As Goethe relates at the conclusion of the ‘historical’ part of his Farbenlehre,⁴ he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned to painting – an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without being connected with it creatively – hoping that if he could discover the laws of one art they would prove applicable to others.