Jansy Mello sends in these fish from the strands of the net:
Mona Lisa Posted on April 11, 2012 by rmc02010
blogs.pomona.edu/rust185-2012s/2012/04/11/mona-lisa/On page 98, Victor submits a poem to his school magazine under the pseudonym Moinet, with the motto ‘Bad reds should all be avoided; even if carefully manufactured they are still bad’. This is ”quoted from an old book on the technique of painting but smacking of a political aphorism”
Leonardo! Strange diseases
strike at madders mixed with lead:
nun-pale now are Mona Lisa’s
lips that you had made so red.
Victor is fascinated by color, and his teacher Lake tells him that the color spectrum is more like a spiral than a circle, with the rainbow starting in a slightly different place when you cycle back around (this is a bit like the cyclical nature of the book). Victor’s color in general seems to be greenish-blue (the glass bowl he sends Pnin, for example), which would be nearly the opposite the dark red of madder. In fact, dark red is basically glossed over in Lake’s modified color wheel: there is cadmium red, but then you reach “…cobalt blues and violets, at which point the sequence does not grade into red again, but passes into another spiral, which starts with a kind of lavender gray and goes on to Cinderella shades…” which is the glassy blue again. So what’s wrong with red? It looks like there’s a little communism joke here, but maybe there’s more. Victor’s poem at least suggests that red is not an enduring color, and even has a kind of poisonous association (diseases, lead).