The lecture at the Mayakovsky Library is dedicated to how the meaning of color in art has changed from a sacred sign to an expression of personal experience. Listeners will trace the path from iconography and symbolic codes to the experiments of the avant-garde and contemporary visual culture, where shades speak of the author's inner world. Color in works of art is often perceived as a natural part of the composition, but behind the choice of each shade lies a history of worldviews. The lecture at the Mayakovsky Library invites us to look at painting and visual practices through the prism of color as an independent language that has changed alongside philosophy, religion, and scientific understandings of humanity. The conversation will begin with epochs when the palette was strictly regulated. In religious images, each color adhered to a canon and carried a specific meaning: indicating holiness, suffering, earthly power, or heavenly glory. Through examples of sacred images, it will be shown how viewers were invited to read the image based on a constructed system of symbols, and why breaking familiar combinations was perceived as a meaningful gesture. Then the focus will shift to periods when artists gained more freedom. Alongside the religious tradition, attention to corporeality, light, weather, and everyday scenes emerges. Color begins to describe lived experience: the cold of the streets, the warmth of interiors, the density of shadows, and the play of reflections on surfaces. New pigments and technical means expand the palette and allow for a more precise transmission of mood, the inner tension of characters, and the dynamics of space on the canvas. A separate block will be dedicated to radical experiments of modern times. The avant-garde and subsequent movements abandon mimesis; color ceases to correspond to visible reality and begins to reflect the artist's inner state, the movement of thought, or pure emotional impulse. Against this backdrop, it is especially important how the viewer's perspective changes: from reading symbols and narratives, they transition to experiencing the intensity of tone.