The Lost Masterpiece - Umberto Tosi
Jimmy Durante finding the lost chord The other day, my inamorata, the surrealist painter Eleanor Spiess-Ferris , said she had dreamt of having the greatest blog idea ever, and that she had conveyed it to me in vivid detail. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember what it was. So, it will just have to wait, folks. This sounded so familiar, the great idea, story, melody, image that slips away. Eleanor says that as a visual artist, she has dreamt of discovering a new color, one dazzling enough to shift human consciousness and foster a masterpiece by its very recognition and existence. The ancient Greeks, they say, did not have a word for "blue" in the way we mean it today, which is why the Odyssey refers to the sea as "wine dark," not azure. The discovery of a "new," seemingly transencent color is quite plausible, given that the spectrum of visible light can be parsed into an infinite array of hues - but only a limited number of them named. I thoug...