Reviewed by Suzi Steffen

In Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay takes her readers on a romp over the rainbow and beyond. The author names her chapters after colors, and although she begins, curiously, with ochre, she soon settles into the pleasing rhythm of Isaac Newton’s ROY G. BIV rainbow.

The rainbow, in fact, provides this wide-ranging book’s only real structure, although Finlay’s laser attention to detail and her use of historical anecdote serve to unify this collection of fascinating stories and information.

Anyone with an art, art history or chemistry background will find Color particularly enjoyable. Finlay tracks down the reasons Titian’s sky could be so brightly blue that his contemporaries called him garish, why one particular Michelangelo was so drab (he got impatient waiting for a color shipment), and why certain shades of ochre might provide Aboriginal Australian artists a map through the outback (iron filings give a clue).

Finlay shows such vivid interest in her subject, and travels to such an unbelievable multitude of places in pursuit of each color, that anyone can find the stories in the book both charming and astonishing. Color’s range extends from the blue halos of two huge Buddhas in Afghanistan before the Taliban destroyed them to the mysterious orange stain used by Stradivari as he made his famous violins, from mollusks weeping onion-scented indigo in Mexico to the child-killing contents of green wallpaper — and ends, appropriately, with a tale exploring the color of the universe. Throughout, Finlay recounts such a sweeping geographical and historical mix of stories and challenging reportorial experiences that she can be forgiven the occasional foray into realms of fancy.