Then came the last step in Raffaelo’s lesson. Holding out the remaining tablets in the palm of her hand, the directress said:
“Show me red, Raffaelo. And show me blue.”
With no mistake, the little color lover selected the red, the blue, and placed each on his table, matching them to the corresponding spools.
“These are yellow,” the directress explained to him, giving him the two remaining spools. Then she left him, having given him the food for clear, colorful thought for which two generations of thwarted painters had made him long.
All the morning Raffaelo played with his six color spools, gathering them together into a pile, handling them, holding them up to the light, that he might watch the play of sunshine and shade upon their beauty, pairing them upon his table, repeating to himself: “Red, blue, yellow!” Sometimes he watched his small neighbor, who had grown very expert in color lore and could name all the colors and lay the spools in chromatic order on his table, eight rows headed, severally, by black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and brown, and each row containing eight gradations of its color.
When this child completed his series of orderly color scales he went to the window and looked out at the Roman hill rising back of the school. To the child who had not received Montessori color teaching, the hill would have been a shapeless, colorless bit of earth. To this child, who could see color in its finest gradation, it was a landscape where one could trace the gold outline of orange and lemon, the red tiling of a vine-tender’s house near the top and back of it a sky that was violet—not blue. He looked at the hill for a long time. Then he selected an outlined picture of a tree, and looking intently at a box of colored pencils, selected one that was just the color of a cedar and proceeded to fill in the outline.
Grading each standard color and its related colors in chromatic order.
