Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Yellow-Green, and the Peak of the Eye

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Yellow-Green, and the Peak of the Eye

Yellow-green is unremarkable in the symbolic traditions and central to how vision actually works, which makes it a useful place to set the two kinds of account side by side.

Human daylight vision is most sensitive at a wavelength of roughly 555 nanometres, which is a yellow-green. Under bright conditions the eye extracts more brightness from this part of the spectrum than from any other, which is why high-visibility clothing and emergency equipment are made in that hue rather than in red: the choice is photometric and not symbolic. Under low light the peak shifts toward the blue-green, an effect named for Jan Purkinje, which is why colours change their relative brightness at dusk.

The colour name most used for the hue in English, chartreuse, follows the liqueur made by Carthusian monks, and the colour sense is a nineteenth century borrowing from it. That is a late and shallow etymology compared with most of the entries in this list, and it is a reminder of how many colour names are simply the name of a thing that had the colour.

Pigments in this range were made by mixing rather than mined, and the mixture of a yellow with a blue or a green was as far as most workshops needed to go. There is no long tradition of a distinct yellow-green pigment, no ritual use recorded under a name of its own, and no correspondence in the classical schemes. It is a colour the eye is exceptionally good at seeing and that the symbolic systems almost entirely ignored.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.