Seeing the Light

Here in the heart of winter, we kick off a new series about color with white, since we so often associate it with snow or a blank page. We asked our experts to tell us how artists actually used white—to message purity, virtue, or something else entirely? The short answer: they have long employed this color to achieve the effect of whites found in nature, though artists rendering Christian subjects, and an occasional architect, did utilize it to symbolize purity.

Walk the Getty galleries and white greets you at every turn: in the edge of a woman’s diaphanous veil, the marble coolness of a bust, or the dusting of snow on Monet’s wheatstacks. Eyes use a color perception system, so those wheatstacks might be awash in orange and blue tinges, but our brains adjust to “read” the harvested grain and ground covering as white. Its presence also helps us to read other works of art—discerning sun glints on a wineglass, the folds of an angel’s robe, the roundedness of a horse’s flank. But what has white really meant in art? Let’s dig into its rich, sometimes dangerous, and always illuminating past.

From caves to canvases

The English word “white” comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to shine.” One of the first written records of the term is from an 11th-century Old English version of Prose Phoenix, where the mythical bird is described as having a “beak white.”

White was also one of the first colors used in art. France’s Lascaux caves contain drawings of animals created roughly 17,000 years ago by Paleolithic artists. They used the mineral calcite and chalk, a soft, white form of limestone composed mostly of microscopic marine shells. Accompanying marks were made of charcoal and red and yellow ocher. Traces of bone white, created from burned lamb bones, date back to Neolithic times (about 7,000 years ago).

In the late 500s BCE, Athenian potters began to coat the natural reddish color of their pottery with a purified clay that turned white when fired. This technique can be seen in an Attic white-ground lekythos, created about 460 BCE, when the practice was transitioning into funerary-exclusive usage. This change was due to the fragile nature of the white slip, which deteriorated over time.

In painting, the Greeks used the highly toxic pigment lead white, made by a laborious process of corroding lead strips in vinegar-laden pots that were placed inside chambers surrounded by fermenting manure or tanbark. White flakes of lead carbonate were created, then scraped, washed, and ground. Lead white rose to be the default white in European painting for centuries, coveted for its opacity, covering power, and shine, until its dangers were better understood. (One of the earliest written accounts of lead poisoning is from the second century BCE, but more on this later.)

Righteous gemstones

Have you ever stepped foot in or seen images of marble quarries? Or have you ever held a piece of mother-of-pearl and noticed its rainbow-like shimmers? Then it might not be surprising to you that artists such as Italian painter Jacopo Ligozzi created designs that resemble paintings but were built from cut minerals (a technique called commesso) rather than pigment.. Consider The Portrait of Pope Clement VIII, where marble, lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, limestone, and calcite were used to compose the pope’s skin, white robes, and ornaments.

Johannes Vermeer was on a similar path as Ligozzi, but from large cut minerals to finely ground materials as studies show that the Dutch artist did not rely on lead white alone, but often laid it over or alongside calcium-rich grounds like chalk. According to Victoria Finlay, author of Color: A Natural History of the Palette, the artist also made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz. These minerals break up and scatter light inside the paint film, creating the milky glow seen in some of Vermeer’s walls, fabrics, and, of course, the highlight on the famous pearl earring.

Also translating geology into radiant architecture, the Getty Center uses white hues to hold and reflect the famously intense and dazzling light of Southern California. Architect Richard Meier’s striking art complex is rendered in expanses of pale travertine stone and gridded, off-white planes. The planes’ shades were negotiated with local homeowners’ associations in the surrounding Brentwood neighborhood, as residents feared that Meier’s signature brilliant white would cause too intense a glare.

Another way to think of it is that up on the Getty hilltop, Meier created a canvas or understructure of sorts on which the collection’s colorful works can play.

Surface deep

Sometimes the most important white in an artwork is in the support underneath: the white of the paper or canvas. Curator of Paintings Anne Woollett calls attention to northern Netherlandish painter Dieric Bouts’s Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel appears in an “incredible white robe,” painted in glue tempera on fine linen. Woollett explains that the support was “likely very white when he painted on it,” as the fabric was probably woven in the Netherlands and bleached in sunlight. The result was a starting place where “nothing interfered with the artist's bright palette.” Woollett adds that such a basis for painting enabled Bouts to achieve a “jewel-like quality ... very clear, radiant colors–including Gabriel's robe,” which served as both a garment and a celestial symbol.

Senior Curator of Drawings Julian Brooks explains that early rag-based papers were rarely the crisp, cool-white kind we expect in modern stock. “At the time, they didn’t have artificial whiteness,” Brooks notes. Even if rag-based papers were off-white, however, they yet read as white when drawn upon. “The paper can still do the job of a highlight,” Brooks explains, adding that in many drawings, the artist darkens everything else and simply leaves the paper untouched for light.

Brooks supports his case with Ruins of an Imperial Palace, Rome, a landscape in red chalk by French painter and printmaker Jean-Honoré Fragonard. “The chalk creates a very warm atmosphere, but Fragonard uses the pale tone of the paper to read as a white or sort of sunlight,” Brooks says.

Other makers created white by removing media. Historically, before modern rubber erasers, artists might use remoistened stale bread, which was “often used to pick up dry particles of chalk or graphite without damaging a paper’s surface,” says Michelle Sullivan, associate conservator in the Department of Paper Conservation. They might also use a knife to scrape and remove drawing material, revealing the white paper underneath.

Senior Curator of Manuscripts Beth Morrison mentions that in medieval manuscripts, the “paper” is in fact animal skin. “About 95 percent of our manuscripts are actually on parchment, not on paper,” she explains. There was even an Italian Renaissance style called “white vine” illumination, where the “white vines” were actually made by coloring around the vine shape, and the white of the parchment actually formed the vine shape. She adds that sometimes the skin was further treated with chalk to whiten it and prepare the surface.

These curators’ insights about paper, paint, and parchment also play out on photography’s light-sensitive gelatin silver prints. For example, in the snowy field of Japanese artist Osamu Shiihara’s Untitled, more exposure allows highlight areas to approach pure paper white, similar to the sunlight in Fragonard’s landscape. And in South Korean photographer Bohnchang Koo’s White 09, the vast milky ground around the few sparse reeds gives off a still, hushed, and wintry aura.

A deadly beauty

By now, you may have noticed that one material dominates many of these mediums: lead white. In Color, Finlay calls the poisonous pigment “the greatest of the whites, and certainly the cruelest.”

Morrison says that lead white was the most common white to be used in manuscripts. “Faces and hands were often rendered in lead white by itself or mixed with other colors,” she adds. Lead white also appears as filigree decoration and delicately applied highlights on flowers, letters, and borders.

In some of Getty’s early Italian drawings, such as Filippino Lippi’s Studies of Christ at the Column, a Nude from Behind, and Various Figures, the artist first coated the paper, drew in metalpoint, then “painted on the white,” a small but important application that “gives the figures the element of dimension,” as Brooks points out. In Still Life with Candle by French Impressionist Albert Lebourg, the flash of lead white paint among the charcoal darkness is so powerful it can make one wonder what the drawing would have looked like with a less intense white.

Lead white’s brilliance and coverage was found to cause severe health issues by way of inhalation or ingestion—yes, ingestion. Morrison mentions a timeworn studio habit: to make a fine point, painters would dip their brush into the lead-based paint and then lick it, regularly ingesting small doses of toxins. Woollett muses, “Some painters lived into their nineties, which is impressive, given the toxicity of some of the materials around them.”

Adding to the drawbacks was the fact that lead white isn’t particularly stable. When exposed to pollution in the air, it converts into lead sulfide, a dark, grayish compound that can dramatically alter the appearance of a work. The clouds in Francesco Zuccarelli’s A Landscape with Shepherds Resting Under a Tree by a Cascade suffered this fate. But in an impressive feat of conservation, Sullivan treated the darkened lead white in the Italian landscape sketch, restoring the intended appearance of the white haze. The clouds are once again a brilliant white.

Symbolic whites: purity, heaven, and “moral” white

White pigment’s extensive history feeds into, and is sometimes driven by, Christian symbolism or cultural significance. In Bouts’s Annunciation, Gabriel’s white robe marks him as a heaven-sent messenger. “White was frequently associated with a celestial, heavenly being,” Woollett says, adding that angels were often distinguished with white dress.

Liturgically, Morrison points out, white is “the color of purity and completeness,” associated in the church year with the 50 days of Easter and Christ’s ascension to heaven. Priests wear white, tunic-like albs for feast days and as a symbol of baptism. The Holy Spirit too was symbolized as a white dove.

In the 1920s and ’30s, modernist architects turned to white as an ethical expression. Le Corbusier, the Swiss “father of modern architecture,” referred to the Ripolin paint brand’s white as “moral.” To the architect, white negated bourgeois decoration and represented a transition from an old to a new world.

Villa Savoye, a summer home designed by Le Corbusier in Poissy, France, appears to be a monument to Ripolin, with its reliance on bare white walls and forms—it even has a porcelain sink in the entrance hall. Le Corbusier visualized a city where houses were all painted white in order to achieve cleanliness and good hygiene: he had designs on Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm too, which never materialized. In his 1925 L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (The Decorative Art of Today) he wrote: “Imagine the results of the Law of Ripolin. Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is.”

Le Corbusier sought a new order, and his white modernist purity has been read by critics as a visual parallel to 20th-century racial ideologies, although any direct historical link remains debated. Of course, there have been other motives for white in architecture. Ancient cultures used whitewashing (lime-based paint) for cooling through reflected sunlight (think the Greek isles). And in 1938, during a cholera outbreak, Greece even mandated its homes be whitewashed. The reason was that whitewash contained limestone, a powerful disinfectant.

Life after lead white

The unmatched optical brilliance and covering power of lead white faded with time as safer alternatives emerged, but it wasn’t a smooth transition. Zinc white made its way onto artists’ palettes in the 19th century, but it was four times the cost of lead white, and in the 1920s, titanium white appeared, described as “the whitest white.” As recently as 2001, however, Finlay met some hand painters in England who weren’t happy with the outlawing of lead white, referring to the titanium substitute as: “rubbish: not as vibrant and nothing near as sharp.”

Today, chemists are developing ultra-white coatings for paints, partly inspired by the Cyphochilus beetle’s microscopic and strikingly white scales. Purdue University professor Xiulin Ruan launched “the world’s whitest white” in 2021, which the New York Times called “almost superheroic” for its powerful cooling capabilities. Implications for climate change could materialize as a result. And Ruan has competition: British artist Stuart Semple claims that his own acrylic White 2.0 formulation is visibly brighter than Purdue’s and reflects 75 percent more UV light.

As we hurtle toward the future, one sure prediction is that this dance between art and architecture and engineering and science, and among chemistry, geology, and philosophy, won’t fade. Each school of thought will keep innovating for whiter paints that achieve greater brightness, opacity, durability, and safety, adding luminosity and ever more layered meanings—across the surfaces of our world.