MEDICINE AND COLOUR

The perceptual experience of colour is necessarily defined in relation to the anthropological-cultural context which produces it. The Greek world is not an exception. The archetypal paradigm of the Homeric poems provides remarkable examples of how the words used to express colours, are closely related to the concreteness of the object, that is the vehicle of the colour itself. Only at a later time, thanks to the refined associative pathways of poetry, the nouns used to define the colours acquire the general and abstract value that we know.