The colour to knows the project ideas. The drawings of Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda

Abstract

Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda is insert into a historical context in which the issue of colour is living a phase of discovery and awareness. Author of numerous architectural works of international attention, arrives in Palermo in 1859, first like engineering of Civil Engineering to become a professor at the Faculty of Engineering. In the XIX century a lot of researchers of psychology, physics, optics, art and architecture are involved in meticulous research that could explain the reasons of colour, its alteration, the complementary compositions, the diagrams, the optical cones, its applications in the Greek and Roman culture. Thus, high-sounding names such as Thomas Young, James Clerk Maxwell, Wolfgang Goethe, Philipp Otto Runge, Michel Eugene Chevreul, Hermann Von Helmoholtz, Albert Henry Munsell are placed side by researchers of art and architecture as Schinkel, Hirtoff, von Klenze, Labrouste Durand and others. The crisis of Neoclassicism of Winckelmann, as a result of the new truth of colour of Selinunte Archaeological, contrasts with the study and use of polychromy in arts and architectures and Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda represents the architect that, more than others, in the Sicilian context, elaborates a wide repertoire of design drawings where the use of colour is strongly used consciously and mindfully thanks to the studies that were propagating in the contemporary culture of the time. The analysis of this gallery of drawings, rich and of inestimable beauty, will allow to identify what was the awareness and, therefore, the application idea of the colour in the author's thought, uncovering a cultural thinking of the time that embraces most of the contemporary architecture of the city of Palermo.