Project description
The revolution of Victorian colours
Industrial Victorian Britain brought overwhelming dark grey landscapes polluted by coal-based mass manufacturing. In response, in the 1850s, artists called for the ‘chromatic revolution’ inspired by technical inventions of vivid natural paints. Twelve years later, the International Exhibition brought new ways of thinking about colour. It flourished in science, art, design and fashion. This poorly remembered and unresearched ‘chromatic turn’ is the main focus of the EU-funded CHROMOTOPE project, which aims to study changes in the attitudes to colour in the 19th century throughout Europe, focusing in particular on the literature, art, science and technology. It will apply a pioneering methodology in a multi-institutional partnership to investigate neglected aspects of 19th-century European cultural history.
Objective
CHROMOTOPE will offer the very first analysis of the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the 19th century, and notably how the ‘chromatic turn’ of the 1850s mapped out new ways of thinking about colour in literature, art, science and technology throughout Europe. Britain’s industrial supremacy during this period is often perceived through the darkening filter of coal pollution, and yet the industrial revolution transformed colour thanks to a number of innovations like the invention in 1856 of the first aniline dye. Colour thus became a major signifier of the modern, generating new discourses on its production and perception. This Victorian ‘colour revolution’, which has never been approached from a cross-disciplinary perspective, came to prominence during the 1862 International Exhibition – a forgotten, and yet key, chromatic event which forced poets and artists like Ruskin, Morris and Burges to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, they invited their contemporaries to learn from the ‘sacred’ colours of the past – a ‘colour pedagogy’ which later shaped the European arts and crafts movement.
Building on a pioneering methodology, CHROMOTOPE will bring together literature, visual culture, the history of sciences and techniques and the chemistry of pigments and dyes, with high-impact outcomes, including one major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, a thorough pigment analysis of Burges’s Great Bookcase and the creation of an online database of 19th century texts on colour. This project will not only give invaluable insight into hitherto neglected aspects of 19th century European cultural history, it will also reveal the central role played by chromatic materiality in the intertwined artistic and literary practices of the period. This will in turn change the way the relationships between text and image, as well as the materiality of the text itself, may be envisaged in literary studies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences educational sciences pedagogy
- humanities arts
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2018-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
75006 PARIS
France
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