Disegno and colore

His­tor­i­cally, two of the impor­tant words that Ital­ians used to describe the act of paint­ing were “dis­egno” and “col­ore.” As I under­stand them, the words had broad mean­ings that I’d like to dis­cuss a bit.

Dis­egno meant both “design” and “draw­ing.” It referred to the whole process of plan­ning and lay­ing out a paint­ing, up to and includ­ing any under­draw­ing. It also referred to what we think of as draw­ing, inde­pen­dent from painting.

Col­ore meant both “color” and the process of apply­ing paint. It included select­ing which col­ors would be used where, lay­er­ing paint, blend­ing paint, shad­ing, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together con­cepts that are sep­a­rate in Eng­lish. If in paint­ing I make a mis­take in place­ment, I might say that I made a “draw­ing” error. But unless I did an actual under­draw­ing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Ital­ian, how­ever, it is exactly cor­rect to say that the dis­egno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the appli­ca­tion of paint and its rela­tion­ship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Tit­ian paid less atten­tion to dis­egno than he had pre­vi­ously and put most of his empha­sis on col­ore. Impres­sion­ism is all about col­ore and less about dis­egno. In the 15^th cen­tury, Nether­lan­dish paint­ing impressed Ital­ians with their colore—their won­der­ful and pre­cise appli­ca­tion of paint. These words just make incred­i­ble sense to me.