Bright Earth

Brilliant…in every sense. Ball’s book is the volume that has been missing from my library * Guardian *Brings the mysterious subject of colour wonderfully alive. Quite literally an eye-opener * Economist *A succinct and elegantly structured new survey of Western painting. Ball pitches his learning just right between academic history and a highly readable series of anecdotes and biographical sketches * Daily Mail *Full of fascinating vignettes. Philip Ball writes engagingly on complicated topics * Sunday Telegraph *Scattered with attractive particles, sparkles with redolent names… A solid, well-researched compendium of information * TLS *A fascinatingly different account of the history of art * Scotland on Sunday *A mine of information…a fascinating book about art and science that is packed with anecdotes * Contemporary Physics *Bright Earth proves that many of the world’s greatest artists owe a great debt to the questing colourmen behind them * Artists & Illustrators *

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass- How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity- How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich- The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible- The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.