Yellow, Vermilion, and Gold: Colour in Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck

This chapter proposes a new interpretation of Karel van Mander’s views on colour, as presented in his 1604 Schilder-Boeck, the most important early modern treatise on Netherlandish painting. At the heart of Van Mander’s theory of colour lay the creation of a critical vocabulary of art that would do justice to the “Netherlandish” technique of oil painting and assert both its epistemic dimensions and its power to produce affects. Particular attention is given to Van Mander’s extensive discussion of the uses of gold and yellow, which has received little attention to date, and to Hendrick Goltzius’s pictorial strategies to “materialize” his new identity as a painter that closely paralleled the writing of the Schilder-Boeck.