When we hold a high-quality printed art book in our hands, we trust that we’re seeing what the artist saw and intended — the subtle colors that hold the meaning of the artwork. Instead, I’ll show you two examples of books that betray this trust by falsifying the colors: printing what should be cool tones in warm ones, more like commercial advertising than the true vision the artist intended to convey
The book “Leonardo da Vinci” by Isaacson is full of useful information. However, the reproductions of the paintings are poor. An example is the odd print of da Vinci’s painting of Ginevra de’ Benci
Ginevra de’ Benci, a sophisticated Florentine lady, was admired for her (quoting en.wikipedia.org.) …intellectual and moral virtue on the one hand, and her physical beauty on the other.
In Walter Isaacson’s book (Fig. 14), Ginerva’s face glows as if she had been treated by a make-up artist before sitting for her portrait.
A remarkable lady of our history is trivialized. Seeing da Vinci’s actual painting of her is worth a trip to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
A more egregious example is the exhibition catalogue at the Metropolitian Museum of Art. “Giorgio Morandi, 1890 – 1964: Nothing is more Abstract than Reality.”
Morandi’s 1964 painting, made shortly before his death, shows his iconic vessels rendered in cool, subdued colors with a dissolving boundary at the upper left. Yet the expensive exhibition catalogue reproduces theses colors in bright, saturated hues, stripping away the fragile nuance that makes the original so moving.
These distortions remind me how much an artwork’s subtle colors and edges carry its true spirit. When colors are misrepresented – whether through careless printing or glossy over-saturation – the deeper layers of meaning are lost, and the viewer ends up seeing sometthing quite different from what the artist actually intended