{"product_id":"zur-farbenlehre-an-uncut-first-edition-of-goethes-most-important-and-most-controversial-scientific-work","title":"Zur Farbenlehre: an uncut first edition of Goethe's most important and most controversial scientific work","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eZur Farbenlehre.\u003c\/strong\u003e Two text volumes and one plate volume. Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1810.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst edition, three volumes. Text volumes, XLVIII, 654 pp.; XXVIII, 757, [1] pp. Plate volume, 24, 12 pp. Entirely uncut, the original wrappers bound in, the plate volume's wrapper titled \u003cem\u003eSechszehn Tafeln nebst der Erklärung zu Goethe's Farbenlehre\u003c\/em\u003e. Chief among the sixteen plates is Goethe's own colour wheel, the symmetrical \u003cem\u003eFarbenkreis\u003c\/em\u003e of 1809, the image through which his colour theory entered the visual imagination and the ancestor of the colour wheel still used in art and design. Text volumes large octavo (220 × 130 mm); plate volume (245 × 200 mm).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHalf-leather bindings c. 1900 with discreet spine gilding and the original wrappers bound in (near-fine, almost entirely free of spotting; entirely uncut).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGoethe's greatest scientific work—and the book he considered his finest achievement.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is Goethe's longest scientific work and, in his own estimate, his best, the culmination of the optical studies he had begun with the \u003cem\u003eBeyträge zur Optik\u003c\/em\u003e of 1791, and one of the grandest material productions in his lifetime bibliography. He did not regard colour as a minor excursion from poetry. In Eckermann's record he claimed no special pride in being a poet, but did take pride in having grasped the truth in \"the difficult science of colours\" [Eckermann, 19 February 1829], a self-assessment essential to the book's place in a Goethe collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe work did not displace Newtonian optics, and its afterlife lies elsewhere. Goethe argued against Newton's demonstration that white light is composite and built instead a theory grounded in sensuous experience, contrast, turbidity and the conditions of perception. \"Search nothing beyond the phenomena,\" he wrote, for the phenomena themselves are the teaching [Goethe, \u003cem\u003eMaximen und Reflexionen\u003c\/em\u003e, FA I\/13, 49]. The physiological-colour section is the strongest part and typifies his psychological approach; the historical section is itself an important model of scientific historiography. This is why the book mattered to artists, philosophers and physiologists even where physicists rejected its polemic. Schopenhauer's colour theory grew from his discussions with Goethe; Wittgenstein's \u003cem\u003eRemarks on Colour\u003c\/em\u003e later returned to the perceptual questions Goethe had made vivid; and the \u003cem\u003eFarbenlehre\u003c\/em\u003e shaped artists from Runge and Turner to Kandinsky and Klee, while engaging thinkers as various as Seebeck, Helmholtz, Steiner and Heisenberg. Robert A. Crone's history of colour places Goethe's influence highest among physiologists and psychologists [Crone, \u003cem\u003eA History of Color\u003c\/em\u003e].\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe plate volume is the part most often lacking, and a complete copy must include it; its troubled publication history was traced by G. Schmid in \u003cem\u003eSchicksal einer Goetheschrift\u003c\/em\u003e. Here all three volumes are present together.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePROVENANCE\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Heribert Tenschert Collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eREFERENCES\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGoedeke IV\/2, 583, 46; Hagen 347, 347c, 347d; Kippenberg I, 386 and 389; Schmid, \u003cem\u003eGoethe und die Naturwissenschaften\u003c\/em\u003e 55–57, 59; Borst 1111.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFischer, \u003cem\u003eDer Verleger J. F. Cotta\u003c\/em\u003e, I (2003), no. 764; G. Schmid, \u003cem\u003eSchicksal einer Goetheschrift. Druckgeschichtliche Funde zur Farbenlehre\u003c\/em\u003e (Halle, 1937); Goethe, \u003cem\u003eMaximen und Reflexionen\u003c\/em\u003e (FA I\/13, 49); Eckermann, \u003cem\u003eGespräche mit Goethe\u003c\/em\u003e, 19 February 1829; Arthur Schopenhauer, \u003cem\u003eUeber das Sehn und die Farben\u003c\/em\u003e (1816); Robert A. Crone, \u003cem\u003eA History of Color\u003c\/em\u003e(Dordrecht, 1999).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47012731551932,"sku":null,"price":45000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0736\/1285\/3436\/files\/Farbenlehre_1810-1.jpg?v=1782778033","url":"https:\/\/atelierzweig.com\/products\/zur-farbenlehre-an-uncut-first-edition-of-goethes-most-important-and-most-controversial-scientific-work","provider":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}