Introduction

Abstract

In everyday life there does not seem to be anything unusual in speaking of the “character” of colors. We may speak of a delicate blue, a vivid red, a lively yellow, a naive green. Colors mean something to us; they have a kind of personality, more or less to be compared with the human personality. The ancient Egyptian word iwn for “color” later came to mean also the character of a living being (82,414). Mantegazza even speaks of the “soul” of a color.