Chromatistes’s Introduction of Colour

Chromatistes’s Introduction of Colour is the remembered origin of Flatland’s brief age of colour: a private experiment in painting became a rapid, society-wide custom that changed how inhabitants recognized and treated one another. The innovation’s appeal lay not only in decoration but in making bodies legible at a glance, so that colour briefly relieved the daily uncertainties of moving among shapes difficult to distinguish by sight.

Discovery and First Uses

The account comes with an important qualification: it is tradition, rather than certain history, that preserves the episode. Its inventor was a private individual, a Pentagon whose name is reported inconsistently. He is said to have discovered the ingredients of simple colours and a rudimentary method of painting, then applied the new practice first to his house, next to his slaves, and then to his Father, Sons, and Grandsons, before finally decorating himself. The progression carries colour from property and dependents into the family and, at last, onto the discoverer’s own body.

The most trustworthy authorities, the narrator says, agree on the name Chromatistes. Wherever Chromatistes turned his variegated frame, he attracted attention and respect. Colour made bodily recognition immediate: neighbours no longer needed to identify him by touch, confused his front with his back, or laboriously calculate his movements. They could see his direction, avoid jostling him, and make way. The innovation also spared him the exhausting need to proclaim his individuality aloud when moving among crowds of ignorant Isosceles.

The Spread of the Fashion

The fashion moved with extraordinary speed. Before a week had passed, every Square and Triangle in Chromatistes’s district had copied the example; only some conservative Pentagons resisted. Within a month or two, even the Dodecagons had adopted it. Before a year elapsed, the custom had reached all but the very highest nobility, and it continued outward from Chromatistes’s district into surrounding regions.

Within two generations, the narrator reports, colourlessness had disappeared throughout Flatland except among Women and the Priests. The widening adoption marks a change from individual experiment to shared social convention: what began as one figure’s painted frame became a visual system by which neighbours could recognize, distinguish, and accommodate one another. Its practical benefits helped carry it beyond the circles who first encountered it.

Recognition and Social Difference

Chromatistes’s innovation matters because Flatland’s ordinary visual world offers little variety beyond degrees of brightness and obscurity. Against that background, painted surfaces supplied distinctions that a single-line landscape could not. Colour altered everyday encounters as well as appearance: direction and identity became easier to read, and movement through a crowd demanded less effort from both the person being recognized and those around him.

Yet the spread was not universal. Women and the Priests remained unpainted, an exception the narrator connects to a dispute about whether bodily sides implied different colours. The popular argument treated many-sidedness as nature’s warrant for colour: distinction of sides, it claimed, should entail distinction of colours. That logic did not readily apply to Women, described as having one side, or to Priests, who claimed to be true Circles, bounded by a single circumference rather than by sides. Their exclusion from the new custom therefore exposed a limit in the rationale used to promote it, even as nearly every other class adopted the practice.