Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles, 3rd Edition

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Harmony of Colors

Harmonia, one of the reputed daughters of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, lent her name to the aesthetic principle of harmony. The Oxford English Dictionary defines harmony in the relevant context as the “combination of parts or details in accord with each other so as to produce an aesthetically pleasing effect or agreeable aspect arising from apt arrangement of parts.” The idea of harmony is very old and harmony is a concept that has been closely associated with nature. There is a belief that everything that is truly natural is harmonious, in the universe as well as on Earth. In the West, this was first conceptualized by Pythagoras (circa 580–500 BCE), the founder of a quasi-religious school. There are no texts extant that can be traced to him (Pythagoreans kept their knowledge secret) but Aristotle, in Metaphysics, reports that

the so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this study, but also having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things… they saw that the modifications and the ratios of the musical scales were expressible in numbers; numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number. (Aristotle 1984)

The Pythagoreans developed the ...