House & Garden 
three primaries: red, yellow and blue, and 
the three secondaries : orange, green and 
purple. Three colors are required to form 
the chord, which comprises any given color 
and its complementary, one of the two being, 
of course, a binary. 
'The important part played by the equi¬ 
lateral triangle in the art of painting can be 
little more than 
suggested within 
the limits of this 
article, but any 
interested reader 
can easily pursue 
the subject for 
himself. It will 
be sufficient to in¬ 
stance only a few 
world famous pic¬ 
tures, painted 
during the golden 
noon of the pic¬ 
torial art—the 
Renaissance pe¬ 
riod in Italy. 
The problem 
which preoccu¬ 
pied the painters 
of that time was. 
as Symonds says of Leonardo, “to submit 
the freest play of form to simple figures of 
geometry in grouping.’’ Alberti held that 
the painter should above all things have 
mastered geometry ; and it is known that the 
study of perspective and kindred subjects, 
was widespread and popular. The first artist 
to achieve a thoroughly scientific scheme of 
composition, 
based on geo¬ 
metrical princi¬ 
ples, seems to 
have been Fra 
Bartolommeo, in 
his Last Judg¬ 
ment, in the 
church of S. 
Maria Nuova, in 
Florence. Sy¬ 
monds says of it: 
“ Simple figures 
—the pyramid, 
and the triangle, 
upright, inverted, 
a n d interwoven 
like the rhymes of 
a sonnet — form 
the basis of the 
composition. 
i i 
