What makes autumn so appealing? Imagine a day in the much revered season in all its poetic glory that inspires over and over again artists and creative minds. In autumn, you can have all four seasons in a single day. You can bathe in sunshine in the morning, drown in showers in the afternoon, and cold wind can bring the frost at night. As moody and dramatic as it may seem, the braver it mixes the colours of nature on its rich palette, the better. The palette is the tool to create masterpieces, be courageous and get inspired by the Egyptians, who back in 4 B.C., were crafting cosmetic palettes to grind and apply ingredients for facial or body cosmetics.
Digging the etymology of the word palette, we come to find that the root of the word originates from Latin, where pala means ‘spade, shoulder blade;’ and that it was borrowed into English from French as a loan word. In its original sense the word refers to the painter’s palette – a wooden board used for mixing colours and the selection of colours itself. When used together, certain colours create aesthetic feeling, so it is common for these to go together on the palette. For example monochromatic palette of colours is used to create the shades and nuances in a painting.
There are no clear evidences when the palette appeared in the hands of painters to replace saucers, but the earliest depictions of painters’ palettes come from circa 1400, for example in Boccaccio’s book On Famous Women.
The earliest description of palettes come from the late 1460s, from the accounts of the Dukes of Burgundy, as ‘trenchers of wood for them to put oil colors and to hold them in the hand.’
And our word was firstly officially recorded in the English print in 1622, in Compleat Gentleman – a guide into the arts for the young gentlemen, usually cited as a primarily source for the study of Renaissance art and artists – where the English poet and writer Henry Peacham writes that: “ Hauing all your colours ready ground, with your pallet on the thumbe of your left hand..lay your colours vpon your pallet thus.”
Followed by the first definition of the word, coming from 1658, from The new world of English words: or, a general dictionary, containing the interpretations of words derived from other languages, terms that relate to the arts and sciences: “A Pallet, a word used in Painting, being a thin piece of wood which a Painter makes use of to place his colours upon.”
With time, the meaning of the word stretched from a spectrum of colours to a variety of similar items from which a choice can be made. And to the modern computing sense of the word and the King of the digital palette – Photoshop.
