Coloritto, or, The harmony of colouring in painting : reduced to mechanical practice, under easy precepts and infallible rules, together with some colour'd figures, in order to render the said precepts and rules intelligible not only to painters, but even to all lovers of painting
Coloritto, published in London in 1720 by the engraver and colour theorist J. C. Le Blon, is a treatise on colour in painting, written for painters and amateurs alike to make its rules of colour mixing understandable. The single plate shows a head-and-shoulders study of a young woman turned three-quarters to the left, rendered in soft tonal mezzotint with a dark background and pale, gently modelled flesh, a useful reference for designers studying tonal portrait shading and the restrained range of early colour printing.
