In 1810, the last year of his young life, painter Philipp Otto Runge devised his Color Sphere, one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive color system in three dimensions. Runge was a correspondent of Goethe, who was also interested in color theory.
The image above is from Runge’s book, Farbenkugel. It comes from Echo Systems’ Virtual Colour Museum, which was the source for BibliOdyssey’s collection of beautiful images of color systems dating back to Pythagoras.
The History of Colour Systems [BibliOdyssey]