transparent color

“The relation of light to transparent color is, when you come to look into it deeply, infinitely fascinating, and when the colors flare up, merge into one another, arise anew, and vanish, it is like taking breath in great pauses from one eternity to the next, from the greatest light down to the solitary and eternal silence in the deepest shades. The opaque colors, in contrast, are like flowers that do not dare to compete with the sky. . . . It is is these, however, that are able . . . to produce such pleasing variations and such natural effects that . . . ultimately the transparent colors end up as no more than spirits playing above them and serve only to enhance them.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from the ‘Supplement’ to his Farbenlehre [Theory of Color], quoted by Walter Benjamin in ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, 1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone; from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, 2008.