Abstract

In its first paragraphs the paper aims at presenting the key-concepts and problematic issues of the philosophy of colours developed by Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966) in her essay Farben (1929). One of the most brilliant pupils of Husserl, Conrad-Martius developed a Realontologie of colours, a sophisticated description of their ontic genesis and structure, according to the realistic interpretation of phenomenology characteristic of the circles of Munich and Göttingen. While deeply indebted to Goethe’s morphological approach, Conrad-Martius’s doctrine was able to influence the “rigorous” Kunstwissenschaft of Hans Sedlmayr and his school. The final paragraphs of the paper show how Sedlmayr, colleague of Conrad-Martius at the University of Munich in the Fifties, tried to make such a phenomenological-ontological perspective fruitful for the interpretation of images belonging to the domain of visual arts, insisting on the ontic roots of chromatic symbolism.