The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of , cartographers' natural signs, military engineers' conventions, and, finally, painters' affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public.