Blue: The History of a Color 9780691181363, 0691090505, 2001019855

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Half-title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: Color Is Not Black and White
1. An Uncommon Color: Prehistory to the Twelfth Century
2. A New Color: The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century
3. A Moral Color: The Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century
4. The Favorite Color: The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
5. Blue Today
Notes
Bibliography
Photography Credits

Citation preview

BLUE

English translation copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press.

Front cover: The Wilton Diptych (detail), c. 1395.

All Rights Reserved

National Gallery, London. Photo: Copyright © National Gallery, London

Reprinted 2018 by Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0-691-18136-3

Back cover: Yves Klein, Blue Sponge Relief, c. 1957–59. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne,

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original

Germany. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln.

edtion of this book as follows

Copyright © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York / adagp, Paris

Pastoureau, Michel, 1947–    [Bleu. English]

Originally published as Bleu: Histoire d’une couleur,

    Blue : the history of a color / Michel Pastoureau.

copyright © Editions du Seuil 2000

     p. cm.

Editions du Seuil, 27 rue Jacob, 75261 Paris

    Includes bibliographical references and index.     ISBN 0-691-09050-5 (alk. paper)

Translated from the French by Markus I. Cruse

    1. Blue. 2. Color—Psychological aspects—

English-language edition published by

   4. Symbolism of colors—History.  5. Blue in art.

Princeton University Press

  I. Title.

  History. 3. Color—Social aspects—History.

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

   BF789.C7 P369 2001

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tr

  155.9’1145—dc21

press.princeton.edu

  2001019855

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Printed and bound in France 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CO N T E N T S INTRODUCTION

7

Color Is Not Black and White 1 AN UNCOMMON COLOR

13

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century 2 A NEW COLOR

49

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century 3 A MOR AL COLOR

85

The Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century 4 THE FAVORITE COLOR

123

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century 5 BLUE TODAY

179

Notes

182

Bibliography

206



216

Photography Credits

Introduction

CO LO R I S N OT BL AC K A N D W H I T E

Color is a natural phenomenon, of course, but it is also a complex cultural construct that resists generalization and, indeed, analysis itself. It raises numerous and difficult questions. No doubt this is why serious works devoted to color are rare, and rarer still are those that aim to study it in historical context. Many authors search for the universal or archetypal truths they imagine reside in color, but for

the historian, such truths do not exist. Color is first and foremost a social phenomenon. There is no transcultural truth to color perception, despite what many books based on poorly grasped neuro­biology or—even worse— on pseudo­esoteric pop psychology would have us believe. Such books unfortu­ nately clutter the bibliography on the subject, and even do it harm.

1. Sapphire Sapphire is a truly celestial stone. Its blue, often compared to that of the sky, is said to have healing powers. Throughout the Orient it is believed to protect against bad luck. Ancient and medieval texts sometimes confuse sapphire and lapis lazuli, attributing to the latter the powers of the former.

 

7

Historians are largely to blame for this situ­ a­ tion because they have spoken about color only rarely. Their silence is the result of differ­ent fac­tors that themselves attest to historical trends. The main difficulty for historians has been to conceive of color as a subject separate from other historical phenomena. Three sets of prob­lems stand in the way of such a con­ception. The first set of problems concerns documentation and preservation. We see the colors transmitted to us by the past as time has altered them and not as they were originally. Moreover, we see them under light conditions that often are entirely different from those known by past societies. And finally, over the decades we have developed the habit of looking at objects from the past in black-and-white photographs and, despite the current diffusion of color photog­ raphy, our ways of thinking about and reacting to these objects seem to have remained more or less black and white. The second set of problems concerns methodology. As soon as the historian seeks to study color, he must grapple with a host of factors all at once: physics, chemistry, materials,

and techniques of production, as well as ico­ nog­­raphy, ideology, and the symbolic meanings that colors convey. How to organize all of these elements? Which questions should come first? How can one establish an analytical model facilitating the study of images and colored objects? No researcher, no research team, no method has yet been able to resolve these problems, because among the numerous facts per­taining to color, a researcher tends to select those facts that support his study and to ignore those that contradict it. This is clearly a poor way to conduct research. And it is made worse by the temptation to apply to the objects and images of a given historical period information found in contemporaneous texts. The proper method — at least in the first phase of analy­sis — is to proceed as do paleontologists (who must study cave paintings without the aid of texts): by extrapolating from the images and the objects themselves a logic and a system based on various concrete factors such as the rate of occurrence of particular objects and motifs, their distribution and disposition, the rela­tionships between upper and lower registers, between left and right, back

8 INTRODUCTION

and front, center and periphery. In short, one undertakes the internal structural analysis with which any study of an image or colored object should begin (this does not mean that the study should end there). The third set of problems is epistemological: it is wrong to project our own concep-tions and definitions of color onto the images, objects, and monuments of past centuries. Our judgments and values are not those of previous societies (and no doubt they will change again in the future). The historian risks anachronistic analysis with every step he takes—and the art historian particularly so. When it is a question of the definition and taxonomy of color, the danger of anachronism is even more pronounced. For example, for centuries black and white were considered to be completely separate from the other colors; the spectrum with its natural order of colors was unknown before the seventeenth century; the notion of primary and secondary colors emerged only gradually during the seventeenth century and did not become common until the nineteenth century; and the contrast between warm and cool colors is a matter of convention and functions differently

according to the period and society in question (in the Middle Ages, for example, blue was a warm color). The spectrum, the color wheel, the notion of primary colors, the law of simultaneous contrasts, the distinction between retinal rods and cones — these are not eternal notions but stages in the ever-changing history of knowledge. The historian should employ these terms with prudence. I have reflected at greater length on these problems of epistemology, methodology, and documentation in my previous work, and so will not spend more time on them here.1 This book does address certain of these issues, but for the most part it is devoted to other topics. Nor is it concerned only with what images and artworks can teach us about the history of color, since this history still has many gaps to be filled. Rather, the aim of this book is to examine all kinds of objects in order to con­ sider the different facets of the history of color and to show how far beyond the artistic sphere this history reaches. The history of painting is one thing; that of color is another, much larger, question. Most studies devoted to the history of color err in considering only the pictorial,

COLOR IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE  9

artistic, or scientific realms.2 But the lessons to be learned from color and its real interest lie elsewhere. Any history of color is, above all, a social history. Indeed, for the historian — as for the sociologist and the anthropologist — color is a social phenomenon. It is society that “makes” color, defines it, gives it its meaning, constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not. The artist, the intellectual, human biology, and even nature are ultimately irrelevant to this process of ascribing meaning to color. The issues surrounding color are above all social issues because human beings live in society and not in solitude. Without recognizing this, it is easy to fall into a reductionist neurobiological analysis or to employ a pseudoscientific approach, which renders futile any attempt to establish the history of color. The historian must approach this history from two directions. On the one hand, he must try to define the chromatic sphere as it existed for past cultures, by taking into account all the elements that made up this sphere: names and definitions of colors, the chemistry of pigments

and dyeing techniques, manners of dress and the social codes they express, color’s place in daily life and material culture, rules and regulations pertaining to color, and the meanings given to it by the church, scien­tific theories, and art. The potential areas for research and reflection are numerous and pose a great many questions. On the other hand, the historian should also employ a diachronic per­spective focused on a single culture, permitting him to study specific practices, codes, and sys­tems of color as well as the losses, mutations, innovations, and combinations that affect the observable aspects of color’s history. This two-pronged approach requires that all available objects be examined: the study of color is essentially a multimedia and interdisciplinary field. But certain fields of research, such as the color lexicon, are more productive than others. Here, as elsewhere, the history of words greatly enriches our knowledge of the past and reminds us that in all cultures, color’s primary function is to classify, mark, announce, connect, or divide. This is also the case for the dyeing of fabric and clothing, in which we see the close links between chemistry, production

10 INTRODUCTION

techniques, materials, professional codes, and the social, ideological, and symbolic problems they accompany. For the medievalist, for example, dyed fabrics and clothing offer physical documentation of color that is often more solid, extensive, and relevant than stained-glass windows, frescoes, panel paint­ings, or miniatures (though the former are often closely related to the latter). This book is not limited to a study of the Middle Ages, but it is also not meant as a complete history of color in Western culture. Its goal is to examine a few key points in that history. To simplify this project, the history of the color blue from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century has been chosen as the principal theme. Blue presents a real his­tori­cal conundrum. It was little valued by the cultures of antiquity; for the Romans, in fact, it was the color of the barbarians and thus had negative connotations. Today, however, blue is by far the favorite color of Europeans, its popularity greatly surpassing that of green and red. Over the course of the centuries, then, there has been a complete reversal of values. This book

focuses on the evolution of this change in perception. First it discusses the lack of interest in blue among ancient and medieval societies; then it follows the rise in blue’s fortunes as evidenced by clothing and daily use beginning in the twelfth century. Emphasis is placed on the social, moral, artis­tic, and religious issues raised by this color up to the Romantic period. The last section focuses on blue’s triumph in modern times, giving a detailed account of its present uses and meanings and reflecting on its future. A single color, however, can never be viewed on its own. Its function can be grasped and its meanings understood only when it is compared or contrasted to one or many other colors. To study the color blue, then, requires the consideration of other colors as well, and these are not absent from the following pages. Far from it — we will also observe green and black, blue’s close counterparts at many points in history; white and yellow, with which it was frequently paired; and above all red, blue’s opposite, partner, and rival in all the Western color systems throughout the ages.

COLOR IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE  11

1 A N UN CO M M O N CO LO R

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century

Contrary to what one might imagine, the social, artistic, and religious uses of the color blue do not reach back into the mists of time. Blue was not present even in the later Paleo­lithic period, when nomadic tribes with long-established social systems made the first cave paintings. In these images we find reds, blacks, browns, and ochers of all shades, but no blue or green and hardly any white. The situation was almost

exactly the same a few millennia later, in the Neolithic period, when human socie­ ties had become sedentary and the first dyeing techniques appeared. Dyeing was done in red and yellow long before blue was used. Although blue is present in natural elements that go back almost to the earth’s formation, it has taken humanity many long years to learn how to reproduce and use it.

2. Fresco from Pompeii, 1st century a.d. Though many wall-paintings survive at Pompeii—buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in a.d. 79—blue, unlike red, is not a common color. I­n almost all Roman painting, blue was used primarily for backgrounds.

 13

Perhaps this explains why blue remained a second-rate color in the West for so long, with hardly any role in social life, religious practice, or artistic creation. Compared to red, white, and black—the three basic colors of all ancient cultures—blue had little symbolic meaning and thus was poorly adapted to transmitting ideas, evoking emotional or aesthetic responses, or organizing social codes. Nor could it be used for even the basic tasks of classifying and establishing hierarchies, which are functions of color in all societies. And it couldn’t be used for religious purposes—unable to evoke a response on earth, it certainly couldn’t communicate with the beyond. The modest role played by blue in ancient societies and the difficulties many ancient languages have in even naming it caused many nineteenth-century researchers to wonder if the men and women of antiquity could see the color blue, or at least see it as we do. Today such questions are no longer considered relevant. But the feeble social and symbolic role that blue played in European cultures over several millennia—from the Neolithic period to the Middle

Ages—remains an undeniable fact of history that merits further reflection.

WHITE AND ITS TWO OPPOSITES Fabrics and clothing offer the richest and most diverse source of artifacts for the historian seeking to understand the role and history of color in a given society. Cloth products tell much more about this history than do words or artworks. Such artifacts also weave the various material, technical, economic, social, ideological, aesthetic, and symbolic aspects of color production into one coherent field of study. All the questions concerning color’s role in society can be examined through cloth: the chemistry and techniques of dyeing, the trade in color-producing substances, color’s impact on the economy, and the financial constraints of color production, as well as social categories, ideological constructs, and aesthetic preoccupations. Fabrics and cloth lend themselves perfectly to interdisciplinary study and will reappear throughout the rest of the book. The silence of documents and the lack of evidence prevent us, however, from studying

14 an uncommon color

the rapport between color and clothing in the most ancient cultures. What we know at pres­ ent indicates that cloth was first dyed at some point between the sixth and fourth millennia b.c.1 Body painting and the “dyeing” of cer­ tain plant materials (wood, bark) go back even further. The most ancient fragments of dyed cloth come from Asia and Africa. In Europe, the oldest evidence dates to the fourth millen­nium b.c.

All of these ancient cloth fragments were

dyed in tones of red. This last observation is striking because, up until the beginning of the Roman era in the West, dyeing fabric generally (but not always) involved replacing the fabric’s original color with a shade of red. These ranged from the lightest pinks and ochers to the darkest purples. The substances that produced red dyes—­ madder, which is probably the most ancient dye, as well as others such as kermes and certain mollusks—penetrated deeply into cloth fibers and resisted the effects of sunlight, water, and detergents better than other dyes. They also resulted in richer and more nuanced colors than those produced by dyes in other colors.

For many millennia the dyeing of cloth was thus done primarily in red. This even had an effect on the ancient vocabulary: in the Roman era, the Latin words coloratus (colored) and ruber (red) were synonyms.2 The primacy of red in ancient civilizations, then, seems to go back much further than the Roman period. This no doubt helps explain why, in most Indo-European cultures, the color white for many centuries had not one but two opposites: black (as we would expect) and red. Indeed, these three were these cultures’ main colors until the height of the Middle Ages;

3. Chinese flasks of lapis lazuli, 19th century. Musée Guimet, Paris. Asia is rich in deposits of lapis lazuli (in Iran, Afghan­istan, Tibet, and China). The objects carved from this hard stone, which is deep blue with light gold and white veins, are fairly numerous and believed to bring good luck. They are always small because of the stone’s rarity and the difficulty of carving it.

around them were organized all social codes and most systems of representation based on color. Without reaching for transcendent archetypes, the historian can legitimately claim that, for ancient cultures, red was long associated with dyed cloth, white with undyed cloth and thus purity and cleanliness, and black with undyed cloth that had

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  15

4. Babylonian frieze of polychrome brick showing processional route leading to the Ishtar gate (detail). Babylon, c. 580 b.c. Pergamonmuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. In the ancient lan­guages of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, the language barrier separating green and blue is often fluid. This fusion can also be seen in colored objects and works of art: the production of pigments as well as techniques for glazing and enameling tended to juxtapose blue and green, and even meld them.

been sullied.3 The two deep-seated char­acter­ istics of ancient and medieval color aesthetics—sensitivity to luminosity (how bright and pure a color is) and to density (how much color is used)—­ probably spring from this double opposition. The contrast between white and black may have made ancient peoples more sensitive to the intensity of light and to its purity, while the opposition between white and red heightened sensitivity to the richness and concentration of dyes and colorants. Black is somber, red is dense, and white contrasts with both of them.4 There was no place for blue, yellow, or green in this three-color system. This does not mean, of course, that these three colors did not exist. They were very evident in daily life, but on a social and symbolic level they did not serve the same functions as the other three colors. Even though it had existed since pre-history, this system opposing white to red and black was usurped in Western Europe between the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thirteenth century. For the historian, the challenge lies in understanding why this tripartite scheme

eventually gave way to new color combinations in which interactions be­ tween blue, yellow, and green came to play the same roles as those between white, red, and black (which remained crucial colors). In only a few decades, Western culture moved from a chromatic system based on three colors to one based on six—and these colors have remained an important part of our lives up to the present day.

DYEING IN BLUE: WOAD AND INDIGO Let us return to the dyed fabrics of antiquity and note that while the Greeks and Romans rarely dyed in blue, other peoples used it more frequently. Such was the case of the Celts and the Germans, who used woad (Latin: guastum, vitrum, isatis, waida) as a source for their blue dye. Woad is an herb of the mustard family that grows in moist, clay-rich soil in a number of Europe’s temperate regions. The principal colorant is found primarily in the leaves, but the process of extracting the blue dye-stuff is long and complex. We will discuss woad in more depth later—in the thirteenth century, when the new fashion for blue tones in clothing

16 an uncommon color

revolutionized the cloth-dyeing pro­ fessions and made the production of woad virtually an industry. Blue dyes were used above all by the ancient peoples of the Middle East, who im­ ported indigo—another important source of dye, long unknown in the West—from Asia and Africa. This substance comes from the leaves of the indigo plant, which has many different varie­ ties but none indigenous to Europe. In regions where the plant grows, people have been dyeing with indigo since the Neolithic period.5 Among such cultures there is a noticeable affinity for blue in fabrics and clothing. Early on, however, indigo—notably that of India—also became an export product. Biblical peoples were using it well before the birth of Christ, but it was expen­sive and applied only to the finest fabrics. Farther west, in Europe, the use of indigo re­ mained rare for many centuries, not only due to its high price (because it came from far away), but also because blue tones were so little appreciated. Like the Greeks before them, the Romans were familiar with indigo. They clearly recognized that it was different from the woad

used by the Celts and Ger­mans, that it was a powerful dye, and that it came from India— hence its Latin name, indicum.6 But they did not know that it came from a plant, believing instead that it was a stone, lapis indicus, because it arrived from the East in the form of compact blocks; in fact, these were a dried

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  17

paste made of pulverized leaves.7 Because they thought indigo was a mineral, many authors— following the example of Dioscorides (a doctor and bot­ anist of the first century

a.d.)—

described it as a semiprecious stone related to lapis lazuli. The notion that indigo was mineral in nature persisted in Europe until the discovery of in­di­go plants in the New World in the sixteenth century. Though the Bible speaks a great deal of 5. Sacred Wsh from Egypt, 1st century b.c. National Maritime Museum, Haifa, Israel. The Egyptians knew about natural blue pigments (azurite, lapis lazuli, turquoise), but they also knew how to produce magnificent artificial blue pigments from copper silicates. Also familiar with the principles of glass-making, they made splendid objects in blue and blue-green faience. These were usually funerary pieces (statuettes, figurines, beads) whose color was believed to have a magical or protective power.

fabrics and clothing, it has little to say about dyes and colors—at least in terms of nuances and shades of color. Impeded here by problems of vocabulary, the historian must be attentive to the different versions and translations of the biblical texts that are used by him and by the authors he cites (such as the church fathers). Because the terms used for colors vary a great deal from one biblical language to another, the Bible poses a serious linguistic

puzzle. Moreover, these terms became more numerous and specific as the Bible was translated into other languages over the centuries. This is because translators seek to “correct” the original and tend to overread it, thus producing shifts in meaning and, often, grossly unfaithful errors. The medieval Latin translation is notable in this respect, for it introduced a great many color terms in places where the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek used only words

for matter, light, luminosity, density, and quality. For example, where the Hebrew word means “shining,” the Latin often has candidus (white), or even ruber (red). Where the Hebrew has “dirty” or “dark,” the Latin is niger or viridis, which in the vernaculars become black and green. Where the Hebrew or Greek have “pale,” the Latin is sometimes albus and sometimes viridis, which in the vernaculars become white and green. Where the Hebrew is “rich,” the Latin often translates purpureus and the vernaculars, purple. In French, German, and English the word red is used abundantly to translate Hebrew and Greek words that in the original text denote not coloration but richness, force, prestige, beauty, love, death, blood, and fire. Before considering the symbolic meaning of colors in the Bible, then, the historian must undertake painstaking analysis of the texts he intends to study.8 These difficult interpretive issues explain why understanding blue’s place in the Bible and in biblical civilizations is so complicated. Blue was probably less important for these peoples than red, white, and black, but that is about all we can say for certain.

A Hebrew word that raised a heated debate among specialists clearly illustrates why it is dangerous to translate ancient words de­noting materials or light quality into modern terms for color. The word in question, tekhélet, appears several times in the Hebrew Bible. Certain translators, philologists, and biblical interpreters believe this word refers to a dense and deep shade of blue. Others, more cau­ tious, have understood it as denoting some form of colorant derived from a marine animal, perhaps the murex (a mollusk that can be used to make a purple dye), but they have not challenged the basic notion that it produced a blue dye.9 We know, however, that none of the shellfish—including the murex—used by dyers in the eastern Mediterranean during the biblical period produced a stable and clearly definable colorant. On the con­trary, all of these mollusks provide a wide range of tones, which include red, black, nu­merous shades of blue and violet, and some­ times even yellow and green. Moreover, once a dye has penetrated the fibers of a fabric it continues to change, acquiring different nu­ances over time; this was especially true of the purple dyes used in antiquity. To

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  19

20 an uncommon color

translate tekhélet as “blue,” or even to attempt associating this material with the color blue, is therefore problematic from a philological standpoint and anachronistic from a historical one.

PAINTING IN BLUE: LAPIS LAZULI AND AZURITE The Bible has much more to say about precious stones than it does about dyes. Here again, however, we face delicate problems of translation and interpretation. Sapphire provides an excellent example of these difficulties: it is the most frequently mentioned stone in the Bible, yet the word for sapphire sometimes refers not to the stone we know by this name, but to lapis lazuli.10 The same is true in the Greco-Roman period and during the Middle Ages: the two stones, generally considered to be of equal value, are well known and clearly distinguished from each other in encyclopedias and lapidaries, but the same terms denote sometimes one stone and sometimes the other (azurium, lazurium, lapis lazuri, lapis Scythium, sapphirum).11 Both were used in jewelry and for precious art

objects, but only lapis provided a pigment that could be used by painters. Like indigo, lapis lazuli comes from the Orient. It is a hard stone classified as semiprecious today, and in its natural state is a deep blue with fine gold and white veins. Lapis was

6. Painting from the tomb of the pharaoh Horemheb, 1332–1305 b.c. Rijksmuseum van Oud-heden, Leiden, the Netherlands. The New Empire (c. 1500– c. 1100 b.c.) was the high point of Egyptian wall painting. The blue tones used are quite varied but serve primarily as background colors. Sometimes derived from organic sources (azurite, malachite) but more often artificial (blue vitriol), they provide lovely blue surfaces that evoke the waters of the Nile in scenes illustrating the passage of the deceased from the city of the living to that of the dead on the river’s far bank.

highly prized because ancient peoples thought these shining veins were actual gold (they are, in fact, iron pyrite, or “fool’s gold”). The largest deposits of lapis lazuli were in Siberia, China, Tibet, Iran, and Afghanistan—the last two regions served as the main providers to the West during antiquity and the Middle Ages. The stone was made very expensive by a number of factors: it was hard to find, it came from far away, and extracting it from the ground required a great deal of labor because of its hardness. Moreover, slow and complicated processes of pulverization and purification were required to transform the mineral into a pigment usable by painters. In fact, lapis con­tains more impurities than blue particles, and these particles must be completely sep­ arated out to make the pigment. The Greeks and Ro­mans were careless in processing lapis and often did

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  21

7. Royal bust from Egypt made from glass, 13th century b.c. Musée du Louvre, Paris. In Egypt, as in the rest of the Middle East, blue had beneficent powers and was used in funerary rites to protect the dead in the afterlife. Blue was often associated with green, the color of resurrection, which played a similar role in Egyptian culture. Indeed, it is difficult to dis­tin­guish blue and green on certain funerary statuettes made from faience.

not bother to separate out the blue crystals. This is why their paintings done with lapis have blues that are less pure and less rich than those one finds in Asia or, later, in Islamic and Christian art. (Medieval artists dis­ covered how to use wax and diluted soap to purify the powdered stone.)12 Lapis produces a wide range of blue tones of striking intensity. It is dense and reflects light well but as a result does not spread easily over surfaces. For this reason, and because of its high cost, it is usually confined to small areas (medieval illumination derives its lovely blue from lapis) and in the zones of an image or object the artist wanted to highlight.13 Azurite was less expensive and was the blue pigment most often used in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is not a stone but a mineral com­posed of basic carbonate of copper. It is less chemically stable than lapis (changing easily to green or black) and its blues are much less pleasing, especially when it is poorly pro­cessed. Ground too fine it loses its hue and becomes

pale; ground not fine enough, it is hard to mix with a binder and produces a granular paint. The Greeks and Romans im­ ported it from Armenia (lapis armenus), from Cyprus (caeruleum cyprium), and from Mount Sinai. During the Middle Ages it was extrac­ted from the hills of Germany and Bo­hemia, whence its name—“mountain blue.”14 Ancient peoples also knew how to pro­duce artificial blue pigments from copper shavings mixed with sand and potassium. The Egyp­tians were exceptional in their ability to produce splendid blue and blue-green tones from copper silicates, such as one finds on small funerary objects (statuettes, figurines, beads). These objects were covered with a glaze that gives them a delicate, glasslike appearance.15 For the Egyptians as for other peoples of central Asia and the Middle East, blue was attributed beneficent powers and was believed to dispel evil and bring pros­perity.16 In Greece blue was less prized and less common, even though in architecture and sculpture it sometimes served as a background color on

22 an uncommon color

which figures were carved (as on certain friezes of the Parthenon).17 The dominant colors in Greek culture were red, black, yellow, white, and gold.18 The Romans demeaned blue even more than the Greeks did, considering it a dark color and associating it with the East and barbarians. They used it sparingly. For the Romans, the color that truly expressed the nature of light was red, often used in tandem with white or gold. In a famous passage on painting in his Natural History, Pliny declares that the best painters have a palette of only four colors: white, yellow, red, and black.19 Only mosaics were an exception to these rules: as an art form brought from Asia, mosaic had a much brighter spectrum that included green and blue, as one sees in Byzantine and Early Christian art.20 Medieval Europe would inherit the luminous legacy of the mosaics.

COULD THE GREEKS AND ROMANS SEE BLUE? Because of the imprecise terminology used to denote blue tones, along with the relative infrequency of blue in Greco-Roman art, past

philologists wondered if the Greeks and Romans were incapable of seeing the color.21 It is difficult to determine which Greek or Latin words designate blue because both languages lack basic, recurring terms for it, whereas white, red, and black are clearly named. In Greek, whose color lexicon did not stabilize for many centuries, the words most commonly used for blue are glaukos and kyaneos. The latter probably referred originally to a mineral or a metal; it has a foreign root and its meaning often shifted. During the Homeric period it denoted both the bright blue of the iris and the black of funeral garments, but never the blue of the sky or sea. An analy­ sis of Homer’s poetry shows that out of sixty adjectives describing elements and landscapes

8. Temple of Aphaea at Aegina (drawing executed c. 1860). Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The colorless Greek temples we admire today were, in fact, painted partially and perhaps even completely. In the nineteenth century archaeologists and architects tried to reconstruct the original color schemes by examining traces of poly­chromy left on these temples. Their research was trans­lated into drawings and water­colors, like the one below. Their colors are often either much too pale or too bright and fail to give an accurate idea of the striking chro­matic contrasts of this painted archi­tecture and sculp­­ ture. Blue pigments were used as background colors and were much darker than they appear in the architectural drawings.

24 an uncommon color

in the Iliad and Odyssey, only three are color terms, while those evoking light effects are quite numerous.22 During the classical era, kyaneos meant a dark color: deep blue, violet, brown, and black. In fact, it evokes more the “feeling” of the color than its actual hue. The term glaukos, which existed in the Archaic period and was much used by Homer, can refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown. Rather than denoting a particular color, it expresses the idea of a color’s feebleness or weak concentration. For this reason it is used to describe the color of water, eyes, leaves, or honey.23 These philological difficulties are compounded by the fact that Greek authors some­ times described objects that are naturally tinted blue, such as plants or minerals, by using terms that are not part of the blue lexi­con. Flowers such as the iris, periwinkle, and cornflower are described as red (erythros), green (prasos), or black (melas).24 The sea and sky can be called any shade of any color, but rarely are they associated with shades of blue. Hence the question asked by specialists at the turn of the last century: Did the Greeks see blue as we see it today? Certain experts replied no, basing

their judgment on evolutionary theories of color perception: the people of technically and intellectually “evolved” societies—such as those of the modern West—would be able to perceive and name a broader range of colors than would those of “primitive” or ancient cultures.25 These theories, which stirred a heated debate and continue to have their proponents,

9. Greek Red-Figure Vase (detail), 5th century b.c. The British Museum, London. No blue is used in ancient Greek ceramics. On vases the palette is limited to blacks, reds, whites, and yellowish ochers. Because these vases are our principal icono­graphic source for under­ standing ancient Greek civ­iliza­ tion, we have the impression that blue had no place in their cul­­ture. This is far from true: the Greeks knew how to dye and paint with blue pigments, they distin­guished between different shades of blue, and over the cen­ turies their lexi­con for blue tones became more precise. Blue did not, however, play an impor­tant role in either their daily lives or their symbolic system.

seem to me both false and indefensible.26 Not only are they ethnocentric, imprecise, and dangerous (by what criteria do we judge a society “evolved” or “primitive,” and who decides?), but they also confuse vision (a biological phenomenon) with perception (which is a function of culture). Moreover, these theories ignore the often considerable gap that exists, in all eras and cultures, between “real” color (as it is objectively seen), color as it is perceived, and color as it is named. The terms for blue in the Greek color lexicon should be studied first as part of the history and function of this lexicon itself, and then in relation to the ideologies of the cultures that use it; but they should never be seen as the products of a different kind of neurobiology. The organs that allowed ancient Greeks to see colors are exactly the same as those of

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  25

the twentieth century. The questions raised by color are above all social and ideological; they cannot be reduced to, or resolved by, biology or neurobiology. The silence, hesitation, evolution, and frequency or rarity of words give the historian studying the color blue an extremely important body of evidence. The difficulty that the Greeks had in naming blue recurs in classical Latin (and later in its medieval form). There were, of course, numerous terms for blue (caeruleus, caesius, glaucus, cyaneus, lividus, venetus, aerius, ferreus), but they were all polyvalent, chromatically imprecise, and sometimes contradictory. The most common word was caeruleus, whose etymology evokes the color of wax (cera—a color between white, brown, and yellow); it denoted certain shades of green and black before attaching firmly to the blue spectrum.27 This lack of lexical precision for blue shades reflects how little Roman authors, and the medieval ones who followed them, cared about blue. They left a gap in the Latin color vocabulary that would later be filled by two foreign words for blue, the Germanic blavus and the Arabic azureus.

These words eventually gained the upper hand and replaced their Latin predecessors in all the romance languages. Thus in English, as in French, Italian, and Spanish, the most common words denoting the color blue are inherited not from Latin but from German and Arabic: blue (blau) and azure (lazaward).28 The Romans may not have been “blind to blue,” as many nineteenth-century specialists thought, but they certainly were indifferent to it—if not downright hostile. For them, blue was above all the barbarians’ color. Both Caesar and Tacitus remarked that the Celts and Germans dyed their bodies blue in order to terrify their opponents.29 Ovid wrote that elderly Germans dyed their hair with woad in order to cover the white. Pliny went so far as to assert that Breton women painted their bodies dark blue before joining in orgiastic rituals. He concluded that blue was a color to be distrusted and avoided.30 Wearing blue was looked down upon in Rome as a sign either of eccentricity (especially during the republic and the early empire) or of mourning. No shade was con­ sidered

26 an uncommon color

acceptable: bright blue was ugly, and dark hues were troubling. Blue was often associated with death and the underworld.31 Having blue eyes was considered almost a physical deformity, or at the very least a sign of bad character.32 In women, it indicated loose morals; in men, it was seen as an effem­ i­ nate, barbarian, or laughable trait. The thea­ter played with these beliefs by exaggerating them into caricatures.33 Terence, for example, combined blue eyes with curly red hair, great height, or extreme corpulence, all of which were signs of the ridiculous in republican Rome. Here is his description of a farcical character in his comedy Hecyra, written around 160 b.c.: “An obese giant, with red and very curly hair, blue eyes, and a face pale as a corpse.”34

IS THERE BLUE IN THE RAINBOW? The controversies concerning the possible blindness of the Greeks and Romans to the color blue are grounded only in vocabulary. They could have—indeed, should have—taken into account the various scientific texts of classical antiquity that discuss the nature of

color and its perception.35 It is true that such texts are few in number and do not speak of individual colors. The issue is further compli­ cated by a striking paradox found in numer­ ous (mainly Greek) treatises, which do talk about the physics of light, optics, the mech­ anisms of vision, and eye maladies but devote little attention to color perception. Yet a science of colors did exist in antiquity, and much of this discourse was picked up by medieval Arab scientists before being transmitted to the West.36 Although the ancients did not write specifically about blue, it is worth mentioning the general outline of their reflections on color. Certain theories about vision are very ancient and traversed the centuries largely unchanged in either Greek or Roman science, while others appeared later and proved to be more dynamic. There were three general and opposing currents of thought about color in antiquity.37 One belief, expounded by Pythagoras six centuries before Christ, held that the eyes emit rays that seek the substance and the “qualities” of the objects being

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  27

28 an uncommon color

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  29

Pages 28–29 10. Mural painting from the Villa Livia, Prima Porta. Museo Nazionale Romano delle Terme, Rome. Blue tones are not very common in Roman painting, usually serving only as back­ground colors or as the ground for inscriptions. However, land­ scape painting (which was very popular between 100 b.c. and a.d. 100) promoted the use of bright blue shades—like the one in this painting—that evoke gardens and enchanted paradises such as those imagined to exist in the Orient.

seen—among these “qualities,” as we might expect, is color. Another school of thought, articulated

by

Epicurus

(among

others),

believed that it was the viewed objects themselves that emitted rays or particles toward the eye. The latest development in Greek color theory came in the fourth and third centuries b.c.

and can be found in Plato, for whom color

vision was produced by the union of a visual “fire” generated by the eye with rays emitted by viewed objects; depending on whether the particles composing this “fire” were larger or smaller than those of the rays they met, different colors were perceived.38 This is a hybrid theory of color vision, based on the environment, the composition of objects, and the identity or personality of the viewer.39 Despite Aristotle’s elab­ oration of the theory (which should have opened the way to new conceptions), and de­ spite a more accurate understanding of the eye’s physi­ology and the role of the optic nerve (dis­ covered by Galen in the second century a.d.), it was the hybrid theory inherited from Plato and the Greek philosophers that endured in the West until

30 an uncommon color

the Renaissance.40 This the­ory does not specifically address the nature of the color blue but, as altered by Aristotle, it does describe how all color is movement: color displaces itself just as light does and makes whatever it touches move. As a result, color vision is a dynamic phenomenon produced by the meeting of rays emitted from the eyes with rays from the affected object. Although the idea was never systematically formulated by any ancient or medieval author, a variety of scientific and philosophical texts indicates that for the “color phenomenon” to occur, three elements are necessary: light, an object that it strikes, and a gaze that acts simultaneously as an emitter and a receiver of rays.41 These authors also express the belief that a color that is not seen by anyone does not exist.42 Though it is a somewhat anachronistic observation—and oversimplifies the issue—one could say that this ancient theory of color perception comes down on Goethe’s side in his position against Newton, two thousand years ahead of time.

The great thinkers of antiquity, though leaving few texts devoted specifically to the nature and perception of colors, did write many treatises on the rainbow. As Aristotle’s Meteorologics demonstrates, these texts combine truly scientific observation with description, poetry, and symbolism.43 They consider the origin of the rainbow’s curve, its relationship to the sun, the nature of clouds and, above all, the reflection and refraction of light rays.44 These authors rarely agree, but they display a great desire to know about, and prove the causes and nature of, these phenomena. They focus especially on isolating and naming colors in order to determine both the number of colors visible in the rainbow and their sequence. In contrast to the modern def­inition of the rainbow, ancient opinions propose only three, four, or five colors in the spectrum. Only one author, Ammianus Marcellinus, pushed the number up to six. None proposed a color sequence, or even part of a sequence, that corresponds to the natural spectrum as we define it now; this discovery would have to wait several more centuries. What’s more, no ancient

author mentions the color blue: for both the Greeks and the Romans, there was no blue in the rainbow. Xenophanes and Anaximenes and later Lucretius mention only red, yellow, and violet; Aristotle and most of his followers see red, yellow or green, and violet; Epicurus describes red, green, yellow, and violet; Seneca, purple, violet, green, orange, and red; Ammianus Marcellinus, purple, violet, green, orange, yellow, and red.45 Almost every one of these writers believes that the rainbow is produced by the diffusion of sunlight in an aqueous matter that is denser than air. There is no consensus, however, on the nature of reflection and refraction or on the length and absorption of light rays. This ancient heritage of observations on the rainbow—with its speculation, proofs, and various descriptions of the visible spectrum— was transmitted first to Arab science and, later, to the medieval West. The thirteenth century was a particularly fruitful period for Western science and philosophy, and some of its greatest thinkers—Robert Grosseteste, John Pecham, Roger Bacon, Thierry de Freiberg,

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  31

11. Vault of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy, 5th century. Unlike wall painting, Roman mosaic employs blue tones extensively. The use of small tesserae permitted subtle color nuances, especially evident in the use of blue-green hues. Early Christian art preferred blue shades closer to black and violet, frequently using them to evoke the cosmos or a figure’s divinity.

Witelo—contributed their own observations on the rainbow in commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorologics and on Alhazen’s treatise on optics.46 Each of these medieval authors advanced understanding of the rainbow but, as with the ancients, none described it as we do today or perceived in it the slightest trace of blue.

THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES: THE SILENCE OF BLUE As in Roman antiquity, blue had little symbolic or aesthetic value in European culture of the high Middle Ages. At best, it played a very minor role next to white, black, and red, which were the basic colors for all social and religious codes. Blue was valued even less than green, the color of vegetation and death, which was sometimes the intermediary between the three principal colors. Blue was nothing, or very little; it was even absent from the sky, which most authors and artists portrayed as white, red, or gold. None of this prevented blue from having a place in daily life, especially in fabrics and clothing of the Merovingian period

(sixth–eighth century a.d.). This was a legacy of barbarian culture—a vestige of the Celtic and Germanic practice of using woad to dye reg­ ular clothing, leather, and animal skins. During the Carolingian era (ninth and tenth century a.d.),

however, these habits died out. Emper­ors,

nobles, and their entourages adop­ ted Roman customs and preferred red, white, and purple. Green was sometimes paired with red; unlike moderns who see these as clashing opposites, medieval men and women saw only a slight contrast between them.47 Blue was effectively banished from the Carolingian court. Ignored by nobles, it was worn only by peasants and those of low estate—a rank it would occupy until the twelfth century. Clothing underscores blue’s marginal role in daily life of the high Middle Ages. But while blue was occasionally present in dress, it was almost never found in other cultural spheres that employ color, such as the naming of people and places, the liturgy, and various symbols. There are no personal or place names, either in Latin or the vernaculars, that incorporate a word or root related to blue. It had much too little symbolic or social value to inspire

32 an uncommon color

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  33

such denominations.48 The opposite is true of red, white, and black, whose presence in a multitude of names is one indication of their enduring influence on Western culture well into the Middle Ages. We might expect that the dominant force in this period, Christianity— with its devotion to the heavens and divine illumination—would expand the range of the

Western color code. But despite its tremendous influence on social, moral, intellectual, and artistic practices, Christianity did not diminish the primacy of red, white, and black. In fact, blue was essentially absent from Christian worship during the thousand years preceding the creation of blue stained glass in the twelfth century.

34 an uncommon color

Early Christian priests celebrated mass and other rituals dressed in their ordinary clothes, which were made from white or undyed fabrics. White gradually became the color of Easter and the other major feast days in the early church. Many Early Christian authors viewed white as the most dignified color, perfectly suited to both the Easter celebration and the newly converted.49 Yet dyeing fabric pure white is a difficult process, and the radiant white sought for Easter remained unattainable. Until the fourteenth century only linen could be dyed white, and even this required a complex operation. Wool was left undyed, or it was whitened after shearing with sunlight and dew, which acted as a bleach. This long, slow process required much space and was impossible in winter; moreover, the white obtained was not pure and eventually reverted to gray, yellow, or the wool’s natural beige. All of this explains why liturgical fabrics and vestments of the high Middle Ages were rarely pure white. Whitening agents derived from plants such as soapberry, soapwart, and others containing saponins, from detergents made of ash, or even from earth and minerals such as magnesium,

chalk, and cerussite (a mineral lead carbonate) yielded whites that were always darkened by gray, green, or blue tints.50

THE BIRTH OF LITURGICAL COLORS Between the seventh and ninth centuries a new desire for splendor in the church led to the use of gold and bright colors for liturgical vestments. Because the liturgy was largely

12. Saint Benedict in blue, from a lectionary from Monte Cassino, first half of the 11th century. Vatican Library, Rome; Ms. Cod. Lat. 1202, folio 138. In the monastic rule he composed around 540, Saint Benedict urged monks not to be concerned with the color of the habits they wore. Because black was the color of humility and penance, however, it became the obligatory color of monastic dress as of the ninth century. This was the ideal, anyway; in practice, dyeing cloth black remained difficult until the end of the Middle Ages. In monastic life, as in the images that depict it, one therefore often finds Bene­dictine monks dressed in brown, gray, or blue robes (as is the case of Saint Benedict himself in this image).

under the control of the bishops, color customs varied from diocese to diocese. The period’s rare treatises on color symbolism are devoid of practical guidelines, or else were aimed only at one or a handful of dioceses. Moreover, the church directives that have come down to us rarely discuss colors per se.51 Councils, prel­ ates, and theologians instead tend to con­demn clothing that is striped, multicolored, or showy, while reiterating that white is the supreme christological color. Such obser­vations continued unabated for centuries, until the Council of Trent (1545–63).52 White remained the focus of attention because it was so symbolically charged, representing inno­ cence, purity, baptism, conversion, resurrec­tion, and the glory of eternal life.53

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  35

Treatises on the religious symbolism of colors became more common after the year 1000.54 Tending to be anonymous and difficult to date and to place, they are more the products of personal reflection than system­atic descriptions of practices and beliefs. They comment on anywhere from seven to twelve colors, more than the number used at any one time in medieval religious rituals. The historian’s task is to determine, to the extent possible, what effect these texts had on real practices. What is particularly interesting in these texts is the absence of any reference to, or commentary on, the color blue—as if the hue simply did not exist. These texts discuss in detail the shades of red (ruber, 13. Bathing the Christ Child. Detail from The Nativity, in a wall painting from the church of Göreme, Turkey, 10th century. Medieval artists almost always depict water with undulating lines of light green or blue, or combined those colors with white. Beginning in the thirteenth century, green was used more frequently than blue to represent the sea, lakes, and rivers on European maps of all kinds; the opposite was true in the East. Throughout Europe, blue did not become the definitive symbolic and pictorial color for water until the seventeenth century.

coccinus, purpureus), white (albus and candidus), and black (ater and niger), and space is also devoted to green, yellow, violet, gray, and gold, but nothing is said about blue. And this silence remains a feature of later medieval texts as well. In the twelfth century, prominent ecclesi­ astical writers such as Honorius of Autun, Rupert of Deutz, Hugh of St. Victor, Jean d’Avranches, and Jean Beleth began to discuss color more and more frequently.55 They tended to agree on the meaning of the three principal

hues: white evokes purity and inno­cence; black, abstinence, penance, and suffer­ ing; red, the blood spilled by and for Christ, and hence the passion, martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine love.56 This consensus did not hold for green (an “intermediate” color: medius color), violet (a “semiblack” color: subniger), gray, or yellow. And, as in previous cent­ uries, none of these authors mentioned blue. This is the case even in the works of Cardinal Lothar of Segni, the future Pope Innocent III, whose discussions of liturgical

colors remained the dominant viewpoint within the church until the Council of Trent. Around 1194–95, when Pope Celestine III had removed him from the curia, Lothar wrote a famous treatise on the Mass entitled De sacro sancti altari mysterio.57 Composed using the common medieval techniques of compilation and citation, this text is nonetheless useful for us because it summarizes and completes

14. Lucifer. Mosaic, late 12th or early 13th century, west wall of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Italy. Dark colors dominate medieval scenes of hell, especially in the repre­sentations of the devil and his minions. During the high Middle Ages, brown, black, red, and green occur much more frequently than blue. Blue devils and demons first appear in the Romanesque period (c. 950–1150). In this image, a blue Satan is seated on a dragon throne and holds his son, the Antichrist, on his lap.

previous medieval discussions of the liturgy. Its detailed observations about the colors and fabrics of liturgical vestments are especially

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  37

38 an uncommon color

precious because they describe the customs current in Rome just before the beginning of Lothar’s pontificate. Up until this period, church authorities had recommended that the dioceses follow the customs of Rome, but this had not been made obligatory. As a result, bishops and worshipers tended to remain attached to local traditions, especially in Spain and the British Isles. This situation changed enormously during the thirteenth century thanks to Innocent III’s immense prestige. The notion that Roman custom had an almost legal power over the rest of Christendom became more and more firmly implanted. Innocent III’s proclamations and treatises were received as authoritative pronouncements on church practice. This was true even of the works he had written as a young man, such as his treatise on the Mass. Its chapter on colors was cited by many thirteenthcentury authors, and it also influenced the practices of many dioceses, some of which were quite far from Rome. Because Innocent III started a slow evolution toward a more homogeneous use of liturgical colors throughout

western Christendom, we will look more closely at what his treatise says about color. Innocent addresses the role of color from both a symbolic and a practical perspective. White symbolizes purity and is to be used for the feast days of angels, virgins, and confessors, as well as for Christmas, Epiphany, Holy Thursday, Easter Sunday, the Ascension, and All Saints Day. Here, as before, red evokes the blood spilled by and for Christ and is used for the feasts of the apostles, martyrs, the holy cross,

15. The Devil of Zillis. Detail from the painted ceiling of the Church of St. Martin, Zillis, Graubünden, Switzerland, c. 1140? The iconography of the hideous and bestial devil became fixed during the Roman­esque period. He was commonly depicted naked, covered with hair or pustules, sometimes with blotches or stripes, and always in a dark color (brown, black, green, and even blue, as in plate 14). Up until the twelfth century, blue was all the more unsettling because it was so rare in religious art and daily life. During the thirteenth century, wealthy red dyers asked stained-glass artists to represent the devil as blue, hoping this would discredit the newly fashionable color that was threatening their profits. Their pleas went unanswered, and blue ceased to be considered a diabolical color.

and for Pentecost. Black, the color of grief and penance, is used for masses for the deceased, the feast of the holy innocents, and during Lent and the Advent season. Last on the list is green, which is used for all other days because—and this comment is of great interest to the historian of color—“green is a color halfway between white, black, and red.” Innocent also notes that black can sometimes be replaced by violet, and green by yellow.58 Like his predecessors, however, he says absolutely nothing about the color blue. His reticence is all the more striking be­ cause Innocent wrote at the end of the

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  39

twelfth century, by which point blue had already permeated church life in stained-glass windows, enamels, paintings, fabrics, and vestments. But it was still absent from the system of liturgical colors, because this schema had been codified too early in history to assign a role to blue. Even today, the liturgical colors of the Catholic Church revolve around white, black, and red, the three “primary colors” of ancient society to whose company was added green, a tagon for ordinary days.

PRO- AND ANTI-COLOR PRELATES Blue was banished from the liturgical color code, but within the sphere of high medieval artistic practice the issue of color use was much more complex and nuanced. Here blue sometimes played an important role, depending on the aesthetics of the period. During the Early Christian era, blue was used primarily in mosaics and associated with green, yellow, and white. Unlike wall painting and, later, book illumination, mosaics do not use black and blue as interchangeable colors. For many centuries, blue was used in miniatures only rarely, and

it is a deep shade when it does appear. It is a secondary or peripheral color in manuscript illumination, devoid of symbolic meaning and contributing little, if anything, to the meaning of works of art. Up until the tenth and eleventh centuries, many miniatures do not contain even a hint of blue, especially those produced in the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula. Beginning in the ninth century, however, blue became more prominent in miniatures painted within the Carolingian empire, where it had a greater range of positive associations. Blue was used as a background color to evoke the majesty of rulers and prelates; as a celestial color signifying divine presence and intervention; and, even at this early date, some­times the color of robes worn by the emperor, the Virgin Mary, and certain saints. The blue used for garments was never bright, but rather a dark hue close to gray or violet. Around the year 1000, most blues in manuscripts became clearer and less heavy. As a result, their role shifted—blue shades began to represent light and illumination in miniatures. They con­tinued to play this role a few decades later in twelfth-century

40 an uncommon color

stained glass, where blue signi­fies divine light or provides a background color against which sacred figures are depicted. This new blue, clear and luminous, is not associated with green (as it is in high medieval painting); instead, its partner is red. The close connection between blue shades and the backgrounds of images was part of a new theology of light whose roots went back to the late Carolingian period (tenth century) but that did not fully develop until the first half of the twelfth century. We will return later to a discussion of this luminous twelfth-century blue and see how in the West it gradually became the color of the heavens, the Virgin, and royalty. First, though, we must examine more closely the debates and controversy that attended blue’s change in status. The role of color within the church was far from a neutral subject—violent arguments about color’s place in worship and church decoration divided ecclesiastical authorities for much of the Middle Ages, and even afterward. For men of science, color was a phenom­ enon of light; for theologians and church

intellectuals, it was something else entirely. There were many medieval churchmen who, like the ninth-century Bishop Claude of Turin or Saint Bernard in the twelfth century, believed that color was made not of light but of matter. As such, it was considered to be vile, useless, and base. The debate over color’s nature and use went back to the Carolingian period, and until the twelfth century it resurfaced periodically to oppose the “chromophiles” and the “chromophobes.” In the years between 1120 and 1150, the color controversy even sparked a violent argument between the monks of Cluny, a wealthy and powerful mon­as­tery, and Citeaux, the center of the reformist Cistercian movement that opposed monastic excess. This clash is particularly instructive because it not only concerns the role of blue in church practice, it also raises perennial questions about proper Christian conduct, which would be as relevant during the Protestant Reformation as they were in the twelfth century.59 In medieval theology, light is the only part of the physical world that is both visible and immaterial. It is “the visible and the ineffable”

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  41

(Saint Augustine), and as such a manifestation of God. Applied to color, this idea becomes a conundrum: if color is light, is it also immaterial? Or is it mere matter, a superficial covering for physical objects? The question is of tremendous importance for the church. If color is light, by its very nature it participates in the divine realm. Therefore, to use it—especially in a church—is to quell darkness and illuminate the place of worship with the divine presence. Seen in this way, the quest for color, for light, and for God are all the same. If, however, color is a material substance and no more than a physical wrapping, it is the farthest thing from a divine emanation, just a futile artifice applied by man to the surface of God’s creation. In this case, it must be resisted and rejected; it must be banished from the church, for it is both immoral and dangerous, an obstacle to the spiritual transitus that leads man to God. These were the two sides of a debate that had begun in the eighth century and that continued to stir passionate arguments four hundred years later. The stakes were high in this controversy and went far beyond mere

speculation or abstract theology. The church’s view of color would have a very specific effect on daily life, worship, and artistic creation. It would determine how the faithful experienced color in numerous ways; the places they inhabited, the images they contemplated, the clothing they wore, and the objects they encountered would all be profoundly influenced by the church’s color doctrine. Above all, this doctrine would determine the role of color in the artistic and religious practices of the church itself. The church leaders engaged in this debate were divided into two camps, each with eloquent and powerful representatives. The most famous of the “chromophiles,” who believed that color was a form of light and thus divine in nature, was Abbot Suger. During the 1130s and 1140s Suger oversaw the extensive reconstruction of Saint-Denis, his abbey located just north of Paris, and there he gave color pride of place. Like the abbots of Cluny, another wealthy monastery, Suger believed that nothing was too beautiful for the house of God. All the latest techniques and media were used to transform Suger’s new basilica into a temple of

42 an uncommon color

16. The Miraculous Draft of Fishes. Miniature from a Bible copied and painted in the late 11th century in the Umbrian region of Terni. Biblioteca Palatina, Parma, Italy; Cod. Lat. 7, folio 72. Blue is already prominent in cer­tain miniatures from the second half of the eleventh century. No longer just a color for backgrounds or the sky, as in Carolingian illumina­tion, here blue is the color of water and of Christ’s robes.

17. The Prophet Hosea. Stainedglass window from Augsburg Cathedral, c. 1100–1110. Only a few fragments of eleventh-century stained glass have come down to us, but a beautiful ensemble of windows from Augsburg Cathedral made in the early twelfth century has survived. Blue was still much less common in this glass than red, green, and yellow. Indeed, blue did not become an important presence in stained glass until the years 1140–60, when it was used extensively in large churches such as SaintDenis, Le Mans, Vendôme, and Chartres. This was the beginning of blue’s meteoric rise in Western art and society.

light and color. Painting, stained glass, enamel, fabric, gems, metalwork, and gilding were all employed because, in Suger’s mind, the illumination, beauty, and visual splendor needed to worship God were expressed most effectively through colorful objects.60 And in the color scheme of Saint-Denis we can see clearly the new—and central—role assigned to blue. Blue is not only present throughout the church as the color of celestial and divine light, but it also is wedded to gold to evoke the splendor of creation. The union of blue and gold that became so prevalent in Western art, and that remains so to this day, had its origins in the twelfth-century desire to evoke divine light and presence. The notion that colors are a manifestation of the divine, and that blue is special among them, occurs throughout Suger’s work and especially in his De consecratione.61 For this abbot who dreamed of building a church from precious stones—like the heavenly Jerusalem envisioned by Isaiah (Isaiah 60:1–6) and Saint John (Revelation 21:9–27)—sapphire, with its resplendent blue, was the most beautiful gem.

It is the purest visual expression of the sacred, a stone whose radiance spreads God’s light throughout the church.62 Suger’s ideas gradually gained a wider following; cited by more and more church writers, they were given concrete form in the great cathedral projects of the thir­teenth century. The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, designed and built during the 1240s as a sanctu­ary of light and color, is perhaps the most beautiful creation of this period. In it the walls have dissolved, and only slim buttresses sup­port the grandiose glass veil that encloses the chapel. The blue of these windows, how­ever, is less bright than that of twelfth-century glass, because at Sainte-Chapelle (as in most of the great Gothic churches) blue is joined systematically with red, giving it a violet hue. The “chromophile” opinions of Suger and his philosophical heirs were not without their opponents. From the Carolingian period until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, many prelates who either wrote about color or oversaw building campaigns were “chromophobes.” Though they were less numerous than their color-loving adversaries, their opinions

44 an uncommon color

were supported by the works of some of the most famous and important church authorities. Chief among these was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian who was also a contemporary of Suger. For Bernard, color is more in the nature of matter than of light. It is an envelope, a mask, a vanitas that men should do without and that must be banished from the church.63 This is why most Cistercian churches have little or no color. Bernard was not only an iconoclast (the only image he tolerated was the crucifix); he was also adverse to color, and in this was joined by numerous church fathers—not just Cistercians—who were opposed to all forms of luxury. In the twelfth century these opponents were rela­ tively numerous, though their position was never the dominant one. Like Saint Bernard, the enemies of opulence found one justifi­ cation for their rejection of color in its ety­ mology: the Latin color, they believed, derived from the verb celare, to conceal.64 Color was therefore that which hid, which dissimulated, which deceived, and so was to be avoided. The debate about color’s nature had its greatest

46 an uncommon color

impact in the twelfth century, when the colors displayed (or banned) in church reflected the beliefs of the controlling church authorities.65 This situation would change radically in the thirteenth century.

18. Noah’s Sons. Stained-glass window from Canterbury Cathedral, c. 1200. The splendid blue tones in the stained-glass windows of Saint-Denis, Chartres, and Le Mans, made in the mid-twelfth century, were no longer being produced by the end of the century. The darker shades of later glass resulted from the replacement of cobalt by copper and manganese salts, which made the blue of those windows murkier than that of earlier glass.

Prehistory to the Twelfth Century  47

2 A N E W CO LO R

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the West, blue ceased to be the second-­rate color it had been in antiquity and during the high Middle Ages. On the contrary, it rapidly became aristocratic and fashionable — some authors even declared it to be the most beautiful color. In the space of just a few decades, blue acquired

economic and social value as a color for clothing and artistic production. This stunning rise in blue’s fortunes was the result of a complete reorganization of the color hierarchy that had previously predominated in social interactions and philosophical discussions. This new color order, which first began to take shape in the

19. Lorenzo di Credi, The Annunciation, c. 1495–1500. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Beginning in the twelfth century, the improved status of blue was made most evident by its prominence in images of the Virgin Mary, notably in her robes. This prevalence, which continues even now, has transformed blue into a color of sanctity and divinity.

 49

But until the twelfth century it remained a marginal color, its symbolic value minuscule compared to that of red, white, and black, the three basic colors of ancient cul­ture. Then suddenly, in just a few decades, every­thing changes—blue is “discovered” and at­tains a prominent place in painting, heraldry, and clothing. Our examination of this dramatic shift begins with a look at depictions of the Virgin Mary, which provide the clearest illus­tration of the social, religious, and artistic consequences of blue’s new status. It must be pointed out, first of all, that eleventh century, concerned all colors and not Above and opposite, top 20 and 21. In towns with a textile industry, the weavers formed the richest guild. They sometimes commis­ sioned stained-glass windows depicting the various steps in making wool cloth. Until the four­teenth century, these ­windows depicted red cloth, the most beautiful and expensive product of the clothmakers. In the fifteenth century, however, this was not always the case: blue fabric some­times supplanted red, as in these windows from the church of Notre-Dame in Semur-en-Auxois, in Burgundy.

just the change in blue’s status. By examining blue’s remarkable success, however, we can appreciate just how profound were the effects of this chromatic evolution.

Mary has not always worn blue. Only in the twelfth century did this become her color and one of her principal attributes, present either on her cloak (the most frequent case), on her robe or, very rarely, as the color of all her clothing. Images from before the twelfth

THE ROLE OF THE V I R G I N The first signs of the increased use of blue tones appear in objects and images made in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We have already seen that blue was not completely absent from art before this period, especially in Early Christian mosaics and Carolingian illumination.

century depict Mary dressed in a range of different colors, but they are almost always dark: black, gray, brown, violet, blue, or dark green. These colors were generally meant to convey suffering and grief; the Virgin wears garments that express her mourning for her crucified son. This was already evident in Early Christian art —where it reflected the

50 a new color

influence of the “chromophile” theologians and church builders. Glaziers and illuminators of the early and mid-­twelfth century made the blue of the Virgin’s robes brighter and clearer, because this luminosity was a form of divine illumination. The extraordinary development of the cult of the Virgin in the twelfth century assured the success of this limpid blue, and it quickly spread to other areas of artistic activity. Around 1140, glass painters working on Suger’s reconstruction project perfected the famous “Saint-­Denis blue.” A few years later, when the artisans and techniques employed at Saint-­ Denis moved westward to other projects, this color became “Chartres blue” and “Le Mans contemporary practice of wearing black or dark clothes to the funerals of friends and family —and it was continued in Carolingian and Ottonian iconography.1 By the beginning of the twelfth century, however, this somber palette had been reduced to the point where blue alone evoked the Virgin’s mourning. At the same time, her blue tended to become brighter and more appealing, reflecting the

blue,” before spreading across northern France and appearing in numerous windows of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century.2 The luminous blue of this stained

glass

embodied

a

new conception of light and enjoyed great prestige, but it was not the only blue in the

Below 22. The famous “Chartres blue” (seen below in the image of the month of April, from a cathedral window) could just as well be called “Saint-Denis blue” because it was perfected at these two sites (and a few others) in the middle of the twelfth century. This luminous blue glass was made from a sodic flux and colored with cobalt. An extraordinarily stable glass, it has survived the centuries almost unchanged, while reds and greens from the same period have been greatly altered.

Right 23. The famous Virgin of Chartres (the so-called Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière) was created in the mid-twelfth century. Taken down after a fire in 1194, it was reinstalled around 1215–20 in the cathedral’s new ambulatory (the head was partially redone).

the Romanesque blue of Chartres, produced almost a century earlier.3 During this period, enamelers strove to imitate the lucid colors achieved by glass-­makers. As a result, they applied the new range of blue tones to a whole other variety of objects, both liturgical (such as chalices, patens, pyxes, and r­ eliquaries) and for ordinary use (notably in basins used to wash the hands before meals). Later in the thirteenth century, illuminators responded to the new uses of blue by systematically ­contrasting blue and red backgrounds in miniatures—a decartistic repertory of the period. In the course of

Opposite 24. The Wilton Diptych, painted c. 1395 for King Richard II of England. National Gallery, London. In the late twelfth century, when blue had become the chief color of the Virgin, painters sought to display their virtuosity by producing subtle and rich shades that evoked both the folds of fabric and the sanctity of the subject. Images of the Virgin also gave painters an excuse to use (at the patron’s expense) the costly pigment lapis lazuli, which was often associated with gold in the late Middle Ages.

52 a new color

the thirteenth century, in fact, blue evolved in many directions and acquired many nuances, some of which were more somber. The darker shades were the result of technical and financial constraints (costly cobalt, which produced a clear blue, was replaced by copper and manganese) and produced a new aesthetic in their turn. Because of these constraints, for example, the gothic blue of the Sainte-­Chapelle in Paris, built in the 1240s, bears little resemblance to

orative scheme that would become standard in book painting throughout northern France and beyond. By the early decades of the thirteenth century blue had become so prestigious that even  certain important reli­ gious and historical figures began to be portrayed wearing blue garments like the Virgin’s—an iconographical development that would have been unthinkable two or three generations before. Saint Louis (Louis IX) was the first French king to be regularly depicted in blue robes. By dressing in blue, the Virgin contributed greatly to the color’s new status in medieval

25. An apostle from a reliquary chasse of Saint Stephen, Limoges, c. 1160–70. Church of Saint-Pardoux, Gimel (Corrèze), France. Blue and green are the dominant colors in Limoges enamels of the twelfth century. Whether light or dark, these colors are always luminous and seductive, and (influenced by developments in stained glass) the blue shades are especially nuanced. Enamels contributed greatly to the diffusion of blue in medieval culture and to its success in other media.

society. We will see later how this new appreciation was expressed in fabric and clothing, but for the moment, let us focus on the history of Marian blue after the end of the Gothic period, when it was at the height of its popularity. As it turns out, Gothic art did not succeed in linking the Virgin exclusively to the color blue, even though it remained her principal chromatic attribute until the early modern period. A new fashion, that of the gilded Virgin, arose with Baroque art. As we saw earlier, gold was also associated with divine light, and it expressed perfectly the new visual opulence sought by the church. The gilded style triumphed in the eighteenth century and held on well into the nineteenth. The history of the Virgin’s colors then took another twist with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, according to which Mary had been conceived without original sin. This doctrine was recognized by Pope Pius IX in 1854, and after that the Virgin’s color became white, a symbol of her purity and virginity. Since the fifth century, the liturgical practice of many dioceses had associated the Virgin’s feast days with white, and this had become more

54 a new color

widespread under Innocent III (1198 –1216). Yet the Virgin’s iconographic color — the color in which she was represented— had never been white. As a result of Pius IX’s proclamation, Mary’s iconographic color and her liturgical color became one and the same for the first time since the beginning of Christianity.4 Over the centuries, then, the Virgin has been associated with a series of colors, as is demonstrated by a remarkable statue sculpted from limewood around the year 1000 and housed today in the Musée d’Art Religieux et d’Art Mosan, Liège. This Romanesque Virgin had first been painted black, as was often the case during that period. In the thirteenth century she was repainted in blue, following iconographic practice and theological precepts. Then at the end of the seventeenth century, this Virgin (like so many others) was refashioned in the Baroque style. Her blue was replaced by gold, which was preserved for about two centuries until the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception inspired a thorough coat of white (around 1880). This super-­ imposing of four colors through the course of a millennium makes the fragile sculpture seem

a living object lesson in visual and symbolic history.

W H AT C OAT S O F A R M S R E V EA L The rise of blue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is visible not only in art and images. Its repercussions were felt in many other spheres of society as well, from the aesthetic to the economic. Indeed, in some cases blue’s success can even be quantified, as when studying coats of arms. These appeared in Europe during the twelfth century and spread rapidly across both geographical and social boundaries. The historian who works with numbers and symbols is on familiar ground when dealing with heraldry. Heraldry lends itself to statistical analysis that can help establish a data­base showing both the vogue for certain colors and their meanings. Compared to other artifacts that use color (books, stained-­glass win­dows, enamels), coats of arms are uniquely useful because they are impervious to nuances and different shades. Heraldic colors are abstract, conceptual, and absolute, though the artist is free to interpret them as he sees fit, depending

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  55

their frequency in medieval heraldry never take into account the incidental matters— such as media, coloring techniques, pigment chem­istry, and aesthetic principles— that deter­ mine the actual appearance of color. This is the considerable advantage that heraldry offers over other colored artifacts. A statistical analysis of heraldic colors clearly shows a constant increase in the freAbove and opposite, top 26 and 28. The arms of France, invented in the second half of the twelfth century, comprise a blue Weld with multiple gold fleurs-de-lis. Toward the end of Charles V’s reign (1364–80), the number of fleurs-de-lis in the king’s personal crest was reduced to three, but the multiple fleurs-de-lis were used to express royal majesty. Above (plate 26): Personification of France praying to the Holy Trinity, from a manu­script of the Vigiles de Charles VII, dated 1484. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. 5054, folio 35 verso. Opposite, top (plate 28): Homage of King Edward I of England to King Philippe le Bel (Philip the Fair) of France in 1286, from a manu­script of the Grandes Chro­niques de France, illumi­nated by Jean Fouquet, c. 1460. Biblio­thèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. 6465, folio 301 verso.

56 a new color

on the material with which he is working. In the arms of the kings of France, for example, “d’azur semé de fleurs de lis d’or — l’azur” (azur is the term for blue in French heraldry) is sometimes rendered as a bright blue, sometimes a teal, and sometimes by a dark shade; none of these affect the symbolism or meaning of the arms. And a great many medieval coats of arms are known not through color representations but through descriptions in heraldic language that appear in literary texts or rolls of arms. Chromatic nuances are never described in these texts, and the terms used for colors denote abstract categories, not specific shades.5 For these reasons, statistical studies of colors and

quency of azur in European heraldry between its birth in the mid-­ twelfth century and the early fifteenth century. Blue appears in only 5 percent of coats of arms around 1200, then it jumps to 15 percent in 1250, to 25 percent around 1300, and to 30 percent in 1400.6 In other words, only one crest out of twenty contained blue at the end of the twelfth century, but close to one in three had it at the beginning of the fifteenth. This is a remarkable increase

Italy. Another interesting fact is that until the sixteenth century, the regions that favored azur (blue) had little sable (black), and vice versa.7 From a heraldic point of view (as well as from others, as we have seen in Early Christian art), blue and black sometimes played the same role.

Opposite, bottom 27. Charlemagne robed in blue, from a missal illuminated for Jean, duc de Berry, c. 1400. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. Lat. 8886, folio 400 verso. At first the color of the Virgin, blue also became that of royalty at the end of the twelfth century. The French royal line was the first to adopt it, followed by the kings of England and eventually by most Western monarchs. It was only toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, that Charlemagne was given a blue mantle in place of his traditional imperial red one.

Until the middle of the thirteenth century, blue was rare in coats of arms belonging to either individuals or families, and it was rare as well in imaginary crests. The heraldry that medieval authors and artists attributed to “imaginary” figures such as heroes from epics and courtly romances, biblical and mythological figures, saints, and allegorical personifications (such as those of the vices and virtues) can tell us a great deal about medieval color and mirrors what we have already seen in the religious realm. This overall picture of blue’s position in medieval heraldry, based as it is on coats of arms from all over Western Europe, can be nuanced by looking at the data for specific regions. For example, azur is more common in eastern than western France, in the Netherlands than in Germany, and in northern than southern

perception and symbolism.8 Here I will focus on what these fictitious coats of arms, and especially those from literature, reveal about blue’s success in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries.

For

example, there is a device in Arthurian literature that, although clearly a product of

Below 29. A precious and curious stone: the pierre d’azur. Miniature from the Livre des simples médecines, late 15th century. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. Fr. 12322, folio 191.

58 a new color

folklore and fiction, can tell us much about perceptions of color and heraldry. Very often, a chivalric tale is interrupted by the sudden appearance of an unknown knight bearing plain arms (of a single color) who blocks the hero’s path and challenges him to fight.9 The color of these arms was used by medieval authors to suggest the character of the stranger and to heighten anticipation about the outcome of the battle. A predictable response could be expected from the reader because a chivalric color code recurs in Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A red knight, for example, generally has evil intentions or a demonic aspect, though red can also signify someone who comes from the magical Other World.10 A knight in black is often an important figure who wishes to conceal his identity; he can be good or bad, since black is not always a negative sign in this type of literature.11 A white knight is, as we would expect, almost always a good guy; often he is an older man and the friend or protector of the principal hero.12 And a knight in green is frequently a youth whose insolence and audacity

create disorder; like the black knight, he can be good or bad.13 Until the middle of the thirteenth century, knights in blue were notably absent from this chromatic literary code. Blue had no meaning among the colors of Arthurian literature. Or rather, its symbolic and heraldic

30. The Blue Knight, from a tournament book copied and painted for Frederick I, Duke of Saxony. Workshop of Lucas Cranach, c. 1535. Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Coburg, Germany; Ms. 2, folio 121 verso. Beginning in the thirteenth century, tournaments and heraldry were important vehicles for spreading newly fashionable blue tones to festivals, pageants, and chivalric rituals. Knights in blue were rare until the 1340s— outnumbered by those dressed in red and green—but they later became much more common both in literature and in actual jousts and tournaments.

value remained too meager to have any real impact within a chivalric narrative. The sudden appearance of a blue knight within a story would not have evoked anything significant for the reader or listener. It was still too early in blue’s history: the color’s promotion to a higher rank within social codes and symbolic systems had not yet been completed, and the literary color code for mysterious knights met during adventures had largely been developed before blue’s transformation into a meaningful sign. Throughout the fourteenth century, however, the use of colors in chivalric romances underwent several metamorphoses (the vast prose romance Perceforest, completed in 1344, is the first indicator of this).14 For example, black became the color of evil and aggression, while red was no longer a negative sign.

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  59

Most striking was the appearance of blue with its positive associations: from this period on, blue knights are courageous, loyal, and faithful characters. Knights dressed in blue first appeared as secondary figures, before moving into the ranks of heroes in the second half of the century.15 Jean Froissart, the famous poet and chronicler, even composed a “Dit du bleu chevalier” (a dit is a short poem) between 1361 and 1367. Such a poem could not have been written during the period of Chrétien de Troyes (in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century), because the blue knight of its title would not have meant anything to audiences of that period.16

FROM THE KING OF F R A N CE TO KING ARTHUR: THE BIRTH OF ROYA L B L U E Within the realm of heraldry, the new vogue for blue was given an important boost by a remarkable “promotional agent,” who played a role comparable to that of the Virgin in images: the king of France. Since the end of the twelfth century, and perhaps even before, the Capetian (the name of this branch of the

French royal family) kings had employed as their coat of arms a shield emblazoned “d’azur semé de fleurs de lis d’or”; that is, with a blue ground on which yellow fleurs-­de-­lis (a stylized lily) were placed at regular intervals. The French king was the only one in the West to have blue in his coat of arms at this period. Blue had probably been chosen as the royal color at the beginning of the twelfth century in homage to the Virgin, who was the protector of the French kingdom and the Capetian monarchy. Suger and Saint Bernard almost certainly played a decisive role in this choice, as well as in that of the fleur-­de-­lis, another attribute of the Virgin that became the royal Capetian emblem in 1130 –40, during the reigns of Louis VI and Louis VII. Eventually, the lily symbol became a true heraldic device early in the reign of Philip Augustus (c. 1180).17 Later, during the thirteenth century, the French monarchy became so prestigious that many families and individuals—first in France and then throughout western Christendom— imitated its arms and introduced blue into their own crests. At the same time, the heraldic azur gradually moved beyond the frame of armorial

60 a new color

31. Clash between a red knight and a blue knight, from a manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel, copied and illumi­nated c. 1316. Biblio­thèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. Fr. 146, folio 40 verso. Allegorical tourna­ments opposing the Vices and the Virtues were a common theme in literature and iconog­­raphy of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Often, as in the Roman de Fauvel, the confrontation is cast not as a tournament but as a joust in which the adver­saries fight one on one. Color symbolism plays an important role in these scenes, but the meaning of blue in this particular manuscript remains ambiguous: at times the attribute of loyalty and fidelity, it can also be the color of foolishness.

32. Fresco depicting the Nine Heroes, c. 1415–20. Castello di Manta in Saluzzo, Italy. The Nine Heroes, a literary and icono-graphic motif invented around 1312, represent the nine greatest knights of history. Among them was King Arthur who (like the Virgin and the king of France) was an important agent for promoting the new symbolic value of blue. Between 1260 and 1280 his coat of arms, until then variable, became a fixed emblem: a blue field with three gold crowns. Arthur’s shield contributed greatly to the vogue for blue among coats of arms and intensified the color’s royal overtones.

shields and banners to appear in other media and in contexts that were not truly heraldic. This was true for both royal and noble uses of blue: azur appeared at royal anointings and coronations, at feasts and ceremonies, at royal and princely entries, at jousts and tournaments, and on ceremonial garb.18 The French monarchy thus contributed greatly to developing the taste for blue in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There was also a very practical reason for blue’s new success. Progress in dyeing techniques during the thirteenth century permitted the production of a stable bright blue, putting an end to the somber, gray, and washed-­ out

tones of preceding centuries.19 This was the case, at least, at the high end of society, and it helps explain the fashion for blue in aristocratic and patrician clothing, whereas previously blue had been primarily the color of work clothes for artisans and peasants.20 The bright, even blue of thirteenth-­century garments was prized even by kings — between 1230 and 1250, both Saint Louis and Henry III of England began wearing blue, a custom that previous kings almost certainly did not practice.21 These kings were quickly imitated by their entourages. Even King Arthur, the most important legendary king invented by the medieval imagination, was not only depicted wearing blue from the middle

62 a new color

of the thirteenth century on, but he was also shown carrying a shield “d’azur à trois couronnes d’or” (with a blue field and three gold crowns)—the same colors as in the arms of the king of France.22 Blue was not embraced everywhere at once. Resistance to this royal French fashion came mainly from the regions of Germany and Italy where the preference for red—the color of the emperor—delayed the adoption of blue. This resistance did not last long, however. By the end of the Middle Ages, even in Germany and Italy, blue had become the color of kings, princes, nobles, and patricians, while red remained the emblematic and symbolic color of imperial power and the papacy.23

DYERS IN BLUE AND DYERS IN RED There were technical reasons behind the new fashion for blue tones in the thirteenth cen­ tury. Two advances were particularly impor­tant: progress in the cultivation of woad and im­ proved dyeing techniques. Beginning in the 1230s woad, like madder, was produced on practically an industrial scale in order to

satisfy the growing demand of weavers and dyers. The operations required for extracting the blue dye were long and complex. The leaves were first plucked, then crushed with a grindstone to make a smooth paste that was then cured for two or three weeks. Next, this paste— known as pastel — was formed into round blocks half a foot in diameter.24 These were placed on covered wood platforms and allowed to dry, then sold a few weeks later to the pastel merchant. He transformed these blocks of pas­tel through a long, delicate, and dirty pro­cess that required very skilled labor. This is why pastel was so expensive, even though woad grows easily in many areas and even though dying with woad— as opposed to dyeing in red— does not require a mordant. Between 1220 and 1240, certain regions— Picardy, Normandy, Lombardy, Thuringia, the counties of Lincoln and Glastonbury in England, and the area around Seville in Spain — specialized in the production of woad. Later, in the fourteenth century, Languedoc and Thuringia become the pastel capitals of Europe. Cities like Toulouse and Erfurt become very wealthy from this trade, and at the end of

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  63

the Middle Ages regions producing woad and pastel enjoyed extraordinary success because this “blue gold” had such a huge market. Woad was exported mainly to England and northern Italy, which could not produce enough to meet the demands of their cloth industries, and to Byzantium and the Islamic countries.25 This boom did not last, however: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cultivation of woad and the pastel market were gradually ruined by the arrival of indigo from the New World. Numerous documents attest to violent conflicts between merchants of madder (used to make red dye) and woad, reflecting the economic stakes of changing fashions in color. In Thuringia madder merchants went so far as to ask glass makers to depict blue devils in stained-­glass windows as a way of discrediting the new fashion for blue.26 Farther north, in Magdeburg, capital of the madder market for Germany and the Slavic countries, hell itself was painted blue in frescoes in order to associate the rival color with death and pain.27 But all this demonizing of blue went for naught.

Woad triumphed in the West, and as of the mid-­ thirteenth century red tones began giving way to blue in fabric and clothing, to the chagrin and great detriment of the madder merchants. Only the continued popularity of scarlet fabrics made of silk and other luxury fibers managed to keep the new preference for blue from total domination, but even this limited resistance did not last beyond the Middle Ages.28 The new vogue for blue greatly enriched the dyers specializing in this color. Little by little, they achieved the dominant position in the profession that had once been held by the red dyers. This evolution varied from city to city: it arrived early in Flanders, the Artois, Languedoc, Catalonia, and Tuscany; later in Venice, Genoa, Avignon, Nuremburg, and Paris. The best indication of blue’s rise among dyers is found in examining examples of the dyer’s masterpiece —the object each dyer had to make in order to attain the rank of master. In Rouen, Toulouse, and Erfurt, the requirement as of the fourteenth century was to produce a fabric dyed blue, even if one had worked with red before; in Milan, however, blue was not the master color

64 a new color

33. Florentine dyers, from a dyeing manual dated 1487. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; Cod. 32, folio 19 verso. Florence was a large textile center where both wool and silk were dyed. The latter required a long and difficult process, especially to obtain red tints (shown here) and black ones; the worker to the left makes a gesture reminding us that this operation also produced a strong stench.

until the fifteenth century, and it prevailed in Nuremburg and Paris only in the sixteenth century.29 The dyeing profession was highly com­part­ mentalized and strictly regulated in medieval Europe. As of the thirteenth cen­tury, numerous documents specify the rules for apprenticeship, the area of town to be inhabited, rights and obligations, and the per­mitted and forbidden dyes.30 Unfortunately, most of these texts are as yet unpublished, so that unlike weavers, dyers still await modern scholars who will tell their story.31 Though a general historical study has not yet been devoted to dyers specifically, the interest in economic history that dominated the disci­pline between 1930 and 1970 has produced a more developed picture of the dyer’s place in the chain of cloth production and of his relationship to cloth merchants.32 Moreover, medieval dyers have left many traces in documents from the period. Chief among the reasons for this is that dyers occu­ pied a very important place in economic life. The textile industry was the largest and most developed of any in the medieval West, and in

every textile center dyers were both numerous and organized into powerful guilds. As a result, they often came into conflict with other cloth professions, notably weavers and tanners. In all cities with a cloth industry, the distinct divisions between professions and the strict regu­lations gave dyers a monopoly in the dyeing market. But the weavers, who were offi­cially forbidden to dye (except in rare cases), did it anyway. These practices led to litigation and trials, which produced archives rich in information for the historian of colors. They tell us, for example, that in the Middle Ages it was the woven cloth that was almost always dyed but only rarely thread (except in the case of silk) or wool.33 Other records indicate that weavers sometimes obtained from municipal or feudal authorities the right to dye their wool cloth in a newly fashionable color or with a dye substance that had rarely, if ever, been used before. This privilege to innovate with dyes, and thus dodge existing statutes and regulations, provoked outrage among the dyers, but it also indicates that weavers were less conservative in the color domain than their competitors.

66 a new color

but woad blue. And he may dye with woad only in two workshops in Paris. For Queen Blanche (may God bless her) granted that the weavers may have two halls in which may they practice the professions of both dying and weaving. . . . When a weaver who dyes with woad passes away, the provost of Paris, in consultation with the masters and jury of the weavers guild, must A case from Paris illustrates how bitter the disputes between weavers and dyers could become. Around 1230 Queen Blanche of Castile authorized weavers to dye in blue in two of their workshops, using only woad. This measure, which was meant to respond to the growing demand for blue cloth, caused a bitter conflict among dyers, weavers, the monarchy, and municipal authorities that lasted several decades. We can still hear the echoes of this dispute in 1268, when Saint Louis ordered Etienne Boileau, provost of Paris, to write the Livre des mestiers, a record of the statutes of every guild in the city: “Whoever is a weaver in Paris may dye in no other colors in his shop

put another weaver in his place, and he too will have the same right to dye with woad that his predecessor had.”34 Dyers also clashed with tanners (who were

34. Artisans drying wool cloth, from a manuscript of Rhabanus Maurus’s De Universo, copied and illuminated c. 1023. Monastery of Monte Cassino, Lazio, Italy; Ms. 74, folio 366. In images made before the thirteenth century it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between weavers and dyers: the former often perform dyeing activities while the latter (although this was forbidden) secretly produce cloth in their workshops. As of the thirteenth century, in most Western cities the two professions were strictly separated and compartmentalized; dyers were further categorized into the specialized production of different colors.

low in rank because they worked with dead animals) — not over cloth but over access to rivers and streams. Water was vital to both dyers and tanners, as it was to many other medieval artisans. For both of these pro­fessions, however, the water had to be clean. Once dyers had dirtied the water with their colorants, tanners were not able to soak their skins in it. Conversely, when tanners dumped tanning chemicals into rivers, the water was ruined for the dyers. Again, these conflicts led to legal proceedings and trials that left many documents in the archives. Among these, the most numerous are the decisions and

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  67

regulations of municipal authorities ordering dyers (and other artisans) to set up outside the city and its suburbs, because “these pro­fessions bring with them such infection, or use materials that are so damaging to the human body, that the places where they can be allowed without affecting the health of the public must be carefully regulated.”35 In Paris, as in all large cities, these prohibitions against operating in densely populated zones were continuously repeated from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Here, for example, is the text of a Parisian regulation from 1533: “Prohibition against all furriers, tawers [those who dress animal skins], and dyers to exercise their professions in their town or suburban homes; ordering them, when washing their wool cloths, to carry them or have them carried to the Seine below the Tuileries; . . . prohibiting them from emptying their tawing agents, dyes, or other such pollution into the river; permitting them to work outside of Paris near Chaillot at a distance of at least two bow shots from the suburbs, under pain of confiscation of their goods and merchandise, and banishment from the kingdom.”36

Access to river water caused similar conflicts, and sometimes quite violent ones, among the dyers themselves. In most towns with a textile industry, the dyeing corpo­rations were strictly divided according to the material that was dyed (wool, linen, silk, and cotton in certain Italian towns) and the colors or groups of colors produced. The regulations forbade dyeing

35. Flemish dyers, from a manuscript of De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, copied and illuminated in Bruges in 1482. British Library, London; Royal Ms. 15 E III, folio 269. Despite the realism of the gestures and instruments, this scene of dyers at work in a Flemish workshop from the late fifteenth century depicts something impossible: the presence of blue and red cloth in the same shop. In Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and all other Flemish towns, dyers were rigidly specialized. If they had permission to dye in red (which is what the basin here seems to indicate), they could not dye in blue, or vice versa.

a fabric or producing colors for which one did not have a license. As of the thirteenth century, if one were a wool dyer and produced red cloth, for example, one could not produce blue. Blue dyers, however, often expanded into green and black tones, while red dyers produced yellow as well. These regulations did not prevent clashes over river access, however. If dyers using red were upstream, then the river water was reddened and the blue dyers downstream had to wait for it to clear. Such situations were not uncommon and caused numerous conflicts over the centuries. Sometimes, as in Rouen in the early sixteenth century, the municipal authorities tried to establish a river access schedule that was modified from week to week, as demand required, so that everyone could have clean water.37

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  69

36. Weavers of the Val d’Aosta, late 15th century. Fresco from the Castello di Issogne, Issogne, Italy.

In certain German and Italian cities,  spe­ cialization among dyers was taken even further: among those producing the same color, dyers were distinguished by which ­ coloring substance they had the right to use. For exam­ ple, in Nuremburg and Milan in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, red dyers who employed madder, which grew abundantly in Western Europe and was reasonably priced, had a legal status different from that of dyers who used cochineal dye and kermes, products that were imported at great expense from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Each group paid different taxes and obeyed different regulations, each used different techniques and mordants, and each had a different clientele.38 Many German cities (Magdeburg, Erfurt, Constance, and espe­cially Nuremburg) distinguished between ordinary dyers who produced colors of average quality (Färber or Schwarzfärber, if the colors were darkened or grayish) and the luxury dyers working in the same color (Schönfärber).39 The latter used refined and expensive materials and knew how to make their dyes penetrate deeply into a fabric’s fibers. It was said of

70 a new color

37. Venetian dyers, 1730. Museo Correr, Venice. Until the discovery of the New World, Venice was the capital of Western dyeing. It was there that mer­chants bought and sold the costly dyeing materials imported from India and the Middle East: kermes, brazilwood, saffron, and “India stone” (indigo). Venetian dyers, perhaps because they were less constrained by professional regulations, were also the most audacious: in the fourteenth century they had the idea that a green tint could be obtained by soaking cloth first in a blue vat and then in a yellow one. This practice, which ran counter to all of the traditions and statutes in the rest of Europe, did not become standard until the seventeenth century.

these artisans that their “colors are lovely, crisp, and solid.”40

THE TABOO AGAINST MIXING COLORS The narrow specialization within dyeing activities was part of the broader aversion to mixing colors that Western culture had inherited from biblical peoples and that permeated all aspects of medieval life.41 Its numerous effects on medieval society were felt equally in the abstract realms of ideology and symbolism and in the mundane areas of daily life and material civilization.42 In the medieval conception of nature, the mixing, melding, fusing, or amalgamating of disparate elements were all viewed as infernal processes because they violated the natural order of things established by the Creator. All those who were involved in such activities because of their professions — dyers, blacksmiths, alchemists, apothecaries— were viewed with fear and suspicion because they seemed to be manip­ulating matter. These artisans imposed certain limits on themselves along with those imposed by society. Thus, dyers were hesitant to mix colors directly to

obtain a third hue; they juxtaposed or superimposed but rarely combined pigments. Before the fifteenth cen­tury, not a single collection of recipes for color production— either for dyeing or for painting— explains that green is obtained by combining blue and yellow. Green tones were produced either from pigments containing naturally green colorants (green minerals, malachite, verdigris, buckthorn berries, nettle leaves, leek juice) or by treating blue or black pigments with processes that produced green dyes without mixing. And in any case, for medieval people who knew nothing about the spectrum, blue and yellow seemed very far apart: they did not have the same ideological or symbolic status, they looked nothing alike, and thus the medieval mind could not conceive of mixing them to produce green.43 The reasons for this “color blindness” become clear if we consider the color scale defined by Aristotle and his followers and elaborated by the majority of chromatic systems invented in Europe before the seventeenth century.44 On this scale, yellow is placed in the same sphere as red and white, green in that of blue and black; and between these two spheres

72 a new color

there is a stark division. Until the sixteenth century, dyeing workshops never contained both a blue vat and a yellow one because of professional regulations: obtaining green through a combination of blue and yellow was therefore not only materially difficult but forbidden. The same prohibitions and physical obstacles surrounded violet tints: these are rarely derived from a mixture of blue and red (woad and madder), but rather by using madder and combining it with a specific mordant.45 This is why medieval shades of violet, like those produced in antiquity, are much closer to red or black than to blue. It is important to keep in mind how much dyeing practices are shaped by the constraints imposed by the use of mordants— substances (tartar, alum, vinegar, urine, lime) applied to facilitate the penetration and bonding of a dye with cloth fibers. Certain dyes require a large amount of mordant in order to produce bright, crisp colors: this is true for both madder (red tones) and weld (yellow tones). Others, however, need only a light treatment or none at all: that was the case with woad and later indigo (for

blue, green, gray, and black tones). This is yet another reason for the separation in medieval documents between dyers “in red” (who use a mordant), and dyers “in blue,” who do not, or do so only rarely. At the end of the Middle Ages in France, docu­ments make the same distinction but with the terms de bouillon (red dyers, who must first boil the mordant, the dye, and the fabric together in a single vat) and de cuve (vat) or de guède (woad) (blue dyers who dispense with the boiling operation and can even, in some cases, dye without hot water). These docu­ ments all insist that one cannot be one and the other at the same time. A fourteenth-­ century text from Valenciennes states, “Again has the prohi­bition been decided and declared by judgment that no dyer using woad can dye de bouillon, nor can any dyer de bouillon dye with woad.”46 Thus far we have concentrated on the technical and social aspects of the dyeing trades, but these also can tell us much about medieval perceptions of color, especially where color intensity and saturation are concerned. An examination of technical procedures, the cost

74 a new color

of colorants, and the hierarchy of prestige accorded to different fabrics shows that value was placed as much on the brightness of hues as on their actual color. For a color to be considered beautiful, and thus expensive and valuable, it must be luminous and lush. It must penetrate deep into the cloth and resist the deleterious effects of sunlight, soap, and time. This system of values, which prized intensity over nuance and tonality, was also present in many other spheres of medieval culture where color played a part: in the color lexicon (notably in prefixes and suffixes), in moral preoccupations, in artistic practices, and in sumptuary laws.47 The emphasis on color intensity led medieval people to perceive color very differently than we do now: for the dyer or painter, and for their clients and publics, an intense, heavily saturated color was often seen (or imagined) as closer to another bright color than it was to a weaker, less concentrated tone of the same color. Thus on wool cloth, a luminous blue was always seen as more like a bright red than like a pale, washed-­out blue tone. In the economic, social, and imaginary systems that

derive from medieval color perception, priority was always given to intensity and luminosity over tone and hue. The desire for bright, concentrated, and stable colors is also reflected in the collections of formulas made for dyers. These demonstrate that the mordant was the key to producing successful colors. Such collections were useful, but dyeing also relied on the private habits and secrets of each workshop. As in other artisanal activities, knowledge was transmitted between generations of dyers more by mouth to ear than by pen to parchment.

R ECI P E C O LLECT I O N S A large number of manuals for dyers and other artisans have come down to us from the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. These documents are very difficult to analyze.48 One difficulty stems from the nature of texts copied by hand: although these collections are always copied from others, each one gives a new version of the text —scribes add to or abridge some formulas, modify others, change the name of a material, or give the same

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  75

38. Cloth dyed with indigo being wrung and exposed to the air in an indigo workshop in Peru. Watercolor, 17th century. Palacio Real, Madrid. Dyeing with indigo does not require a mordant, the intermediary substance that facilitates the penetration of dyes into fabric fibers. A fabric can be dyed blue simply by being dunked in a vat of indigo and then exposed to the air. The cloth appears green when first removed from the vat, but after a few minutes it changes to a lovely blue shade.

name to what are, in fact, different substances. Another difficulty is that practical advice in these manuals is always mixed with allegorical and symbolic descriptions. The same sentence may contain a gloss on the symbolism and “properties” of the four elements (water, earth, fire, air) and authentic technical advice on the best ways to fill a pot or clean a vat. Moreover, quantities and proportions are always quite inexact: “take a good portion of madder and put it in a certain amount of water; add a bit of vinegar and a lot of tartar.” The same imprecision applies to the length of time one should boil, decoct, or soak the cloth, which is rarely indicated or else highly implausible. A text from the late thirteenth century, for example, explains that to produce green paint, copper shavings should be soaked in vinegar for either three days or nine months.49 As is often the case in the Middle Ages, the ritual is more important than the result, and numbers are more symbols than actual quantities. For medieval culture, three days or nine months represented more or less the same thing in that both expressed a period of waiting and (re)generation —Christ’s

resurrection occurred on the third day, a child arrives after nine months. It is typical of medieval thinking to superimpose such symbolically significant periods on other spheres of life and activity. Generally speaking, whether they are addressed to dyers, painters, doctors, apoth­ ecaries, cooks, or alchemists, these manuals offer as much allegorical content as practical advice. And it is interesting to note that both technical and allegorical texts employ similar sentence structure and a common vocabulary, especially with regard to verbs. Take, choose, pick, pluck, crush, grind, immerse, boil, infuse, dilute, stir, add, filter: all of these are activities common to both physical work and to the vivid images found in allegory. The manuals have other elements that also strike us as more symbolic than practical. They stress the importance of letting time do its slow work (the desire to accelerate things is always seen as ineffective and dishonest). They emphasize the metic­ulous care that should go into choosing receptacles and clearly describe the possible choices: clay, iron, tin, open or closed, wide or narrow, big or

76 a new color

small, various shapes. Such attention is paid to the selection and use of these vessels because what happens inside them is like a metamorphosis, a dangerous—if not diabolical — process that demands great care. Finally, these manuals are very sensitive to the problems of

mixing and the use of different materials. They make clear that the different types of matter — mineral, vegetal, and animal — must be treated with care. Each has different properties that determine how it may be used with the others: the vegetal is pure, the animal is not;

78 a new color

the mineral is dead, the vegetal and animal are alive. Often, dyeing and painting methods are described in terms of joining a “living” material to a “dead” one. What we would call symbolic thinking was never far from the world of medieval artisanal and artistic practice. Because of their common features, these manuals should be studied as a group and considered a literary genre in and of themselves. Despite the fact that the history of these texts is often unclear and that they often contain meager practical advice, are difficult to date, and have no identifiable authors, these manuals are rich in all kinds of information. Many are still waiting to be published, and none of them has been properly described or catalogued.50 Further study of their contents would provide us with new information about dyeing, painting, cooking, and medicine in the Middle Ages. It would also allow us to better comprehend the evolution of “practical” (the term must clearly be used with prudence) knowledge and techniques in the West between antiquity and the eighteenth century.51 If we turn our attention to medieval dyeing manuals, we notice a striking feature: in those

made before the late fourteenth century, three-­ quarters of the dyeing recipes are devoted to producing the color red, while in the fifteenth century the recipes for blue appear with greater frequency. This evolution continues so that by the eighteenth century, dyers’ manuals contain more formulas for blue than for red.52 A similar progression is visible in manuals and treatises for painters: recipes for red are far more common until the Renaissance, when

39. A lesson on the rainbow, from a manuscript of De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, copied and illuminated in the late 14th century. Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris; Ms. 1028, folio 395. In both texts and images of antiquity and the Middle Ages, rainbows have three, four, or five colors, but never seven. And because the spectrum was unknown at that point, the colors composing the rainbow appear in sequences that bear no resemblance to the sequence we know. Since neither meteorological phenomena nor human biology has changed, these differences confirm that perception is in large part cultural: it is not only a function of biology and neurobiology but also, and above all, relies on memory, knowledge, and imagination.

those for blue begin to catch up and, eventually, surpass them. The rivalry between blue and red, far from being of mere anecdotal interest, is one of the most crucial aspects of the history of color perception in the West; it began in the Middle Ages, but it continues to this day. Studying these manuals yields a number of questions. How did medieval dyers use these texts, which in many ways are more speculative than practical, more allegorical than functional? Were the authors actual artisans? Who were these manuals and their recipes intended for? Some are long, others very short: should we assume that they were aimed at different publics, that certain manuals were used in the

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  79

workshop while others were read inde­pendent of any artisanal activity? And what was the role of scribes in the formation of these manuals? Given what we know at present, it is very difficult to answer these questions, but a useful parallel can be drawn with painting, where the same questions arise. Here we are lucky to have preserved both the manuals and the actual painted works of certain artists.53 Comparison of the two shows that often there is very little rapport between the written formulas and the methods of exe­cution, at least before the seventeenth century. The most famous case illustrating this point is that of Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote a famous (unfinished) treatise on painting that is both a compilation of techniques and a series of philosophical reflections. When we study his own paintings, however, we discover that in no way do they follow the advice given in his manual.54

A NEW COLOR HIERARCHY In the opinion of certain late medieval authors, blue was the most beautiful and most noble of colors. This should not surprise us, given the tremendous changes in blue’s

fortunes we have seen in this chapter. Blue became the color of the Virgin, then that of the arms of both the king of France and King Arthur, then a fashionable color commonly associated with joy, love, loyalty, peace, and comfort. In its new role, blue gradually took the place of red as the preferred Western color. This was already the opinion of the anonymous thirteenth-­century author of Sone de Nansay, a didactic romance composed in Lorraine or Brabant to teach the virtues of chivalry: “Blue comforts the heart, for it is the emperor of colors.”55 The same idea appears several de­cades later from the pen of the great poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut (1300 –1377): “He who would rightly judge colors and pro­nounce their true meaning, must place before all others beautiful blue.”56 For the his­torian, the essential questions are what caused blue’s sudden promotion and, with it, the sudden shift in the color hierarchy? How important were the dyers, for example, in triggering this change? Did some technical advance or discovery in pigment chemistry suddenly allow them to produce a bright, luxurious, crisp, and stable blue? How to explain this sudden

80 a new color

achievement? Did the new popularity of blue in textiles and dress lead to its adoption in other media? Or was the dynamic just the opposite: Did society demand that dyers (and other artisans) improve their methods of producing blue because the color was already so desirable?57 In other words, did the offer of a new blue precede the demand for it, with chemical or technical changes preceding those in ideology and symbolism? Or, as I could easily imagine, is the opposite true? There is no one response to these complex questions, of course, especially since in many ways color chemistry and color symbolism are two sides of the same coin.58 What is clear is that the rise of blue was not just a minor feature of Western history but the expression of important changes in the social order, systems of thought, and modes of perception. Nor is blue the only color to be affected by these transformations; its promotion was just the most visible aspect of a profound upheaval in the relationships between all colors. An old order of colors, which perhaps had its roots in prehistory, was replaced by a new order in the Middle Ages.

The most important feature of this new order was that the triad white-­red-­black, which had been the focal point of Western color systems since antiquity (if not before), was no longer dominant. This change is important because the tripartite chromatic system was a basic part of human cultures not only in Europe but also in Africa and Asia. As linguists and ethnologists have long pointed out, the intimate relationship between white and its “two opposites” was part of the earliest forms of civilization.59 These three colors served as the poles around which all other colors could be organized: red remained isolated, yellow was assimilated to white, while green, blue, and violet were joined to black.60 From this chromatic system sprang a host of symbolic meanings and classifications. The ancient color system left a profound mark in medieval literature (primarily in epics, but in chivalric romances as well), in personal and place names, and in popular tales, fables, and folklore.61 For ex­ample, the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”—the oldest version of which seems to date to around the year 1000—is structured around red, white, and black: a little girl

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century  81

dressed in red carries a pot of white butter to a grand­mother (or a wolf ) dressed in black.62 The same chromatic combination is found in “Snow White,” but with a different distribution of colors: a witch in black robes gives a red apple (which is poisoned—red can signify the diabolical) to a young girl whose skin is white as snow. Or again, in the fable of the fox and the crow, perhaps the oldest tale of the three: a black bird drops a piece of white cheese, which is grabbed by a red fox. There are many more such examples of the ar­ che­ typal func­ tion of the white-­ red-­ black triad, whose sym­ bolic meaning was expanded and

applied

to

numerous

spheres of ancient and medieval culture.63 Between the end of the eleventh and the middle of

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the thirteenth century, however, this tripartite chromatic system was replaced by another in Western color practices. With a new social order came a new order of colors. The simplicity of the old system, with its three principal colors and its division between dark and light, no longer sufficed. Western society needed six basic colors (white, red, black, blue, green, yellow) and much richer and more subtle combinations for its emblems, its representational codes, and its symbolic systems. More colors

were needed to classify, associate, oppose, and establish hierar­ chies, because a much more complex society was forming. Among the new color combina­ tions, the red-­ blue couple rap-

40. Miniature from the Ingeborg Psalter, copied and illuminated c. 1210. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France; Ms. 1965, folio 53. In the early thirteenth century blue became a royal color in illumination. The new royal fashion and ideology even influenced the iconography of biblical kings: here the young David is anointed by Samuel, and both are retroactively given blue garments. Blue is used extensively through­out this manuscript.

idly became one of the most important because it allowed red, like white, to have a second opposite. In other words, the red-­blue contrast joined the two other basic ones, white-­ black and white-­red, which were of ancient origin. In the thirteenth century, red and blue become contrasting colors and remain so to this day.

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3 A M O R A L CO LO R

The Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

The history of blue between the fourteenth and seventeenth century, as in the high Middle Ages, cannot be studied as an isolated phenomenon. During this period blue’s fate is more than ever bound to that of other colors, and especially to that of black. In the middle of the fourteenth century, blue became the rival both of red and of black (which was extremely

popular in clothing in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance). Far from detracting from blue’s success, this rivalry actually helped it, and blue—like black—became a color with moral implications. Two principal causes were at the heart of this transformation in European society: the widespread moralizing discourse that dom­inated late medieval society and, above

41. Jacopo Pontormo, Portrait of Cosimo de Medici, c. 1530. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Despite the aristocratic vogue for blue in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, in certain regions—especially Italy—red remained the color of power and wealth. Nowhere did red’s hold last beyond the sixteenth century, however, and after 1580 kings and princes rarely wore red. Only the pope and certain prelates continue to do so, and only in certain situations.

 85

all, the views of the great Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century concerning the social, religious, and artistic use of color.

SUMPTUARY LAWS AND DRESS CODES The changes in the color hierarchy that led to blue’s moral metamorphosis began with the promotion of black in the mid-­fourteenth century. Gradually, and indirectly, the rise of black aided blue to the detriment of red. This rise began between 1360 and 1380 and for reasons similar to those we saw with blue: European dyers discovered a method for dyeing wool cloth in solid, saturated, and deep black tones that had never been achieved before. This advance was apparently the result not of technical progress or chemical discoveries, nor of the arrival of a new pigment, but rather of new demand from society. Because clients began to ask for black fabric and clothing of high quality, dyers quickly responded to the demand by producing large quantities of wool in this newly fashionable color. The valorization of black for Western clothing in the late Middle Ages and early

Renaissance had a considerable impact on soci­ ety. Its legacy is still visible today in dark suits, tuxedoes, mourning clothes, the famous “little black dress,” and perhaps even in jeans, blazers, and navy blue uniforms. Indeed, navy blue—the most common color in Western clothing today— has assumed in the twentieth century many of the values expressed by black in preceding centuries. The expanded preference for black in clothing during the fourteenth century affected blue’s status for many centuries thereafter. Even though many documents and artifacts attest to the increase in black’s pop­ularity, we still do not know all of the causes and motivations behind it. The most impor­ tant reasons seem to have been moral and economic, tied to the proliferation of sump­ tuary laws and dress regulations throughout Christendom in the wake of the plague (1346–50). There are studies of sumptuary laws in specific cities, but a general synthesis of their history has yet to be written.1 They survived in various forms until the eighteenth century (notably in Venice and Geneva) and have left profound marks on the modern fashion code.

86 a moral color

These laws were passed primarily for three reasons. The first was a desire to aid the economy by limiting expenditure on clothing and dress accessories among all classes and social categories, since this was a nonproductive investment. By the second half of the fourteenth century, such spending by nobles and patricians had attained extraordinary, and often ridiculous, levels.2 Sumptuary laws were intended to stop this ostentatious luxury, which led to ruinous spending and permanent debt. At the same time, the laws were meant to prevent price increases, redirect the economy toward more productive ends, stimulate local production, and slow the importation of luxury goods from abroad. The second aim of these laws was to preserve the Christian tradition of modesty and virtue. The laws, decrees, and regulations on dress were part of a much broader moralizing trend that swept late medieval Europe and spawned the Protestant Reformation. These laws reflect a hostility to changes and innovations that would upset the established order and transgress wholesome morals. This is why they are

often directed against youths and women, the two social categories said to often seek novelty and pleasure. And finally, these laws had an ideological motivation. They created a form of segregation by dress, a system in which all members of society had to wear garments proper to their sex, estate, dignity, and rank. Solid barriers had to be placed between different social groups, movement from one class to another had to be impeded, and clothing had to be the chief sign of social classification. To transgress these boundaries was both sacrilegious and dangerous, for it was to violate the God-­given order. Sumptuary laws thus made social status readable through clothing. Dress reflected one’s birth, wealth, age, profession, and social activities. A wide array of elements communicated these distinctions: the nature and size of the wardrobe one was allowed to own, the specific pieces of clothing in it, the fabrics from which these were made, the colors in which they were dyed, and the furs, bangles, jewels, and other accessories that accompanied them. These laws were not limited just to dress; they

The Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century  87

42. Nicolas Froment, King René d’Anjou and His Wife, Jeanne de Laval, c. 1460? Musée du Louvre, Paris. Like most rulers of his day, King René d’Anjou (1409–1480) wore black for most of his life. He also had a strong love of gray, which he saw as a color of hope rather than affliction. His favorite livery was composed of these two colors, which were perceived as opposites and often joined by white. At his court, blue was always used in discreet tones.

concerned other aspects of material life as well: crockery, silverware, food, furniture, real estate, vehicles, domestics, and animals. Clothing, however, was their focus because it was the basic medium for display in a society undergoing profound transfor­mations, where appearance played more and more of a role. Sumptuary laws can thus tell us a great deal about the ideological signif­icance of the dress code in the late Middle Ages. This usefulness is in no way diminished by the laws’ often theoretical nature; indeed, their ineffectiveness meant that over time they were reissued in expanded and more precise forms, which give the historian a sometimes overwhelming amount of detail and information.3 Unfortunately, these texts (like the dyers’ manuals) are for the most part unpublished.

PERMITTED AND FORBIDDEN COLORS Let us look more closely at what these laws, decrees, and regulations on dress from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have to say about color. The first thing to note is that certain colors were forbidden outside certain

88 a moral color

The Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century  89

43. Grisaille miniature from a manuscript of La Première Guerre punique (The First Punic War), copied and painted by Leonardo Bruni, c. 1465–67 for Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels; Ms. 10777, folio 95 verso. Grisaille miniatures appear with greater frequency in manuscripts after the midfourteenth century. They were part of a vast moralizing move­ ment that swept late medieval Europe and that, in the visual arts, was characterized by a rejec­tion of polychromy and bright colors. The austerity imposed by a restricted palette inspired many artists to use colors with extra­ordinary refinement and subtlety, especially blue, white, and gold.

social categories, not because they were too showy or immodest but because they required expensive dyes whose use was reserved for those of high birth and great wealth. In Italy, for example, the celebrated Venetian scarlets (scarlatti venezianni di grana) were cloths dyed in various shades of red with a very costly kind of kermes, and produced only for lords and dignitaries. German cities had similar prohibitions against red fabric dyed with cochineal dye from Poland, and even against certain cloths of a rich blue (panni pavonacei, or “peacock” cloths) produced from a high-­ quality pastel from Thuringia. The moral issue here was not the actual color, but the product used to create it. Or so it seems; the problem for the historian is that in these texts the same words are often used to denote both the dyestuff and the color it produces. In fact, the same word can be applied to the dye, its color, and the fabric that is colored. The con­fusion of the modern researcher is com­pounded by these lexical difficulties. In the fifteenth century, for example, the majority of vernacular texts (in French, German, Dutch, and other languages) use the word scarlet in a dizzying

variety of ways: to denote luxury fabric of any color; or fine cloth dyed red, without regard to the dye used; or red cloth dyed only with kermes; or the dyestuff itself, the famous and costly “scarlet seed”; or most simply, scarlet can mean a lovely red shade. In the modern era, only this last meaning has become fixed in ordinary speech.4 Everywhere in Europe, colors considered too rich or showy were forbidden to all who had to project an image of dignity and reserve:

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clerics, of course, but also widows, magistrates, and all those in government service. In general, garments that were multicolored, striped, checkered, or featured strong color contrasts were prohibited, being considered improper for the good Christian.5 Such sumptuary laws and dress regulations have much more to say about permitted colors than about those that are forbidden. While the laws against taboo colors focus on the quality and cost of the colorant, the dis­course on lawful colors focuses on the color itself, defined in an almost abstract manner, inde­pen­dent of nuance, material, or intensity. This is because certain authorized colors were often used to distinguish social outcasts. They should therefore not be dis­ creet but, on the contrary, attract the eye; they were distinctive signs, obligatory em­ blems, marks of infamy that designated various cate­gories of margin­ als or pariahs. In the urban environment, these were the first social groups to be targeted. The preservation of the estab­lished order, of proper morals, and of ances­ tral traditions required that honest citizens be clearly separated from men and women on the margins of society, or even beyond the margins.

These chromatic directives applied to a long and varied list of individuals and professions. They were aimed above all at men and women who practiced dangerous, dishonest, or simply dubious activities: doctors, surgeons, executioners, prostitutes, usurers, minstrels, musicians, beggars, vagabonds, and all sorts of outcasts. Next in line were those who had suffered some form of condemnation, ranging from drunks causing public disturbances to false witnesses, perjurers, thieves, and blasphemers. Then came various categories of the infirm, because both physical and mental illness were considered signs of profound sinfulness in the medieval system of values. Thus the crippled, the deformed, lepers, the “weak bodied,” and those who were “cretins and funny in the head” were often made to wear bright colors. Finally, these laws applied to the large communities of Jews and Muslims who had settled throughout Europe and especially in the south.6 Indeed, it seems that the desire to mark non-­Christians was the original impetus behind these mandatory color laws. They were the targets of the first such edict, which was decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215—part

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44. Grisaille miniature from a manuscript of La Vie et miracles de Notre-Dame, copied and illuminated by Jean Miélot c. 1460 for Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Ms. Fr. 9199, folio 37 verso. The abundance of blue-gray tones in grisaille miniatures enabled illuminators to depict water, atmosphere, light, and distance with great subtlety. The monochromatic nuance of these images often gives them a far-off, nocturnal, and magical quality that invites contemplation. Though not yet Protestant images, they are already Romantic.

of a prohibition against marriages between Christians and non-­Christians.7 Despite what other historians have said about these laws, however, it is clear that there were many systems of color marks used throughout Christendom to designate different categories of social outcasts. Customs varied greatly from one region to another, from one city to another, and within a given city, from

one era to the next. For example, in Milan and Nuremburg, where the regulations became more numerous and detailed in the course of the fifteenth century, the colors imposed on prostitutes, lepers, and Jews changed from one generation—and even one decade—to the next. However, in these cities as elsewhere there are certain patterns that are worth considering more closely.

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Only five colors are used for these discrim­ inatory marks: white, black, red, green, and yellow. Blue is almost never cited. Is this because in the late Middle Ages it was too valued a color to be integrated into such a sign system? Or was it so common in clothing that it would not have been effective as a distinguishing mark? Or is it, as I tend to think, because the origins of these chromatic marks (which are yet to be studied) date to before the Fourth Lateran Council, when blue was still too meager a symbol to be used as a social signal? The absence of blue from these marks, as from the liturgical color code, is in any case eloquent testimony to the lack of interest in blue reflected by social codes and value systems before the thirteenth century. Neither imposed nor forbidden, blue could be used freely, neutrally, without threatening anyone. No doubt this is why blue became increasingly common in male and female dress over the decades of the late Middle Ages. And because it was ignored, blue was in a perfect position to be promoted as a “moral” color later on. Although they are not concerned with blue’s history, let us look more closely at the colors

that compose these medieval marks of infamy. These marks could be applied in many ways: as an appliquéd cross, a circle of cloth, a colored band, a scarf, a ribbon, a hood, gloves, or a hat. Sometimes these badges were of a single color, but most often two of the five shameful colors were placed together on them. Although any color combination was possible, the most frequent were red and white, red and yellow, white and black, and yellow and green. The colors were joined in the same geometric patterns used for heraldry, either divided down the middle, in vertical or horizontal bands, or divided in four even parts. The only tricolor combination used was red, green, and yellow. To the medieval eye these were the loudest colors, and their juxtaposition was almost always a pejorative sign. If we try to assign colors to the different categories of marginals and outcasts, we see (simplifying a great deal) that black and white—either alone or together—tended to mark the poor and the sick (especially lepers); that red was assigned to executioners and prostitutes; yellow, to counterfeiters, heretics, and Jews; green (either alone or with yellow),

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to musicians, minstrels, buffoons, and fools.8 There were, of course, numerous exceptions to this scheme. For example, it is impossible to generalize about the color emblems for prostitutes, for whom such marks had as much a fiscal as a moral function. Prostitutes were often labeled by a red dress, clasp, scarf, hat, or cloak, depending on the city and the period. But in late-­fourteenth-­century London and Bristol, they were distinguished from honest women by their striped clothing, and the same custom was practiced in the towns of Languedoc several years later. On the other hand, in Venice in 1407, the sign of a prostitute was a yellow scarf; in Milan in 1412, a white cloak; in Cologne in 1423, a double red-­and-­white clasp; in Bologna in 1456, a green scarf; in Milan in 1498, a black cloak; in Seville in 1502, green-­and-­yellow sleeves.9 Sometimes no color at all is mentioned, and they are designated only by an item of clothing—as in Castres in 1375, where the sign was a man’s hat. The signs and marks imposed on Jews were even more varied and remain little studied. Here again, despite what other authors have written, there was no system common to all

Christendom, nor even recurring customs in the same regions.10 It is true that yellow, the color traditionally associated with the Synagogue in iconography, eventually became standard after many centuries; but for a long time before this, red, white, green, and black marks were also used, or else bicolored patterns of yellow and green, yellow and red, red and white, or white and black.11 The forms these marks took were as diverse as their chromatic formulas: most often they were in the shape of a circle, but there were also small rings, stars, figures shaped like the tablets of the ten commandments, scarves, hoods, or even crosses. When a mark was sewn onto clothing it was worn on the shoulder, the chest, the back, a hat or hood, and sometimes in multiple places. As with the marks of prostitutes, it is impossible to generalize.12 And blue, again, was never used as a color of shame or discrimination.

FROM DIGNIFIED BLACK TO MORAL BLUE Let us return to black and its sudden rise in the mid-­ fourteenth century. Again, this seems to be the direct consequence of the

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45. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Copy made around 1500 of a lost original by Rogier van der Weyden. Schloß Ambras, Innsbruck, Austria. Blue was not particularly in favor at the prestigious Burgundian court in the fifteenth century. Black was the favorite color of Duke Philip the Good (1396–1467), who wore mourning almost his entire life for his father, who was assassinated in 1419. The Burgundian fashion for black continued during the reign of Charles the Rash (1467–77) and then made its way to the Spanish royal court, which inherited the etiquette and customs of the ducal court of Burgundy.

sumptuary laws and dress regulations. Black’s success began in Italy and at first was only an urban phenomenon. Certain patricians and wealthy merchants who had not yet reached the top of the social ladder were prohibited from owning luxurious red fabrics (like the famous Venetian scarlets) and certain bright blues (like the famous “peacock” blues of 46. A fool in multicolored garb, from a Parisian breviary copied and illuminated c. 1470. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris; Ms. 101, folio 306. The perception of colors is as much a cultural habit, varying among eras and cultures, as it is a biological phenomenon. A color contrast that seems strong to the modern eye might have seemed mild in the Middle Ages, and conversely, two colors that harmonize for us could have clashed violently in the medieval perception. For us, yellow and green do not clash because they are neighbors in the spectrum. However, in the late Middle Ages this was the strongest contrast one could depict. It was used for fools (when they weren’t given multicolored dress, as in this image) and to highlight dangerous, transgressive, and diabolical behavior.

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Florence, panni pavonacei).13 They reacted to these restrictions by turning to black, which had previously been considered a modest color of little worth. Because they were wealthy, however, they ordered their weavers and tailors to procure luxury fabrics in blacks that were darker, crisper, and more seductive than the norm. Urged on by this new demand, the weavers in turn pushed the dyers to find a way to satisfy the desires of this wealthy clientele willing to pay large sums for high-­ quality black fabric. In the two decades between 1360

and 1380 the dyers triumphed, and the vogue for black was launched. It allowed the patricians to obey the sumptuary laws and at the same time dress in their own distinctive style. Though prohibited from wearing sable—the most expensive and the blackest of furs, which was reserved for lords—the urban elite were nevertheless able to wear costly black that was still austere and virtuous and there­fore satisfied the municipal authorities and the moralists. Other classes were soon imitating the patricians and wealthy merchants. First were princes such as the duke of Milan and the count of Savoy, as well as the lords of Mantua, Ferrara, Rimini, and Urbino, all of whom had black garments in their wardrobes in the late fourteenth century.14 At the turn of the century the fashion moved from Italy into France and England, where kings and princes began to wear black, and then to Germany and Spain.15 Black became popular at the French royal court, for example, during the madness of King Charles VI in the 1390s. The king’s uncles began to wear it, possibly influenced by the king’s young sister-­in-­law,

47. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of Count Secco Suardi, c. 1560. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Two completely different blacks were used in sixteenth-century clothing. The one worn by Benedictine monks, certain Catholic prelates, and most Protestants was a humble, severe, sober, and dignified black. A bright and showy black, on the other hand, was worn by kings, princes, and lords.

Valentina Visconti, who brought with her the customs of her father’s court in Milan. The decisive moment in black’s rise came a few years later, however, around 1419–20, when a young prince who would become the most powerful in the West succumbed to the new fashion and remained faithful to it the rest of his life. He was Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.16 Many chroniclers and historians have noted the omnipresence of black at Philip’s court and on his person, and attributed this to mourning for his father, John the Fearless, who was assassinated by the Ar­magnacs in 1419.17 There is truth to this, but we can also see that John the Fearless himself had been partial to black after participating in the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, at which a European army was crushed by the Turks.18 Dynastic tradition, princely fashion, political events, and personal history all contributed to Philip the Good’s preference for black, the success of which was then assured throughout the West because of the duke’s prestige.

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98 a moral color

The fifteenth century was dominated by black. Until the 1480s, there was not a single princely or royal wardrobe that was not abundantly furnished with black linens, furs, and silks. Black could be worn alone, or it could be joined by another color. Generally it was partnered with white or gray, the latter being another color that flourished in this era with a penchant for dark and somber colors. For the first time in the history of Western dress, gray— which until then had been relegated to work clothes or the most humble garments—became a seductive, desirable, and even flamboyant color. Two French lords, René d’Anjou and Charles d’Orléans, were faithful wearers of gray for many years, using it both in their dress and in their literary compositions as a contrast to black.19 Whereas black was the color of mourning and melancholy, gray evoked hope and joy. This sentiment is present in a lovely poem by Charles d’Orléans, the nobleman poet “with the heart draped in black” who was held prisoner in England for twenty-­five years: “Though he is far from France, beyond Mont Senis, he lives in un­yielding hope, for he is dressed in gray.”20

Black’s success as a dress color did not flag with the death of Charles the Rash, the last duke of Burgundy, in 1477, nor did it cease as the fifteenth century drew to a close. Indeed,

48. Portrait of a man in court costume by Marco Basaiti, c. 1520. Pinacoteca dell’ Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy. Furs often added a luxurious accent to the sumptuous black garments worn in the sixteenth century by princes and the wealthiest patricians. In German and Italian painting, however, these garments were often represented against a blue, green, or gray background in order to temper their opulence and give the image more depth.

the sixteenth century became doubly attached to black. Along with royal black, whose vogue at the courts continued well into the modern era (in some cases until the mid-­seventeenth century), the “moral black” of ecclesiastics and government officials was also preserved and renewed. The Protestant Reformation viewed the latter black as the most dignified, virtuous, and Christian of colors; to it the Protestants gradually assimilated blue—an honest and temperate color evoking the sky and the spirit.

THE REFORMATION AND COLOR: RITUALS The war against images declared by Protestant reformers is a subject that has inspired many studies. However, this reform-­ minded iconoclasm was paralleled by a veritable “chromoclasm” that has not yet been studied. This attack on color, which played an

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essential role in the elevation of blue during the early modern period, was pursued in several areas: religious practices, art, clothing, and daily life. We will examine each in turn. The debate over whether color should have a place in the Christian church is ancient. It has already come up in our discussion of the Carolingian and, above all, the Romanesque period, when a violent conflict opposed Cluniac and Cistercian monks over questions of dogma, ethics, and aesthetics.21 Numerous church authorities (including all the great abbots of Cluny) and a great many the­ologians believed that color participated in the nature of light, the only part of the sensory world that was both visible and immaterial. Because God himself is light, it was an acceptable—and even recommended—practice to expand color’s role in the church, in order both to dissipate darkness and to provide more space for the divine. As we have seen, this is what Suger did in the 1130s and 1140s when he undertook the reconstruction of the abbey church at Saint-­Denis. But other prelates were hostile to color, which they viewed as material rather than luminous in nature.22

This second point of view dominated Cistercian thinking and was evident in their architectural and decorative aesthetic for most of the twelfth century and even into the thirteenth. As time went on, the Cistercian stance on colors became more nuanced, as did that of the “chromophiles,” so that by the middle of the fourteenth century the two camps held fairly similar views. No one argued anymore either for the omnipresence of color or for its total absence. The aesthetic of the day—at least in France and England—preferred simple chromatic highlights, the gilding of edges and borders, and grisaille. In Poland, Bohemia, Italy, and Spain, on the other hand, color remained very present. In the wealthiest cathedrals of these countries, gold became even more visible, and the opu­lence of the decoration increased with that of the rite and vestments. This extrav­agant dis­play helped spark the fifteenth-­century move­ments (the Hussite revolt, for example) against gold, color, and images in the church, critiques that were continued by the Protes­tants several decades later. The effect of this dissent can be seen in many

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fifteenth-­ century miniatures from Northern and Northeastern Europe, which show spare church interiors resembling those of the Calvinist churches de­picted in Dutch painting two centuries later. The Protestant Reformation did not begin, then, at the moment when European churches were at their most colorful. On the contrary, its origins date to a period when the multicolor aesthetic was waning and colors were becoming more sober. This trend was not present throughout Europe, however, and for the reformers, in any event, it was insufficient. Their goal was to cleanse the churches of color, on a massive scale. Like Saint Bernard in the twelfth century, Bodenstein Carlstadt, Philipp Melanchthon, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin denounced colors and overpainted sanctuaries.23 (Martin Luther’s attitude seems to have been more nuanced.) Like the biblical prophet Jeremiah railing against Joachim, they violently criticized those who would build churches resembling palaces, “put windows in them, dress them with cedar, and plaster them with vermilion.”24 Red, though a noble color in

the Bible, symbolized the worst forms of luxury and sin for the reformers, representing not the blood of Christ but the folly of humanity. Carlstadt and Luther loathed it as an abom­ ination.25 For Luther, moreover, red was the emblematic color of papist Rome—as scarlet as the Whore of Babylon.26 All of this is relatively well known, but less studied are the ways that the different the­oretical and dogmatic points of view promulgated by the various Protestant churches were actually put into practice. What was the chronological and geographical evolution of the Reformation’s expulsion of color from European churches? How much of it was achieved by violent destruction, by color removal (stripping objects of paint, placing monochromatic hangings over paintings, plastering interiors), and by modifications in the organization and use of church space? Did Protestants seek the total eradication of color, or were there certain cases, certain milieus, certain moments when they were more tolerant and less “chromophobic”? And how did they judge that enough color had been removed? Did

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49. Lucas Cranach the Younger, portrait of Leonhard Badehorn, mayor of Leipzig, and his family at the foot of the cross, 1557. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany. In the most pious and austere Protestant families, black was the obligatory color for both men and women. Only small children could wear white clothing, and bright colors—considered dishonest and unworthy of true Christians—were totally excluded from clothing, daily life, art, and religious practices.

white, gray, blue, or unpainted objects represent the minimum allowed? The information we have pertaining to these questions remains incomplete, sim­ plistic, and sometimes contradictory. What is clear is that the urge to remove color is not the same thing as iconoclasm. The chronological and geographical data furnished by studies of the war against images do not necessarily explain Protestant attitudes toward color. The war against color—if there was one—man­ ifested itself differently, with less violence and more subtlety, which makes it less observable for the historian. Moreover, we must ask if there really were attacks against images, objects, and buildings solely because their colors were too rich or too provoc­ative. How can we answer such a question? How can we separate the color from its medium? The polychromy on sculptures, especially those of the Virgin and saints, certainly con­ tributed to the reformist view that such objects were idols. But color was not their only condemnable feature. And what sparked the destruction of many stained-­ glass win­ dows by the

Huguenots? The images? The colors? The formal treat­ment (anthro­po­morphic repre­ senta­tions of divine fig­ures)? Or was it the sub­ject matter (scenes from the life of the Virgin, saints’ legends, images of the clergy)? Here as well it is difficult to respond. Our puzzlement is com­pounded when we notice that this destruc­ tion, especially in Zurich and Languedoc, took on a form that was theat­ rical—and

even

“carnivalesque.” 27

Turning these ques­tions on their head, then, could we not see these acts of destruction as rituals in their own right that participated perversely in a “liturgy of color”? And speaking of the liturgy, we must also examine the place of the Catholic Mass in this conflict, especially since color plays a primary and primordial role in it. The objects and vestments used in Catholic rituals are not only coded by the system of liturgical colors, they are also part of a larger theater of color that includes candelabra, architectural decor, poly­ chromed sculptures, manuscript illumina­ tions, and sacred ornaments. Like gestures, rhythms, and sounds, colors are

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essential to the proper and effective practice of the divine office.28 As we have seen, blue is completely absent from the system of liturgical colors as it was established and codified in the high Middle Ages. This absence may explain why the Reformation remained favorable to blue for use both inside the church and out, both in religious and in social and artistic practices. Having launched a war against the Mass and the “obscene theater that makes the Church look ridiculous and transforms priests into actors” (Calvin), and that “displays baubles and useless riches” (Luther), the Reformation had no choice but to attack color as well. Color offended both because of its physical presence inside the church and because of its role in the liturgy. For Zwingli, the sincerity of worship was warped by the external beauty of Catholic rites.29 For Luther and Melanchthon, the church had to be freed of all human vanity. For Carlstadt, the church should be “as pure as a synagogue.”30 For Calvin, its loveliest ornament was the word of God. All felt that the church should lead the faithful to sanctity and

therefore be simple, harmonious, and without mixed and muddled elements, its purity signifying and favoring purity of spirit.

THE REFORMATION AND COLOR: ART Is there a specifically Protestant form of art? This question is not new. The answers proposed, however, remain uncertain and contradictory. What’s more, while many studies have set out to examine the relationships between the Reformation and artistic creation, those that have considered the problems surrounding color are very rare. Color remains, always and everywhere, the gaping hole in art historical studies, even—and above all—in those devoted to painting.31 We have just seen how in certain cases the war against images entailed a war against colors judged too vivid, rich, or provocative. The scholar and antiquarian Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715) left us many drawings of medieval tombs of prelates from Anjou and Poitou that had originally been painted in magnificent color but were stripped of their color by the

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Huguenots during their wave of iconoclasm and “chromoclasm” in 1562. In northern France, Flanders, and the Netherlands, the “vandals of the summer of 1566” often did the same, but pure destruction was more common than scraping, scratching, and plastering.32 In the areas touched by Lutheranism, on the other hand, once the initial vio­lence had passed a certain respect was shown for old images, which were removed from sanctuaries and covered with drapery. This respect was joined by a greater tolerance for existing colors—especially white, black, gray, and blue, which were considered “honest.” The heart of the matter lies elsewhere, how­ ever. We must study what the Reforma­ tion created, not what it destroyed, to have a real understanding of the Protestant attitude toward art and color. This involves examining the palette of Protestant painters, as well as the reformist discourses on pictorial creation and aesthetic sensibility that preceded them. Such a study is not easy, given how dense and incon­ sistent these texts often are.33 Zwingli, for example, seemed less hostile to the beauty

of colors at the end of his life than during his most zealous years. Like Luther, he was more preoccupied with music than with painting.34 Calvin’s writings provide the greatest number of remarks and recommendations on art and color, but these are unfortunately scattered through­ out a vast quantity of writing. We will try to summarize them as accurately as possible. Calvin did not condemn the plastic arts, but believed that they should remain outside the church and be used to instruct and enthrall (in an almost theological sense), and to honor God. These aims should be met through the representation not of God (which is abominable) but of his creation. The artist must avoid artificial and gratuitous sub­jects, as well as those inviting vice or lechery. Art has no value in itself; it comes from God and should help us to better under­stand him. It is for this reason that the painter should use mod­eration when painting, seek har­­mony of form and tone, gain inspi­ration from the created world, and depict what he sees. For Calvin, beauty was com­posed of clar­ ity,  order, and per­fection. The most beau­tiful

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50. Lucas Cranach the Elder and the Younger, Luther preaching predella, from the Last Supper Altar­piece, 1547. Marienkirche, Wittenberg, Germany. Images are always more ideological than documentary in nature. Their function is not to “photograph” reality (especially not that of color), but to express ideological and symbolic values that shape reality. Luther, Calvin, and all the other great Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century often had them­selves represented wear­ing black, but this does not mean that they wore black garments on a daily basis. Rather, it signifies a basic moral precept of Protes­tantism, which is that the good Christian should wear sober and humble clothing. The need to dress arises from the Fall of Man, and so clothing is always a sign of sin and penance.

depicted by Calvinist painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—portraits, scapes,

land-

animals,

still

lifes. Less clear is the relationship

between

these texts and the use of colors. Is there really a Calvinist palette? A Protestant palette? Do these questions make sense? I would respond in the affirmative to all three. Protestant painters, it seems to me, used a palette composed of a colors were those of nature; he found “much grace” in the tender green tones of certain plants, and the loveliest color was naturally that of the sky.35 It is not difficult to see the link between these aesthetic recommendations and the subjects

few dominant and recurring features that give them a truly unique chromatic character: soberness, aversion to stark contrasts, somber tones, grisaille, monochromatic effects (notably with blues and grays), and a general chromatic harmony that is strictly observed. We could even say that certain Calvinist painters manifest a veritable chromatic puritanism, so assidu­ously

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do they apply these principles. This is the case with Rembrandt, for example, who practiced a kind of color asceticism based on a limited palette of dark and discreet tones—to such an extent that his work has even been called monochromatic. His evocation of the vi­brancy of light contrasts has extraordinary subtlety and an undeniable spiritual in­tensity.36 For many centuries, then, the moralistic discourse on art and color in Europe was marked by a striking continuity. From its or­ igins in Cistercian art in the twelfth century to grisaille miniatures and the anticolor movements of the early Reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Calvinist and Jansenist painting in the seventeenth century, the same idea was repeated over and over: color is luxury, artifice, and illusion. It is vain because it is mere matter; dangerous, because it deviates from the true and good; blameworthy, because it seduces and deceives; confusing, because it impedes clear recognition of forms and contours.37 Saint Bernard and Calvin employed almost exactly the same language, and their discourse reappeared again in the seventeenth

century during the interminable debates over drawing versus color.38 We will return to this conflict later. The Reformation’s fear of colorful art was hardly new, but it played a crucial role in the evolution of western color perception. On the one hand, it contributed to the separation of white and black from—and elevation over—the “true” colors; on the other, it sparked a “chro­ mophile” reaction among Catholic au­thor­­ities

51. Catholics and Protestants shown in Jean-Jacques Perissin, Judicial Assembly at the Augustine Monastery, Paris, 1559. Musée Calvin, Noyon, France. Images made during the wars of religion that show Catholics and Protestants together always depict the latter dressed in black or somber colors. Their severe dress contrasts with that of the Cath­olics, which is less reserved and more colorful: the Protestant uniform is opposed by “papist pomp,” even in parliaments, political assemblies, and civic meetings.

and participated, indi­ rectly, in the gen­ esis of Baroque and Jesuit art. For the Counter-­ Reformation, the church was the image of

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heaven on earth, and the dogma con­ cerning the divine’s real presence there justified any magnificent ornamentation inside the sanctuary. Nothing was too beautiful for the house of God: marble, gold, precious fabrics and metals, stained glass, statues, frescoes, resplendent paintings, and color everywhere. Everything, in other words, that had been rejected by the Reformation. With Baroque art, the Catholic church became once again the sanctuary of color it had been during the high Middle Ages, and blue yielded its dominant place to gold.

THE REFORMATION AND COLOR: CLOTHING The Protestant aversion to color exerted its deepest and longestlasting influence on customs related to clothing. This was largely because the great Protestant reformers tended to agree about such customs more unan­ imously than about color’s role in art, the church, and the liturgy. Minor differences in costume among the various sects sprang from the diverse preferences of moderates and radicals within various Protestant movements.

To varying degrees, the Reformation viewed clothing as a sign of shame and sin, with one of its principal functions being to remind post-­ Paradise humanity of its fallen state. For this reason, clothing should be sober and simple, an expression of humility adapted to nature and to human activities. All Protestant moral codes reflected a deep contempt for sartorial excess, makeup, jewelry, disguise, and changing or eccentric fashions. For Zwingli and Calvin, jewelry was impure, makeup obscene, and disguise an abom­ination.39 For Melanchthon, whose ideas were close to Luther’s, paying too much attention to the body and dress lowered man beneath the level of animals. For all of these reformers, luxury was a form of corruption. The only ornaments humanity should covet were those of the soul, which should be valued more than outer appearance. These principles yielded an extreme austerity in dress and demeanor—based on simple forms, discreet colors, and the absence of any accessories that would mask true appearance. The great reformers presented themselves as models of proper attire, both

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52. Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Christopher, c. 1520– 24, pen and indigo drawing. Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris; inv. 18476. Joachim Patinir (c. 1475–1524), one of the greatest Flemish landscape painters, used blues in a remarkable way. Distant backgrounds, always placed extremely high up in his compositions, are depicted with incomparably clear, delicate, and often transparent blue tones. These distant blues often echo others, darker and more somber, that are placed in the foreground and middleground. The result is a composition bathed in a subtle chromatic atmosphere, evoking serenity, the unreal, and the infinite.

in their daily lives and in the painted and engraved representations they had made of themselves. All were depicted in modest and even mournful costume. Most often their dark portraits are placed against bright blue backgrounds that evoke the heavens to which they aspired. The Protestants expressed this desire for simplicity and severity in a sartorial palette that eliminated red, yellow, pink, and orange,

as well as most greens or violets. Bright colors were considered dishonest. Subdued colors like black, gray, and brown, on the other hand, were used in abundance, as was white—a pure, dignified color recommended for children’s clothes (and sometimes for women’s). At first blue was allowed only in faded, grayed, or sober tones, but at the end of the sixteenth century it definitively joined the “honest” colors. Any multicolored costume that “clothes men like peacocks”

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53. Hieronimus Janssens, Ball on a Palace Terrace (detail), c. 1650. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France. In the 1640s bright colors begin to make a comeback in most European courts and wealthy milieus, after a long absence. The new style for women favored pinks, reds, yellows, and above all blues; only green was out of fashion. Blue’s popularity in women’s fashion increased until the end of the seventeenth century and lasted throughout the eighteenth.

(in Melanchthon’s phrase) was severely condemned—another reflection of the hatred of polychromy.40 The colors approved by Protestants differed little from those that medieval dress codes had permitted for many centuries. Monastic rules from the high Middle Ages, rules for the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, and late medieval sumptuary laws and dress codes all recommended or imposed sober and somber colors. These medieval codes were aimed not only at colors themselves, however. They were also concerned with the morality of color production and intensity: even dyes that yielded acceptable hues could be forbidden simply because the colors were too dense, too rich, or too concentrated. This concern over intensity was no longer an issue during the Reformation, or in other modern (that is, postmedieval) dress codes, which focus on the colors themselves—some are forbidden, others permitted. The dress codes and sumptuary laws proclaimed by most Protestant authorities are quite clear on this subject, whether one looks to Zurich and

Geneva in the sixteenth century, London in the mid-­ seventeenth, Pietist Germany a few decades later, or even Pennsylvania in the eighteenth. These regulations merit further study from an anthropological perspective.41 A broader analysis of them would help us to understand the long-­term evolution of various dress precepts and practices, and to distinguish the periods and areas in which dress codes were relaxed or intensified. Numerous Puritan and Pietist sects expressed their hatred of earthly vanities by increasing the severity and uniformity of their dress. Indeed, various Protestant groups considered imposing uniforms, a tendency visible as early as 1535 in the highly restrictive codes of the Münster Anabaptists.42 Such sects played an important role in shaping the image of a Protestant style that was austere, anachronistic, and fairly reactionary because of its hostility to other styles, to change, and to novelty. At the same time, they had a broader impact on European style by helping prolong the taste for somber clothing, by making white and black distinct from the other colors, and

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54. Brown and indigo wash drawing by Giacomo Ligozzi, c. 1610–20. Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris; inv. 5044. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, indigo wash was very popular, especially with Flemish landscapists who used it to create dreamlike distant backgrounds that seemed to reach to infinity. In Italy, on the other hand, certain artists used indigo wash drawing or paper tinted blue, in conjunction with red chalk or brown wash drawing, to amplify effects of distance and mass, giving their drawings the illusion of three-dimensionality.

by making blue the only honest color worthy of a good Christian. Given the far-­ reaching influence of the Reformation and the value systems that it helped establish in European culture, the historian should pay close attention to the long-­ term consequences of the Protestant rejection of color. It is certain that the reform attitude favored the distinction between black, gray, and white on the one hand and the “true” colors on the other—a split that had begun in the late Middle Ages. Along with printed books and engravings, the Reformation helped spread a new form of color perception that influenced daily life, cultural activity, and moral reflection, and that prepared the way for scientific experimentation and the discoveries of Isaac Newton (himself the member of an Anglican sect).43 The effects of the Protestant aversion to color were felt long after the initial upheavals of the sixteenth century and long after the scientific experiments of the seventeenth. It seems to me that they remained visible much nearer to our own time, especially during the second

half of the nineteenth century, when Western industry began to produce objects for mass consumption on a gigantic scale. The leaders of industrial capitalism had intimate ties to the Protestant culture of the day. In England, Germany, and the United States, the mass production of ordinary items brought with it moral and social debates fueled by Protestant ethics. I therefore wonder to what extent these ethical considerations influenced the restricted color choices for these products. Although industrial chemistry had for some time made possible the production of many items in various colors, it is striking to notice the number of products available only in black, gray, white, and blue: the first house­ hold appliances, the first fountain pens, the first typewriters, and the first cars, to say nothing of fabrics and clothing. It is as if the chromatic excess that industrial techniques could have allowed had been rejected by social morality (as was the case in the cinema for many decades).44 The most famous example of this color constraint in manufacturing is that of Henry Ford, who was extremely preoccupied with ethics: despite competition and

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the public’s clamor, he long refused on moral grounds to sell cars in any color but black.45

PAINTERS’ PALETTES Let us return to the seventeenth century. Beginning in the 1630s, the chromatic austerity characteristic of Protestant painters was appropriated by certain Catholic painters, especially those drawn to the reformist Jansenist movement. It has often been noted that Philippe de Champaigne’s palette became more restrained, less varied, and more somber in 1646, when he began to frequent the religious circle supported by the Port-­ Royal abbey in Paris, before undergoing a true conversion to Jansenism later on.46 Far from the exuberance of Peter Paul Rubens, or even the more moderate palette of Anthony Van Dyck, Champaigne’s colors came to resemble those of Rembrandt, but with a more pronounced presence of blue. His blue is subtle, at once deep and restrained, nuanced and dark. It is a moral blue. To study the palette of a painter from the past is not easy. One problem is that we see the

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Right 55. The Illuminated Mirror, manu­script treatise on painting by A. Boogert, Delft, 1692. Biblio­thèque Méjanes, Aix-enProvence, France; Ms. 1389. Many manu­scripts of painting have come down to us from the seventeenth century. Some, like this one compiled in Delft, have plates showing various colors and their different shades. Blue figures as the most important color in all of these manuals. The same is true in printed works produced for painters: as of the mid-sixteenth century, the chapters devoted to blue are more numerous and longer than those on any other color.

colors he placed on the canvas or panel as time has made them and not in their orig­inal state. Another is that we see paintings most often in museums—in a context and under lighting conditions that have no resem­ blance to the environment and light that the painter and his contemporary public knew. Obviously, electric light does not have the same prop­erties as light produced by cande­labra, candles, or oil lamps. Yet what art his­torian or critic remembers this when studying an old canvas? That said, it is less difficult to study the

Opposite 56. Philippe de Champaigne, Virgin of Sorrow, c. 1660. Musée du Louvre, Paris. In the first phase of his career, Philippe de Cham­paigne (1602–1674) was a celebrated painter, the favorite of Cardinal Richelieu, the clergy, and the nobility; he was even named the official painter of the French court. His palette during this period was bright, lively, and varied. However, once he was attracted to the reformist teachings of the Port-Royal abbey in Paris and “converted” to its doctrine of Jansenism, his palette became more somber. Blue shades became more prevalent in this second phase, as they permitted Champaigne to depict the play of light and color in fabric while preserving the austere and profoundly religious character of his images.

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palette of a seventeenth-­century painter than that of an eighteenth-­ century one. In the eighteenth century new practices in pigment making became more and more numerous, and the old workshop techniques of choosing, grinding, mixing, and applying colors were replaced or altered by new customs that could differ greatly from one workshop, or one painter, to another. Moreover, Newton’s discoveries and the growing importance of the spectrum in the late seventeenth century progressively transformed the color hierarchy: red was no longer situated halfway between

white and black; green was definitively seen as the mixture of blue and yellow; the idea of primary and complementary colors gradually became accepted, as well as that of warm and cool colors as we understand them today. The color universe at the end of the eighteenth century was no longer what it had been at the beginning. There had been no such profound mutations during the century of Rubens, Rembrandt, Jan Vermeer, and Philippe de Champaigne. The same was true for painters of southern

Europe: the seventeenth century saw little innovation in pigment production.47 The only real novelty was the use of Naples yellow, used until then only in pyrotechnics, which produced tones ranging from yellow ocher to lemon yellow. Contrary to what has sometimes been written about them, seventeenth-­century painters were very traditional in their use of pigments.48 Their originality and genius are to be found in the ways they applied and combined colors, and not in the materials they used. Take the example of Vermeer, who to my mind is the greatest painter of the century. His pigments are those used by other artists of the period. His blues, which are often quite vivid, were always produced from lapis lazuli.49 But because this pigment is very costly, it was used only for surface work; the sketch underneath was done with azurite, smalt (especially for skies), or less often with indigo.50 His yellows are derived from the traditional ochers (used for centuries), tin, and the new Naples yellow, which is a lead antimoniate (used by Italians before Northern painters,

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and with more finesse), which he used sparingly. He used few copper greens, since these were unstable and corrosive, but many earth greens (as did his contemporaries). During this period it was still relatively rare to produce green by mixing yellow and blue pigments. This practice existed, of course, but it was not until the eighteenth century that it became common, to the chagrin of several artists.51 Vermeer’s reds were made from vermilion, minium (in small quantities), cochineal lake, madder, brazilwood (for both pinks and oranges), and red ochers of all shades. There is nothing very original, then, about the chemical makeup of Vermeer’s palette as it has been revealed through laboratory anal­ ysis.52 It is only when we turn our attention from the pigments to the visual results that Vermeer’s originality truly stands out. His coloring is

more harmonious, more textured, more refined. This is clearly due to his incomparable handling of light, evoked through a subtle treatment of illuminated and dark zones, and due also to his particular methods of applying paint and finish. Art historians have said almost all there is to be said on these aspects of his genius. Few of them, however, have truly studied Vermeer’s colors themselves.

57. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Samson Telling a Riddle (detail), c. 1650. Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany. The contrast between the palettes of Rubens, a Catholic, and Rembrandt, a Calvinist, is quite striking: the former’s colors are vivid, sensuous, and diverse; those favored by the latter are restrained, severe, and at times almost mono­chromatic. Rembrandt (1606–1669) constructed his images with light, not with color. He nevertheless represents an extreme example of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century; other Dutch painters, Calvinists like their illustrious contemporary, did not hesitate to use vivid and contrasting colors.

There is no space for a detailed study here, but even a cursory discussion has to begin by highlighting the role of gray, and especially light gray, in Vermeer’s palette. The chromatic harmony of his paintings often depends on the presence of these grays. Vermeer was also a painter of subtle blue shades (which he often associated with white), and this more than anything else sets his colors apart from those of other seventeenth-­ century Dutch painters. Whatever their other talents and qualities, these artists never attained the subtle handling of blue that Vermeer mastered. Finally, as Marcel Proust reminds us, we cannot overlook the importance for Vermeer of yellow touches, which are sometimes given a pink tinge (like

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the famous yellow wall in the View of Delft) and sometimes made sharper. These yellows, whites, blues, and grays are the main components of an ineffable visual music that continues to enchant us and that makes Vermeer so different from other painters—not only the greatest of his century but perhaps the greatest of all time.

NEW CONSEQUENCES AND NEW CLASSIFICATIONS FOR COLOR In the works of seventeenth-­century painters, then, variations in palette are due more to their different methods of painting than to their use of different pigments. And as we have seen, these differences are also the result of diverse religious beliefs: not only can we speak of Catholic and Protestant painting, but within each of these are trends and intentions— Jesuit or Jansenist (for the former), Lutheran or Calvinist (for the latter)—that reflect the beliefs of particular groups. Yet the individual qualities of different painterly styles cannot be reduced simply to a religious affiliation. Style

was also intimately tied to a painter’s position in the interminable debates on drawing versus color, which dated from the Renaissance and kept artists and theorists arguing over the greater importance of one or the other to the painter’s art.53 Color’s adversaries did not lack good arguments. They considered it less noble than drawing because it was not a creation of the spirit but the simple product of pigments and other matter. Moreover, in their opinion colors were more or less a visual distraction, especially red, green, and yellow; blue was a “distant” color, however, and so was not criticized.54 Color, the critics felt, prevented the discernment of contours and the identification of forms, and for this reason lured the viewer away from the true and the good. It was a deceitful seducer, a form of artifice, falsity, and lies. Finally, color was dangerous because it was uncontrollable: it could not be pinned down with language, and it defied all generalization and analysis. It had to be controlled or restrained at all times.55 This last set of arguments, however, was contested with increasing frequency by men

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of science, who made the seventeenth century the great period of research into the nature and measurement of light. In 1666 Newton began his famous experiments with the prism, separating white light into colored rays and thereby discovering the spectrum. This new order of color contained neither black nor white, and thus science confirmed that in nature—as in long-­ held moral and social

practices—black

and

white

were

excluded from the color universe. The spectrum also altered the age-­old color hierarchy: in ancient and medieval systems, red had occupied the dominant position, but in the natural spectrum the center belonged to blue and green. Newton also demonstrated that, like light (whose transmission and dispersal produced it), color could be measured.56 From this moment co­lorimetry began to invade both the arts and the sciences. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century witnessed an explosion in chromatic scales, charts, and samplers that declared the numbers, laws, and norms defining color’s nature.57 From a scientific point of view, color from then on

seemed more or less mastered; as a result, it lost much of its mystery. In the early eighteenth century, most artists followed scientists in paying attention to color, and color began to win its debate with drawing.58 Now that it had been mastered and measured, color could fulfill functions in paintings and on objects that it had not had before. It could be used with confidence to classify, distinguish, valorize and devalorize, and create meaningful contrasts. Above all, color could be employed to show what drawing alone could not express. The clearest example of color’s new role was in the depiction of flesh, which Old Masters such as Titian had mastered.59 For those who believed in color’s primacy over drawing, this provided what seemed a definitive proof of color’s superiority. To their minds, the only painting worthy of the name depicted living things; since only color could give the aura of life to bodily creatures, there could be no painting without color. This was a powerful idea that remained current throughout the eighteenth century and was later developed at length by Hegel.60 No doubt

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it explains why the earliest color engravings were used for anatomical images: color was equated with carnality. In the seventeenth century color’s critics had attacked its superficiality; in the eighteenth, color’s ties to the flesh made it seem more real. The invention of color engraving by Jakob Christoph Le Blon in the early eighteenth century signaled the end of these preoccupations and transformations in the debate between drawing and color.61 Indeed, it ended for good the ancient debate and momentarily stopped the search by engravers and printers to create lifelike images in black and white.62 This technical and artistic innovation had effects beyond the realm of professional artists and artisans, however, because its success sprang from the new color system it employed. A broad public was introduced to this system, which broke radically with previous color classifications and prepared the way for the theory of primary and complementary colors.63 This theory was not yet definitively formulated (despite the practices of certain painters).64 Nevertheless, three colors began to dominate the others: red, blue, and yellow. Color

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58. Johannes Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (detail; see also p. 2), c. 1663–64. Rijks­museum, Amsterdam. The large exhibition devoted to Vermeer at The Hague in 1996 permitted new laboratory analysis of most of his works. The chem­ical analysis of his blue pigments (lapis, azurite, smalt) showed that Vermeer used materials not at all different from those of his contemporaries. Struc­tural analysis of the paint layers, however, revealed an extremely subtle application and a unique method of mingling large dabs of blue with minute touches of white, gray, and yellow.

engraving was crucial to this evolution because it employed three plates, each dyed with one of these colors; when superimposed and aligned properly on the page, they could produce all the colors in the spectrum. The color universe was no longer composed of six basic colors, as in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but three. Not only were white and black definitively excluded from the realm of color, but green—

59. Color mezzotint engraving by Jakob Christoph Le Blon, 1739. Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; inv. AA 4, rés. Unlike Louis XIV, who preferred red, Louis XV liked to dress in blue. The perfection of color engraving by Jakob Christoph Le Blon between 1720 and 1730 allowed engravers to represent the king dressed in his favorite color, which was also that of the French monarchy.

now viewed as the product of yellow and blue (which had never been the case in ancient cultures)—lost its status in the color hierarchy. It was no longer a basic, “primary” color. Colors had entered a new phase of their history.

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4 T H E FAVO R I T E CO LO R

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries blue at long last became a first-­rate, beautiful color— the color of Mary and royalty, and thus the rival of red. During the following four or five hundred years, these two colors shared the preeminent position over all others and in many spheres formed a partnership of con­ trast: red versus blue meant the festive versus the moral, the material versus the spiritual, the

near versus the far, the masculine versus the feminine. This relationship began to change, however, in the eighteenth century. The retreat of red tones from dress and daily life (which had begun in the sixteenth century) left more room for blue, which became not only one of the most common colors for fabrics and clothing but also the favorite color of European society. It has remained so up to the present

60. Samples of dye tints for silk, manuscript album from the Gobelins dye workshop, mid-­18th century. Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Lh 31, folio. Newton’s discoveries in the second half of the seventeenth century gave rise in the eighteenth to considerable interest in the problems of colora­tion. Experiments multiplied in the realms of both painting and dyeing, leading to the production of numerous color samplers. These show how color could be labeled, measured, regulated, and systematized.

 123

day, its popularity far surpassing that of the other colors. Blue’s victory in the competition among everchanging chromatic preferences had been prepared long in advance. Its rise had begun in the twelfth century with both its sanction by theologians and its valorization by artists, and that popularity had been reinforced by the skill of thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­ century dyers. In the fourteenth century blue had become the dominant heraldic color, and two centuries later its success was ensured again when its moral dimension was confirmed by the Protestant Reformation. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that blue’s vic­ tory was sealed. This process began with the expanded use of a remarkable natural color­ ant, indigo, which until then had not been freely used. After this came the discovery of a new artificial pigment, Prussian blue, which produced new blue tones for both painting and dyes. And finally, blue’s triumph came thanks to the appearance of a new color sym­ bo­lism, which enthroned blue as the worthiest color and assured its associations with progress, enlightenment, dreams, and liberty. The

Romantic movement and the American and French revolutions played an essential role in this last stage of blue’s triumph. Blue’s promotion did not end there, how­ ever. At the same time that it became the favor­ite color of artists, poets, and the majority of society, it retained its important place in the schemas and studies of scientists. Far from being a marginal color, as it had been in ancient and medieval color systems, blue now became central to new chromatic classifi­ cations spawned by the Newtonian revolu­tion, the adoption of the spectrum, and the theory of primary and complementary colors. Sci­ ence, art, and society henceforth operated on the same chromatic principles and made blue, instead of red, the principal hue. Blue has preserved and, indeed, amplified this role ever since.

BLUE AGAINST BLUE: THE WAR BETWEEN WOAD AND INDIGO At the end of the seventeenth century and all throughout the eighteenth, the vogue for new blue tones in fabric and clothing was due

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largely to the use of indigo, an exotic colorant that had long been known in Europe, but whose importation and use had been limited by many urban authorities in order to protect the local production of woad and the profit­ able trade that it supported. This was espe­cially true in France and parts of Ger­many where, until late in the eighteenth cen­tury, the use of indigo in dyeing was forbidden. As time went by, however, and indigo proved to be a cheaper and stronger dye than woad, the exotic plant supplanted the local product and eventually almost totally eliminated it. Indigo is produced from the leaves of a plant that exists in many varieties—none of which will grow in Europe. In India and the tropical regions of the Middle East and Africa, indigo grows in the form of bushes that rarely exceed two feet in height. The principal colorant, also called indigo, is very strong and found in the youngest leaves, near the tips of the branches. It produces a deep, solid blue that saturates silk, wool, and cotton fabrics without requiring a mordant to make it penetrate the fibers: the cloth is simply dunked in a vat of indigo and exposed to the air in order to fix the color. If

the tint is too pale, this operation is repeated several times. The only problem with colors obtained this way is that they sometimes look flat and may appear to have dark blotches or stripes. Earlier we noted how the new vogue for blue tones that began in the thirteenth century enriched woad producers and merchants. This “blue gold” assured the prosperity not only of many large cities (Amiens, Toulouse, Erfurt), but also of entire regions (Western Languedoc, Thuringia, Saxony, and the region around Albi) which became veritable “lands of milk and honey.”1 Considerable fortunes were built entirely on the production and sale of pastel (the concentrated paste extracted from woad). For example, Pierre de Berny, a merchant from Toulouse, became so rich thanks to this trade that in 1525 he was the guarantor of the enormous ransom demanded by Charles V for the liberation of Francis I (king of France, 1515–47), who had been taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia.2 This prosperity did not last forever, however. It was first threatened by the increasingly abundant importation of the “Indian stone”

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in the late Middle Ages. Italian merchants involved in extensive trade with the Orient took advantage of the aristocratic taste for blue cloths and garments and introduced this exotic colorant in the West. Indigo could produce a blue that was ten times darker than that of

woad, but it cost thirty to forty times as much. Indigo was available in Venice by the twelfth century, and it appeared in London, Marseilles, Genoa, and Bruges in the thir­teenth. At first, woad producers and pastel ven­­dors succeeded in slowing this impor­tation. They successfully

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demanded that royal and municipal authorities forbid dyers from using Indian indigo, which was threatening to ruin local woad production in many regions. Throughout the fourteenth century, statutes and regulations incessantly repeated this prohi­bition and threatened violators with extremely severe punishment.3 At times certain cities in Catalonia and Tuscany tolerated the use of indigo in silk dyeing, but this was far from typical. Nonetheless, the protectionist mea­sures did not keep the price of woad from falling, especially in Italy and Germany.4 Fortunately for the woad and pastel traders, the Turkish advance in central Asia and the eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth century disrupted Western trade with India and Asia. This gave a slight reprieve to the woad producers and pastel merchants. But it did not last long. Only a few decades later, Europeans exploring the tropical regions of the New World found new varieties of indigo that pro­ duced a colorant superior to those made from the Asian varieties. From then on, indigo was victorious. Despite severe protectionist poli­ cies by European rulers and attempts to demonize

the exotic product—described by various seventeenth-­century manuals as toxic, deceptive, false, pernicious, corrosive, and uncertain5—European woad was gradually replaced in dye workshops by American indigo. Spain was the country that most benefited from this transformation, for the indigo from its colonies became a source of considerable wealth. Elsewhere, vain attempts were made to estab-

61. A dye workshop at the Gobelins factory, c. 1765–70. Plate from the Encyclopédie drawn by Radel and engraved by Robert Benard. Bibliothèque Municipale, Versailles, France. The Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and other Enlightenment thinkers devoted a great deal of space to color matters as well as to dyeing professions and techniques. Many of the plates in the first edition show the dyeing workshops of the Gobelins factory (founded by Jean-­Baptiste Colbert in 1662 to promote and control the production of royal tapestries). The factory was built in the Saint-­Marcel area southeast of Paris, near a large stream called the Bièvre, which had been used by dyers for centuries.

lish trade barriers to protect woad. Italy, which imported more pastel than it produced, was the first to cave in: by the mid-­sixteenth century, indigo from the West Indies was being imported to Genoa in massive quantities, while Venice renewed its trade with the East seventeenth century, the Indies.6 In the mid-­ different trading companies of England and the Netherlands began to participate heavily in the indigo trade. Germany and France, the principal producers of woad, resisted longer but suffered financially as a result. Indigo from the New World (the Antilles, Mexico, the Andean regions) was produced by a system of cultivation that relied more and more heavily on slavery; for this reason, indigo’s production cost was lower than that

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62. An indigo plantation in the Antilles, c. 1660–70. Engraved by Sébastien Leclerc for Father Du Tertre’s treatise Manière de faire l’indigo (How indigo is produced) (Paris, 1667–71), 3 vols. Départe­ment des Estampes, Biblio­thèque Nationale de France, Paris. In the Ameri­cas the cultivation of indigo plants and the production of indi­go dye were carried out at low cost by a labor force composed largely of black slaves. As a result, dyeing with indigo cost much less than using Euro­pean woad.

of European pastel, despite the fact that it had to be transported across the Atlantic. The pastel merchants found it impossible to compete with the new product, especially since even the best pastels were weaker dyes than the most mediocre indigos. In France several royal edicts (in 1609, 1624, 1642) prohibited the use of indigo as a dye on pain of death; the same bans were pronounced in Nuremberg and several other German cities throughout the seventeenth century. Yet all were in vain. In 1672 Jean-­ Baptiste Colbert, the powerful controller general of finance, was obliged to give provisional authorization for the use of indigo in the cloth factories belonging to Abraham van Robbais in Abbeville and Sedan. This was the beginning of the end for woad. Despite the artificial price supports for woad provided by increasingly protectionist legislation, indigo permeated France, and three generations later the law was forced to recognize this fact: in 1737 the use of indigo throughout the kingdom was definitively approved. This enriched ports such as Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, but ruined Tou­louse, the pastel capital, and caused the disap­ pearance of an

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Right and opposite 63 and 64. Colored copper engravings of two dye plants. Indigo (plate 63), from Charles Middleton’s Com­plete System of Geography (London, 1777). Madder (plate 64), from a picture book for chil­dren by Friedrich Justin Bertuch (Weimar, Germany, 1792). The indigo plant is found in many varieties, none of which is indigenous to Europe. The indigo that grows in India and the Mid­dle East rarely exceeds six feet; the variety found in the New World is taller and more vigorous. The principal colorant—related to that found in European woad, but much stronger—is concen­trat­ed in the youngest leaves near the branch tips.

entire segment of society that had lived more or less directly off the production of pastel: cultivators and pro­cessers of woad, transporters, inspectors, and small-­ scale merchants. The same was true in Germany. Erfurt, Gotha, several cities in Thuringia, and all the villages around them were wrecked by the legalization of indigo dyeing, which was declared in 1737, the same year as in the French kingdom.7 The following year, woad production had disappeared from Germany and left the terrain wide open for indigo, that exotic product of redoubtable strength that Emperor Ferdinand III had called the Teufelsfarbe (devil’s color) as recently as 1654.8 In the second half of the eighteenth cen­tury, dyeing with indigo imported from the Americas and Asia became common through­out Europe. Its rise accompanied that of a new vogue for cotton cloths, which indigo colored easily without requiring a mordant; moreover, it provided a great variety of dark and solid blue tones that were very resistant to soap and sunlight. Woad production did persist in a few regions, but only because the maritime transport of indigo could

be disrupted by numerous forces, and so it was necessary to have a replacement colorant on hand in the event of a delay. Under Napoleon in France (1804–15), the industrial production of pastel was even relaunched in some re­gions because of the English naval blockade. This did not last long, however, and the hope of replacing indigo with pastel, which was nur­ tured by many intellectuals and entre­preneurs, was snuffed out.9

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At the end of the nineteenth century, the use of new artificial colorants caused a gradual decline in the cultivation and trade of dye plants, especially indigo. In 1878 the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer discovered a way to synthesize the colorant indigo chemically, and his process was perfected twelve years later by Heuman. From then on the firm of BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik) used this artificial indigo on an industrial scale, causing the irreversible decline of indigo plantations in India and the Antilles after World War I.

A NEW PIGMENT: PRUSSIAN BLUE In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dye industry was not the only one to make progress in the production of blue shades. Advances were made by painters as well, notably in dense and somber blue shades, leading to a new appreciation for dark blue nuances that until then had been hard to distinguish from black tones. For years painters had struggled with the difficulties of varying the tones and effects of the darkest blue shades. Not only

was it hard to produce these colors, but mixing, applying, and above all using them on large surfaces posed serious problems. Neither lapis lazuli, azurite, nor smalt—much less organic matter (woad, sun­ flowers, various berries)— could be used to produce the desired shades on

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with iron sulfate. One day, having run out of potassium, he went to buy some from a rascal pharmacist named Johann Konrad Dippel. Dippel sold him adulterated potassium carbonate. When Diesbach used it, it pro­ duced Above 65. Watercolor by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1780. Stiftung Weima­rer Klassik, Weimar, Germany. Goethe loved color but he was no more original in his preferences than the other poets and artists of his day: like them, he preferred blue and green. Dominant in nature, these hues were placed above all other colors by the Ger­man Roman­tics.

a large scale. The production of a blue that was both dark and reflective was possible only for accents and details. Indigo might have allowed painters to avoid these difficulties but, as we have just seen, in many countries its impor­ tation and use were highly controlled. More­ over, many painters—whether out of pride or ignor­ance—refused to use products meant for dyers.10

Opposite, bottom 66. Color wheel from Michel-­ Eugène Chevreul, Les Couleurs et leurs applica­tions aux arts industri­els à l’aide des cercles chromatiques (Colors and their appli­cations in the indus­ trial arts with the aid of color wheels) (Paris: J. B. Baillière & fils, 1864). The color wheel created by Chev­reul was one color system among many. None­­­theless, its “scien­tific” basis and the famous law of “simultaneous con­trasts” that accom­p­anied it ex­erted immense influence not only in the world of industry but also in art.

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All of this changed in the first half of the eighteenth century. Between 1704 and 1707 an artificial color was created in Berlin that yielded blue and green shades of a subtlety that had been lost for several centuries: Prussian blue. This color was discovered by accident. A certain Diesbach, a druggist and pigment maker, sold a lovely red that he obtained by making a precipitate composed of potassium and a cochineal decoction mixed

a magnificent blue instead of his usual red. He did not understand what had happened, but Dippel (who was a better chemist and a savvy businessman) quickly saw the potential profit to be made from this dis­covery. Dippel understood that it was the action of the impure potassium on the iron sulfate that had produced this splendid blue. After several experiments, he improved the chemical process and commercialized this new color under the name “Berlin blue.”11 For more than a decade Dippel refused to reveal the secret behind his invention, and this allowed him to amass a considerable for­ tune. But in 1724 the English chemist M. D. Wood­ward solved the riddle and published the composition of this new color.12 Berlin blue, which in the meantime had become Prussian blue, would be produced from then on throughout Europe. A ruined Dippel left Berlin for Scandinavia, where he became doc­ tor to the

Swedish king Frederick I. More inventive than ever, he concocted several dan­ gerous medicines that earned his expulsion from Sweden and a prison stay in Denmark. Dippel died in 1734, leaving the memory of an able chemist, but one who was also un­scru­pulous, scheming, and greedy. As for Diesbach—about whom we know nothing, not even his first name—he died shortly after making his lucky discovery, which would transform painters’ palettes for close to two centuries. Despite the tenacious rumors—which were perhaps due to Dippel’s bad repu­ tation— Prussian blue is not toxic and does not turn into prussic acid. On the other hand, it is not stable when exposed to strong light and it is broken down by alkalis (which means it cannot be used in certain kinds of paint). It is none­theless a very powerful color­ant, and when mixed with other pigments it can produce strong or translucent

tones. It was used extensively in the decorative arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to produce green wall­ papers. Later, the Impressionists and all artists who painted pleinair landscapes gave it a special veneration, despite its unstable nature. In the mid-­ eighteenth century, scientists and dyers sought to adapt the new Prussian blue to the techniques and constraints of the dyeing process, particularly in order to obtain more vivid and less costly blues and greens than those produced with indigo. Numerous learned societies and academies sponsored competitions to find a solution, but for many years the results were disappointing for both

Above 67. Color plate from Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Color) (Tübingen, Germany, 1810). Goethe placed blue and yellow at the center of his chromatic system. For him these were two “polar” colors, whose juxtaposition represented absolute harmony. Yellow, a weak color, is cold and passive; blue, a strong color, is active and luminous—the most beautiful and the most dynamic of colors.

blue and green tints.13 “Macquer blue” and “Köderer green,” for example, were two magnificent colors that appeared in the 1750s, but they bonded poorly with fabric and had no resistance to either light or soap.14 Another color, “Raymond blue,” which appeared during the Empire in France, was sturdier, especially on silk.15 Though commercialized for a while,

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68. Jean-­Louis Victor Viger, Josephine Visiting Her Husband at Luxembourg Prison in 1794. Châteaux de Mal­­maison et de Bois-­Préau, France. By the time the French Revolution erupted, blue had long been the most common clothing color for both men and women in high society. Far from damaging blue’s reputation, the events of 1789 to 1795 and the ideology that promoted them produced new styles that reinforced blue’s domi­nance and made it the most loved of the three “national colors.” Under the Directory, however, and above all during the Consulate and the Empire, the vogue for blue tones receded to the profit of blacks, whites, and greens. This eclipse did not last long, however.

it was eventually eliminated at the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of the improved use of indigo and, later, by the arrival of new synthetic aniline dyes.

ROMANTIC BLUE: FROM WERTHER’S COAT TO BLUES RHYTHM In the eighteenth century the vogue for new blue tones in dyes and paintings helped establish blue definitively as the favorite color throughout Europe, and especially in Ger­many, England, and France. In the 1740s, blue was one of the three most commonly worn colors in these countries (along with gray and black), especially at court and in town. One fact in particular reveals the extent of this new fashion, which was linked in part to the newly permitted use of indigo by dyers. Until the eighteenth century, sky blue or light blue tones had rarely been worn in the upper levels of society. These colors were associated with peasant clothes dyed artisanally with mediocre woad, which penetrated cloth fibers poorly and faded under the effects of sunlight and soap. These blues

were light, certainly, but also grayish and bland.16 When the nobility and the wealthy wore blue, as they often had since the thirteenth century, the shades were denser, more somber, and more solid. In the first half of the eight­ eenth century, however, a new fashion for light blue tones gradually took hold at court, first for women and then for men. After mid­century this style spread to the nobility and then to the wealthy segments of the bour­ geoisie. It was deeply anchored in certain countries (such as Germany and Sweden), where the wearing of light blue persisted until the early nineteenth century. This fashion marked a rupture with the past. Moreover, it was confirmed and indeed amplified by an increase in the number of words for shades of blue in many languages. The lexicon for light blues had been relatively limited, but in the mid-­ eighteenth century it grew considerably, as the dictionaries, ency­ clo­ pedias, and dyeing manuals of the period demonstrate.17 In French, for example, around 1765 there existed twenty-­four common terms

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epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in Leipzig in 1774: “It was a diffi­cult decision for me to abandon my simple blue dress coat in which I first danced with Lotte, but it was becoming quite thread­bare. Besides, I had had one made exactly like it, even to the collar and facings, and another yellow vest and trousers to go with it.”20 The novel’s extraordinary success and the 69. Daniel Chodowiecki, Werther, etching, 1776. No book, no work of art, no event seems to have had greater influence on dress than Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774. For an entire decade, young people throughout Europe enjoyed dress­ing in the famous blue frock coat and yellow breeches that the hero wore the first time he met Char­lotte. This coat was often depicted, but certain artists mixed things up and switched the colors, giving Werther a yellow coat and blue pants, as in this picture.

for the blues produced by dyers (there had only been thirteen a century earlier), and out of these twenty-­four, sixteen denoted light blue shades.18 During the eighteenth century certain French words even changed meaning, such as the word pers, which in Old and Middle French denoted a flat and somber blue but later described a brighter, more reflective shade close to gray or violet.19 The literature of the Enlightenment and, later, of the early Romantic period echoed the new fashion for blue tones. The most notable example of this is Werther’s famous blue-­and-­ yellow outfit, which Goethe describes in his

“Wer­thermania” that followed launched a fash­ ion for the blue coat “à la Werther” through­­out Europe. Into the 1780s, numerous young people imitated the costume of the amorous and desperate hero, wearing a blue frock coat or jacket with a yellow vest and breeches. There was even a robe “à la Charlotte” in white and blue with a bow and pink ribbons.21 Here the historian has a remarkable example of the kinds of back-­and-­ forth relationships that have existed between literature and society from the Middle Ages to the present: Goethe gave his hero a blue coat because blue was in style in Germany in the 1770s; but the success of his book reinforced this fashion, spread it throughout Europe, and caused it to leap from the realm of dress into

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the arts of painting, engraving, and porcelain. The case of Wer­ther’s coat proves once again that the imagi­ nation and literature play an important role in shaping social realities. Goethe’s connection to the color blue was not limited to The Sorrows of Young Werther. Not only does blue often appear in his youthful poetry—as in that of his contem­poraries—but it is above all the keystone of his color theories. Very early on, in fact, Goethe was inter­ested in color and in the writings devoted to it by artists and thinkers. It was only after his return from Italy in 1788, however, that he decided to work on it seriously and that he planned a complete treatise on color; this was not intended to be the work of an artist or poet, but a veritable scientific study. For Goethe, color was a living, human phenom­e­non that could not be reduced to mathe­ mati­ cal formulas, and by this point he was already convinced, instinctively, that Newton’s theory was wrong. Challenging the New­tonians, he was the first to reintro­duce the human being into the problems of color and to dare to declare that a color that no one sees is a color that does not exist.22

Goethe’s treatise, Theory of Color, was pub­ lished in Tübingen in 1810, but he added to and corrected it until his death in 1832. In the didactic section of his work, the most original chapter is perhaps the one on “physi­ological” colors, in which Goethe argues forcefully for the  subjective and cultural nature of per­cep­ tion, an idea that was almost completely novel at the time. His discussions of the physics and chemistry of colors, on the other hand, are lightweight and flawed compared to what oth­ ers knew in the period. That weakness greatly undermined the success of his book, provoking either virulent criticism or disdain­ful silence from philos­ophers and scientists.23 These attitudes are unjust, but they ultimately can be traced back to Goethe himself and the way he wrote his book. Instead of creating a work based on his re­markable poetic intuition and his feeling that color always has an im­portant anthro­pological dimension, he wished to write a learned trea­ tise that would be recog­ nized as such.24 That said, Goethe’s book is of great in­terest to our study because of the important place

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  137

70. Colored postcard, c. 1905. Werther’s blue coat and the blue flower dear to the poet Novalis made blue the Romantic color par excellence. Long after the Romantic movement had ended, blue—especially light shades with a touch of gray—remained the color of melancholy and suffering. It had already fulfilled this function in medieval symbolism and has continued to do so in modern times with the concept of the blues in music.

that it accords to blue, which along with yellow is one of the poles of Goethe’s color sys­ tem. He saw in the juxtaposition (or the fusion) of these two colors the absolute form of chromatic harmony. From a symbolic point of view, yellow constituted the negative pole (because it is a passive, weak, and cold color), while blue was always charged with positive associations and represented the opposite pole (because it is an active, warm, and luminous color).25 Here again Goethe was entirely a pro­ duct of his age. His personal tastes dis­tanced him from red and attached him to blue and green: the former for dress, the latter for wall hangings and furniture. He never missed the opportunity to point out that in nature blue and green are frequently associated and that man should always seek to imitate the colors of nature.26 This opinion was hardly original; it permeated the Romantic sensibility, which devoted special attention to color symbolism. The Romantic movement brought color into literature in a way never before seen. Of course, references to color had not been completely

absent from literary creation before the first generation of Romantics, but they were relatively rare. In the 1780s, however, they began to appear in abundance. Among the colors deployed by novelists and poets, one dominated all the others by the range of its nuances and the variety of its virtues: blue. The Romantic movement had a special devotion to this color, particularly in Ger­ many. In the German tradition the exemplary, if not primary, text for the adoration of blue was the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis, published posthumously in 1802 by his closest friend, Ludwig Tieck. This novel recounts the legend of a medieval troubadour in search of a little blue flower he has seen in a dream, which represents pure poetry and the ideal life. The success of this little blue flower was considerable—much greater than that of the novel itself. Along with Werther’s blue coat it became the emblem of German Romanticism.27 Indeed, we could say that this flower became the symbol of Romanticism in general, so frequently were it and its color imitated

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outside Germany by poets writing in all the languages of Europe.28 Everywhere blue was adorned with the poetic virtues. It be­ came, or became once again, the color of love, melancholy, and dreams, as it had been (more or less) in medieval poetry, where the play on “ancolie” (a blue flower) and “mélancolie” was already present.29 What’s more, the blue of poets was reconnected with the blue of pop­ular expressions and proverbs, which for a long while had labeled dream images and fairy tales as “blue tales,” and in which the “blue bird” was an ideal, rare, and unreachable being.30 The Romantic and melancholy blue, that of pure poetry and infinite dreams, has traversed the decades but along the way been somewhat distorted, darkened, and trans­ formed. In Germany it is still present in the expression blau sein, which means “to be drunk”—the German tongue using blue to evoke the clouded mind and numbed senses of one who has drunk too much alcohol (French and Italian use references to gray and black to say the same thing). By the same token, the

English expression “the blue hour” denotes the end of the work day, when men (and some­ times women), instead of going directly home, spend an hour in a bar to drink and forget their troubles. This link between alcohol and the color blue was already present in medieval traditions: numerous collections of dye recipes recommend using an extremely drunk man’s urine as a mordant to help woad penetrate deeply into the fabric.31 Finally, and above all, we must note the connection between the blue of the German Romantics and the blues, a popular musical form of African American origin character­ized by a slow four-­ four rhythm that expresses a melancholy mood.32 The Anglo-­American word blues—which numerous languages have adopted unchanged—comes from “blue devils,” a term for melancholy, nostalgia, the doldrums—sentiments that French instead associates with another color in the phrase “black ideas.” The “blues” are also an echo of the expression “to be blue,” which is equiva­lent to the German alles schwarz sehen, the Italian vedere tutto nero, and the French broyer du noir.

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FRENCH BLUE: FROM COATS OF ARMS TO THE COCKADE The end of the eighteenth century saw not only the birth of Romantic, melancholy, and dreamy blue throughout Europe, but also that of national, military, and political blue. The latter blue was born in France, where it has preserved this triple dimension for more than two centuries. Over the centuries blue became the color of France. Today all the sports teams that represent the nation in international compe­ tition play in blue jerseys and outfits (though we should note that France does not have the monopoly on this athletic and national blue).33 France is often emblem­atically associ­ated with this color in domains far removed from sport, though this is perhaps more the case abroad than in France itself. This “blue France” has deep historical roots. It is most noticeable, of course, in the tricolor flag. Blue is perceived as the flag’s most important color because it is closest to the pole (moreover, when there is no wind blue

is the only color visible). White and red are certainly national colors as well, but the blue of the flag—born during the Rev­olution—seems more representative of the French nation. Blue is the color of consensus, while white and red today evoke opinions and ideologies that are more radical and polar­izing. Moreover, unlike red and white, the blue of the tricolor flag seems to establish a link with an older color, the blue of the royal crest—d’azur semé de fleurs de lis d’or—that appeared in the twelfth century. Over the centuries, then, there was a continuity of “French” blue (as there was for English red): this azur of the royal arms became in the thirteenth century the color of the monarchy and then, in the late Middle Ages, that of the state and government and finally, in the modern era, the color of the nation. Thus blue was already well established as the color of France before the Revolution, but it was more the color of the king and the state than of the nation. It was the Revolution that definitively made blue the national color. It is worthwhile looking at this evolution a bit more closely and, in particular, studying the

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  141

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birth of the tricolor cockade (a rosette worn as an ornament or badge) and the tricolor flag.34 The word cocarde (translated as cockade

71. The Le Sueur brothers, Planting a Tree of Liberty, 1790. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. In the days after the taking of the Bastille, the tricolor cockade—symbol of patriotism and adherence to the new ideology—enjoyed stunning success. During the summer and fall of 1789 it could be seen everywhere: its three colors spread to scarves, belts, ties, sashes, clothing, banners, and flags carried by patriots.

in English) is rather strange. Originally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it desig­ nated a hair style or hat in the form of a cock’s head or comb. Then, by a metonymic extension, certain badges and accessories that were placed on hats, or on clothing or other objects, were called cocardes in the eight­eenth century. Thus the use of cockades pre­ dates the Revolution. During the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, they were made of cloth, felt, or paper; shaped like circles or bows, they could be joined with hanging ribbons, gar­ lands, or rigid bands. Though often purely decorative, they could also serve to express an opinion, signal adherence to a group or insti­ tution, or even announce loyalty to a person, family, or dynasty. They were used especially by soldiers, for whom the cockade was a way to indicate their corps or regiment. These military badges were much liked by civilians, who adopted, imitated, and trans­formed them. Even women used them, not on their hats but on their dresses or as acces­sories.

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In the period just before the Revolution, then, the use of cockades was already wide­ spread, at least in the upper classes and the military. The fact that they flourished in the months of June and July 1789 is therefore not surprising, since they already had a mean­ingful place in the culture. And the meanings they conveyed were manifold: belief in or hostility toward revolutionary ideas; attach­ment to the king, queen, or princes; or affiliation with various circles, clubs, or opin­ions. Certain cockades reproduced the colors of the liveries, crests, or emblems of different nobles, communities, or political bodies: white was the color of the king; black, that of the house of Austria (from which Marie Antoinette came); blue and red, those of the Parisian militia; blue and white, those of the French Order of Cincinnatus (composed of French officers who had fought for the independence of the young United States of America, and to which the marquis de Lafayette belonged). Green, paradoxically, was the color of both Louis XV’s grandson Comte d’Artois and of Jacques Necker, the reformist director general of finance whose dismissal by court

reactionaries on July 11, 1789, set in motion the disturbances that led to the storming of the Bastille. On July 12, 1789, in the wake of Necker’s dismissal, a young and unknown lawyer named Camille Desmoulins gave two speeches in the gardens of the Palais-­Royal, which had important consequences and have remained famous to this day. At the end of the second speech, he invited patriots to take up arms against the “aristocratic conspiracy” and to wear a cockade as a sign of their identity. He asked the crowd to choose the badge’s color. “Green, the symbol of hope,” came the response. Immediately the speaker tore a leaf from the nearest tree at hand, a linden, and fixed it to his hat. The crowd did the same. Later that evening, green ribbons sewed to hats replaced the leaves and became the sym­bol of the Third Estate, in preparation for in­sur­rection. The following day, however, it was learned that green—the color of advancing Liberty—was also that of the detested Comte d’Artois. Reactions varied between disillusionment and hesitation, between keeping the color and renouncing it. On July 14, the Bastille was

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seized by mili­ tants, many of whom wore no cockades; those who did, wore a variety of colors including green, blue, red, blue and red, and blue and white. Despite what has sometimes been written, the tricolor cockade did not yet exist on July 14, 1789. It was created in the following days (perhaps even the day after), under circum­stances that remain poorly understood, despite (or because of) the numerous and con­tra­dictory contemporary accounts. In his memoirs, Lafayette declared that it was he who had the idea, on July 17 at the Paris town hall, to combine in a single tricolor design the royal white with the blue and red of the National Guard, which had been founded four days earlier to maintain order in Paris. His account, however, must be read with caution.35 Jean-­Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris, had already claimed that he was father of the tricolor cockade.36 Others who witnessed the events of July 17, 1789, stated that it was the king himself who, in a conciliatory gesture, attached the blue and red ribbons that he had been given at the

town hall to the white cockade that he already wore. It is unlikely, however, that Louis XVI would have gone to the town hall, seat of the revolutionaries, wearing the white cockade that symbolized his military author­ity over the royal army—this would have been seen as a provocation.37 On the other hand, it is certain that the first tricolor cockades appeared in the week following the taking of the Bastille.

72. French school, October 5, 1789, 18th century. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Whether used on scarves, ribbons, or badges, the tricolor combination was not standardized for a long time. Sometimes blue was at the center, sometimes it was on the edge. Until 1794 the same was true on tricolor banners and flags: sometimes blue was placed nearest the mast, sometimes it was replaced there by red.

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Much ink has been spilled in the debate over the meaning of these colors. While it is true that in the early summer of 1789 white was the color of the king, his flag, and his cockade, it is also the case that the blue-­and-­red combination was only weakly linked to the city of Paris. Red and a dark brownish-­ red shade were used much more often to signify the city and its dignitaries than were red and blue. Though the tricolor cockade did not exist before July 15 or 17, 1789, the union of red, blue, and white had nevertheless been popular for at least a decade in many media, and especially on textiles. These were the colors of the American Revolution and of the flag of the young United States of America, whose side France had taken in the war for inde­pendence from the British. In the late 1770s, those in France and other countries of the Old World who adhered in some way to the independence movement declared their beliefs by wearing the three colors. They were an important part of dress fashions of the period, even at court.38 The crucial role played by the American Revolution in launching the vogue for tricolor

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symbols may be clear, but it remains to be clarified why the revolutionaries of the American colonies chose in the years 1774–75 a red, white, and blue flag—in other words, a flag with the same colors (though combined differently) as those of the British flag against which they fought to gain their independence. In fact, what we have here is probably an “anti-­flag,” with the same colors as the enemy flag but different designs and meanings. It is easy to imagine that if the British flag had not been red, white, and blue, that of the Amer­ ican Revolution would not have been either,

73 and 74. Watercolors showing early designs for the first British flag, c. 1604. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Ms. 2517. Like the French flag, the British is a tricolor design, but it is much older. Its origins go back to the early seventeenth century, when King James VI of Scotland became Ja­mes I, king of England, at the same time, uniting the two kingdoms under a single rule. At the time, the Scottish banner (a white X on a blue background) and the banner of England (a red cross on a white background) were combined, leading in 1606 to the creation, after various attempts, of the ancestor of the current British flag—the famous “Union Jack.” The red X of Ireland was added in 1801.

and therefore neither the French Revolution, nor the Empire or Republic that followed, would have used these colors. To understand the American and French flags, then, we must go back to the origins of the British flag, which was already red, white, and blue in the early seventeenth century—which had, in fact, featured these colors since 1603, when James VI Stuart, king of Scotland, became king of England as well, thereby uniting the two king­ doms. To signify this, he had the blue-­ and-­white Scottish banner combined with the

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red-­ and-­ white English banner into a single tricolor design. Therefore, if James Stuart had not ascended to the English throne in the early seventeenth century, the French flag—born two centuries later—would perhaps not have been red, white, and blue.39

FRENCH BLUE: FROM THE COCKADE TO THE FLAG Let us return to the days following the fall of the Bastille and the summer of 1789, when the tricolor cockade—the symbol of fervent patriotism—had tremendous success. It could be seen everywhere, and its three colors spread to scarves, belts, ties, clothing, badges, and flags worn and carried by patriots. On June 10, 1790, the Constituent Assembly declared the tricolor cockade a national symbol, and for the celebration of the Federation a few weeks later, the Champ-­de-­Mars was completely decorated in red, white, and blue. These were henceforth “the three colors of the Nation.” Over the following months the cockade acquired an increasingly political meaning, how­ ever. This trend was intensified by the

fact that counterrevolutionaries opposed the tricolor badge by wearing and displaying royal white cockades; they even managed to place them in the trees of liberty planted to celebrate the new order. On July 8, 1792, the legislative assembly decreed that all men had to wear the tricolor cockade. The convention made the same declaration for women on September 21, 1793. To be caught without a cockade meant, in the best case, eight days in prison, and whoever was caught tearing down a tricolor cockade was immediately handed over to the firing squad. This tyrannical fix­ation on the revolutionary badge did not last, however. After the fall of Robespierre and, above all, with the rise of the Directory, the cock­ade was no longer obligatory (except when going to the theater). Under the Consul­ ate, only soldiers continued to wear it. Between 1790 and 1812 the three national colors became more and more common on official banners and flags. This evolution occurred slowly, with hesitant steps, mis­under­stood signals, and much confusion. The design of marine flags was decided first. In the autumn of 1790

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75. The National Guard, c. 1900. Musée de la Révo­lution Française, Vizille, France. In his memoirs, the marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) declared that it was he who had the idea of com­bining in a single tricolor design the king’s white with the blue and red of the Nation­al Guard. His claim should be treated with care, but it is solidly established that the Parisian National Guard wore a blue uni­form with red cuffs and collar. This blue imitated that of the King’s elite regiment, the French Guards, many of whom joined the National Guard in early summer 1789. Often just a thin line separated monarchical blue and revolutionary blue.

the Constituent Assembly decided that warships and merchant vessels would henceforth display a flag with three vertical bands of red, white, and blue—red would be closest to the pole and the central white band would be slightly wider than the other two.40 The three bands were divided vertically so that the new national flag would not be confused with that of the Dutch. Since the seventeenth century, the marine flag of the Netherlands had been a tricolor divided into three horizontal bands of, from top to bottom, red, white, and blue—that is, three bands running parallel to the long side of the rectangle. It was in order to avoid confusion (which came close to resulting at first) that the vertical formula was chosen for the French flag.41 We should note in passing that in the eighteenth century many ships displayed flags of red, white, and blue (with various geo­metric figures), and that in the flags of the different Western countries blue is far and away the most common color. Three and a half years later—on February 15, 1794—the National Convention made an important decision concerning the definitive

form of the French flag. It decreed that for “all the vessels of the Republic” the flag would henceforth be the same: three vertical bands of equal width (which was not the case in 1790) with blue near the pole (instead of red as be­fore). The shades of this new flag’s colors were not specified (and never have been). These were abstract, intellectual, and “heral­dic” col­ ors, as are the colors for most other national flags (there are exceptions, however). The blue of this flag can be light or dark, the red more or less pink or orange—such nuances have no importance and no meaning. This has given a great deal of chromatic lib­erty to the many painters who have depicted, and continue to depict, the French flag. In any case, when it hangs outdoors and is subject to the effects of the weather, the tricolor flag presents different and changing colors. Over time this new maritime flag became the French flag.42 Under the Empire, it waved over the Tuileries palace and several other official buildings, and in 1812 it replaced the old army flags decorated with diamonds and triangles. One tradition claims that the initial

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design for this new national flag was conceived by the painter Jacques-­Louis David, but there are no documents or drawings that confirm this hypothesis. Moreover, the flag decreed in 1794 made only minor modifi­cations to the one designed in 1790, which David had played no role in creating. The flag of 1794 would be the

red flag was once again the official flag of the state. It has remained so without interruption up to the present day, despite being threatened twice: by the red flag of 1848, and by the white one of 1873.43

final form. During the two periods of monarchi­cal restoration in the nineteenth century, the royal white cockade and flag reappeared and were the only emblems authorized. The tricolor flag was dropped for fifteen years (1814/15–­ 1830), but came back to the forefront during the political upheaval of 1830. It flapped over the barricades during the insurrection of July 27–29, and it contributed to the victory of the Parisian rebels. The tricolor flag was such a potent symbol that on August 1, Louis-­Philippe d’Orléans (who would soon be crowned king but at that point was only the lieutenant general of the kingdom) ordered that France once again fly “her national colors,” the day after receiving from the aged Lafayette a tricolor flag in a ceremony of symbolic importance. The blue, white, and

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The Red Flag The red flag has never been a symbol of France, but it very nearly became one at two moments in French history: the first, and most successful, was on Febru­ary 25, 1848, the famous day of insur­rection during which the poet Alphonse de Lamartine “saved” the tricolor flag in the nick of time; the other, the spring of 1871 during the Paris Commune. Under the ancien régime, the red flag was far from an emblem of insurrection. On the contrary, it was a warning signal and a symbol of order. The red flag, or a large piece of red fabric, was used to warn the populace of imminent danger and, at a public rally, signaled the crowd to disperse. Over time, this flag became associated with laws against assembly and sometimes even with martial law. Thus in October 1789 the Constituent Assembly decreed that in the event of public disturbances, municipal officers should call for armed intervention “by displaying a red flag from the principal window of the town hall and by carry­ing it in all the streets and inter­sec­tions”; when the red flag was shown, “all assemblies become crimi­nal acts and should be dispersed with force.” The red flag was becoming a more and more threatening symbol. Its his­ tory underwent a twist on July 17, 1791. The king, while trying to escape France, had been arrested at Varennes and taken back to Paris. On the Champ-­ de-­ Mars, near the Altar of the Fatherland, a “republican petition” was placed de­man­ding

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the king’s abdication. Many Parisians came to sign it. The crowd was agitated, the gathering seemed to be turning into a riot, and public order was endangered. The mayor of Paris, Jean-­Sylvain Bailly, quickly had the red flag raised. Before the crowd had time to disperse, however, the National Guards fired, without the order to do so having been given. About fifty people were killed, and they soon became martyrs of the Revolution. The red flag “stained with their blood” became, by a kind of inversion of values, that of the oppres­ sed and rebelling peoples ready to rise against all tyrannical regimes. The red flag would play this role throughout the whole Revolution whenever there were riots or popular revolts. It was joined with the red cap of the sansculottes and the most extremist patriots. Little by little, the red flag became the emblem of those called “socialists”; later on, and later still, of the “far left.” The red flag reappeared on center stage during the Restoration, notably in 1818 and 1830, and then under the July Monar­ chy. It was present on the bar­ricades in 1832 (in Les Misérables, Victor Hugo devotes several impassioned pages to it) and again in 1848. On February 24 of that year, it was brandished by the Parisian insurgents who proclaimed the Republic. On the 25th it accompanied them to the town hall, where the provisional government met. One of the insurgents, speaking for the

crowd gathered outside, demanded the official adoption of the red flag, “symbol of the misery of the people and sign of the rupture with the past.” This declaration reflected the desire to make this a lasting revolution (unlike that of 1830). In these tense moments two conceptions of the Republic confronted each other: the one was Jacobin and dreamed of a new social order — its symbol was the red flag; the other was more moderate and hoped for reforms but not an over­ turning of society—its symbol was the tricolor. It was then that Lamartine, a member of the provisional government and minister of foreign affairs, made two famous speeches and drew public opinion back to the tricolor flag: “The red flag . . . is a banner of terror . . . that has been around only the Champ-­de-­ Mars, but the tricolor flag has been around the world, with the name, glory, and liberty of the fatherland. . . . It is the flag of France, the flag of our vic­torious armies, the flag of

76. The original red flag of 1793 (restored). Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, France. The insurrection symbolism of the red flag was born on the Champ-­de-­Mars in July 1791. Though flown alongside the tricolor flag in 1793 and again in 1830, the red flag opposed the tricolor during the 1848 revolution and became, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the primary symbol of numer­ous revolutions—first in Europe and then throughout the world.

our triumphs, which must be raised before Europe.” Even if he embellished his discourse when writing his Mémoires, Lamartine saved the tricolor flag that day. Twenty-­three years later, the red flag invaded the streets of Paris once again and was raised by the Commune over the entry to the town hall. Red and insurrectionist Paris, however, was defeated by the tricolor troops of

Versailles, Thiers, and the Assembly. The tricolor flag became the flag of order and legitimacy; the red flag, that of the defeated populace, of socialist and revolutionary parties, and several decades later that of communist parties and regimes. For a long time now, its history has been no longer national but international.

Above 77. Jean-­Victor Schnetz, Combat at the Town Hall of Paris, July 28, 1830. Musée du Petit-­Palais, Paris.

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The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  153

The White Flag In the late Middle Ages, white was already a royal color in France. White was not part of the king’s arms, d’azur à trois fleurs de lis d’or, nor did it appear on the ceremonial robes he wore for his anointing. Nevertheless, it played an im­por­­tant role in the staging of mo­ narchical majesty, as is evidenced by the few solemn occasions where the king appeared dressed in white (as at assem­ blies of the Order of Saint Michael, for example). Moreover, certain uncommon crests — such as the d’argent semé de fleurs de lis d’or (a “silver” field with scattered gold fleurs-­ de-­ lis) — in which the back­ ground is white, were sometimes attributed to the French kingdom or to France personified as a female allegor­ical figure. During the ancien régime, royal white became above all the color of the king’s military power. In army symbolism it was the color of the king and of the military leaders who com­manded in his name (France was not the only country to follow this practice). These officers wore white scarves and plumed helmets, and some were en­dowed with a “cornette” of the same color. This latter object was a pointed standard given to different cavalry com­panies; it was often white with gold fleurs-­de-­lis for the first company of each regiment and recalled the royal cornette, which was entirely white and represented the unit in which the king himself fought. This royal standard was carried by a person designated especially

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for the position, the “porte-­cornette.” At the battle of Ivry in 1590, during the Wars of Religion, Henri IV—who had not yet been anointed but was already considered the legitimate king by much of the realm — saw his wounded standard-­bearer evacuated from the battlefield. Pointing to the white plume on his hat, he is said to have made this famous (but perhaps apocryphal) declaration: “If you lose the cornette, here is my rallying sign.” When the Revolution erupted, white was therefore a royal color (among others) and a mark of com­ mand. It was between 1789 and 1792 that this color increasingly became that of the counterrevolution. This role for white may have been started at a ban­quet at Versailles on October 1, 1789. It is said that while the king’s body­guards were feasting that day, they trampled on the tricolor cockades, which had be­come very popular since the events of July. In place of these they hung white ones that several ladies of the court distributed. This event caused a great stir among the populace and was one of the reasons that a crowd of Parisians marched to Versailles on Oct­ober 5 and 6, besieging the chateau and eventually taking the king and queen back to Paris. From that point on, the counter­revolutionaries strove to replace every tricolor cockade they found with a white one. After the fall of the monarchy, the war of cockades was joined by an increasingly bloody war of flags. In

the west of France, the “Catholic and royal” armies fought under white cock­ades and flags. The latter were often decorated with gold fleurs-­de-­ lis or the image of Christ’s sacred heart, to which Louis XVI — imprisoned in the Temple in Paris — was particularly devoted. White cockades and flags— and even white armlets, for officers — were also used in the various royalist armies formed by those who had fled France and later returned. White had become the color of the counterrevolution, opposing both the blue of republican soldiers and the tricolor cockade and national flag. The white flag returned to France during the Bourbon Restoration in 1814/15. Its substitution for the tricolor flag was not without discord and incident. Many officers, soldiers, func­ tionaries, cities, and political groups that had recognized Louis XVIII would have liked the tricolor flag to remain next to the white one. The Bourbons did not want this, however, and their decision was probably a political mis­take. What’s more, they somewhat disfigured the white flag of the ancien régime, which had been purely white, by covering it with gold fleurs-­ de-­ lis and royal crests under the Bourbon Restora­tion, as did the royalists during the decades following the 1830 revolution. Contrary to former customs, this weak­ ened the symbolic force of the white cloth. (It is true that since the eigh­teenth century the blank white flag has also

become, in the context of war, a sign of surrender for all the armies of Europe.) After the tumult of July 1830 and Louis-­Philippe’s ascent to the throne, the tricolor became, once again and defi­nitively, the flag of France. The white flag was exiled once again, this time for a long while. Several decades later, between 1871 and 1873, the obstinate rejection of the tricolor flag by Comte de Chambord prevented the return of the monarchy in France. For this grandson of Charles X, the only legitimate flag was the white one, in whose folds he hoped to “bring order and liberty to France.” He felt that Henri V (as he would be called if crowned) could not “abandon the white flag of Henri IV . ” In fact, two different conceptions of France’s future were locked in struggle during this period, symbolized by two flags that themselves had been fighting for a long time. The white flag represented monarchy by divine right; the tricolor flag, popular sovereignty. In 1875 the Republic was proclaimed (by one vote), Comte de Chambord went into exile, and the white flag remained that of the royalists. 78. Jean-­Joseph Dassy, Louis-­François Perrin, Count of Précy, General in Vendée, 1827. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Cholet, France. Under the ancien régime the white flag, symbol of military command, was truly monochromatic. During the Restoration, however, it was often decorated with gold fleurs-­de-­lis, and this formula was retroactively projected by artists onto the white flags used during the Revolution-­era battles in the Vendée region of France.

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The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  155

156 the favorite color

THE BIRTH OF POLITICAL AND MILITARY BLUE The French Revolution not only created the tricolor flag, it also, for a time, made blue the color of soldiers fighting for the Republic, and later for France. As a result, the Rev­olution contributed to the birth of “political” blue, the color of the Republic’s defenders, then of moderate republicans, and later still of liberals and even conservatives. Under the ancien régime, the uniforms of French soldiers varied greatly from one reg­ iment to another and, even if white was the predominant color, the overall impression was strikingly multicolored. The same was true for most foreign armies as well (except Prussian soldiers, who had worn dark blue since the late seventeenth century, and the English, who had worn red since the 1720s). However, in France just before the Revolution, the soldiers of the French Guards—an elite regiment created in 1564 and attached to the king’s family—had blue uniforms. It was they who fraternized with the populace in July 1789 and, switching sides, participated in the taking of the Bastille.

Many later enlisted in the paid companies of the Parisian National Guard and brought their blue uniforms along. The following year, this blue of the Parisian militia was adopted by those installed in the principal regional cities and, in

79. Anonymous, Devotion to the Nation Shown by a Man Who Has Just Had His Arm Amputated, 18th century. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Beginning in 1790, the three national colors became part of the symbolism of civic rituals that was visible at large ceremonies, like the Day of the Federation (July 14, 1790), as well as in the smaller political meetings of the sections, districts, and boroughs. Sometimes this symbol­ism acquired the aura of a sacrificial ritual for the homeland.

June, it was declared the “national blue.” From then on, blue began to become—along with the tricolor emblem—the symbolic color of all those who sup­port­ed the evolving Revolution. It was a counter to the white (the king’s color) and black (that of the clergy and the house of Austria) displayed by the counter­revolutionaries. When the Republic was proclaimed in the fall of 1792, blue naturally became the color for its soldiers’ uniforms: several decrees from late 1792 and early 1793 made it obligatory, first for infantry regi­ments, then for all army regulars, and finally for the revolutionary armies raised off and on in 1793 and 1794. It was mainly during the wars in the Vendée that this military and republican blue definitively became a political color. The blue of the Republic’s troops took on an ideo­logical dimension as they battled the Catholic and royal army under its white banners; this period established

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  157

blue and white as a pair of opposites that would be linked in French political life throughout the nineteenth cen­tury. However, while white remained the color of royalist partisans over the decades, the blue of the republicans was increasingly overtaken by red among socialists and extreme leftists. In the period during and after the Revolution of 1848, blue even lost its revolutionary tinge and became instead the color of moderate repub­licans, then of centrists and finally, under the Third Republic (after any idea of a return to the monarchy had been abandoned), that of the republican right. Blue’s political meaning was henceforth much closer to white than to red.44 The French example of using blue for political purposes was gradually imitated in many other European countries where, aside from a few exceptions (notably Spain), blue had a similar evolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: at first the color of progressive republican parties, it then became that of moderates and centrists, and finally of conservatives. On the left it was challenged by socialist pink and communist red; on the right by the

black, brown, or white of clerical, fascist, or monarchist parties. These various colors, each of which has its historical roots, have recently been joined by the green of the ecologists.45 The French Revolution thus played a crucial role in the birth of modern political colors.46 Its effect on uniforms did not last as long, however. In the late eighteenth century, the desire to dress French soldiers in blue posed difficult problems because of the need for a large supply of indigo. This colorant was shipped from India and the New World but France, despite its American colonies, relied largely on foreign suppliers, especially En­gland. In 1806 the English naval blockade of the Continent made the shipment of indigo from America to France impossible, at a time when it was greatly needed to dye the uni­ forms of French soldiers. Napoleon demand­ed the reestablishment of woad culti­vation and the pastel trade, but this took time.47 He also asked chemists and other scientists to invent new dyeing processes using Prussian blue, but the results were dis­appointing. Until the end of the Empire—indeed, until the beginning of

158 the favorite color

the Restor­ation—French troops had a difficult time finding blue uniforms. Later, after peace had returned, France was again dependent for its indigo supply on England (which had established immense indigo plantations in Bengal). It was for this reason that King Charles X ordered in July 1829 that the blue pants of infantry troops be replaced by red ones dyed with madder. The cultivation of this colorant, which had been relaunched in the mid-­eighteenth century, was modernized and intensi­fied in several regions, such as Provence and Alsace. Between 1829 and 1859 red pants were adopted by other parts of the army and were worn with a dark blue overcoat until 1915. These pants dyed with madder were bright and easily seen, which may have led to consid­ erable losses in the field. Decades before, the armies of neighboring countries had dropped vivid colors in favor of those that blended more effectively with the landscape: khaki was worn by British soldiers (it was worn by the army in India as of the mid-­nineteenth cen­tury); grayish green by Germans, Italians, and Russians; grayish blue by Austro-­ Hungarian soldiers.

The need for a field uniform better suited to

80. Pierre-­Narcisse Guérin, Henri de la Rochejaquelein, 1817. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Cholet, France. Under the ancien régime, white was just one royal color among many. For this reason, the white cockade was not the only one challenging the tricolor badge at the beginning of the Revolution: the black cockade (of the house of Austria) and the green (that of the Comte d’Artois) were also royalist emblems. It was the wars in the Vendée in 1793–95 that established royalist white and republican blue as the opposite sides of the coin. These two colors continued to confront each other in French political life throughout most of the nineteenth century. White remained the color of royalist parties, but republican blue was gradually overtaken by revolutionary red among leftists.

modern warfare had certainly not escaped certain French generals, but many people were against the abandon­ment of the madder pants. Thus, as late as 1911, the former war minister Etienne declared: “To do away with all that is colorful, all that gives the soldier his joyful and strutting air, to seek shades that are dull and faded, is to go against both French taste and the demands of the mili­tary function. The red pants have a nation­al quality. . . . The red pants, c’est la France.”48

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  159

81. André Gill, Germany Covering Alsace-Lorraine in Prussian Blue, 1871. Biblio­thèque Municipale, Versailles, France. France and Prussia fought many wars in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. While the Prussian soldiers were invariably dressed in blue, the French wore uniforms that varied with the regiment and the decade. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French wore the famous red pants they retained until World War I. The French defeat, as this carica­ture shows, meant that Alsace and a part of Lorraine were covered by “Prus­sian blue.”

In August 1914 French soldiers left for war wearing their red pants, and it is likely that this overly bright color cost tens of thousands of men their lives. That December it was decided to replace red with a dull, unobtrusive grayish blue. Finding the quantities of syn­thetic indigo needed to dye cloth blue for all the soldiers, however, was a long and complex operation. It was only in spring 1915 that all French troops were outfitted in this new blue, henceforth called “horizon blue” because it resembled the indefinable color of the horizon line separating sky and earth (or sea). After the war, the expression “horizon blue” left the battlefield and entered the political arena. After the 1919 elections, the Chamber welcomed a number of deputies who the year before had been soldiers, and in jest or mockery, several journalists described this as the “horizon blue Chamber.” The centrist and right-­wing deputies, linked in a national bloc that was violently anti-­Bolshevik, had a large majority in this assembly. They remained in power until 1924 and greatly contributed to blue’s association with the republican right, enemy

of the “reds.” The blue uniform worn by the Revolutionary soldiers of 1789 was henceforth a distant memory.

THE MOST WORN COLOR: FROM UNIFORMS TO JEANS By the second half of the eighteenth century blue, along with black and gray, had become one of the three most common colors for clothing, in France and in most neighboring countries. This was true for both the well-­off classes and those of more modest means. A notable shift occurred in the dress of country folk, who displayed a taste for blue tones in clothing that was often new (in England, Germany, and northern Italy, for example) and ran counter to the blacks, grays, and browns of preceding centuries. This rural fashion also recalled, six hundred years after the fact, the dull, grayish blue worn by peasant populations during the feudal period. But the rise of blue tones during the century of the Enlightenment began to run out of steam shortly after the torments of the Revolution, before declining in the nineteenth

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century. In cities as in the country, black once again became the dominant color for both men’s and women’s clothing. The nineteenth century, like the fifteenth and seventeenth, was a great time for black. This lasted only a few decades, however. Even before World War I—to the great horror of certain puritans—the range of dress colors for European pop­ulations began to expand, even for daily wear; and, among the new or renewed colors, blue (in all its shades) regained dominance little by little. This phenomenon accelerated in the 1920s, notably in the cities, with the newly triumphant fashion of navy blue fabrics. Within three or four decades, in fact, numer­ous garments for men, which for various reasons were black, became navy blue—beginning with uniforms. Depending on the fashions and cultural rhythms of different countries, the following groups at some point shifted from black to navy blue uniforms in the first half of the twentieth century: sailors, guards, policemen, soldiers, firemen, customs agents,

postmen, athletes, and, even more re­ cently, certain ecclesiastics. Of course, not all the uniforms of these different social and institutional groups became

82. French soldiers in a trench at Bois-­Le-­Prêtre, October 1914 to May 1915. Color postcard, undated. Private collection, Paris. In 1914, French soldiers still wore red pants with a dark blue overcoat. They were the last in Europe required to wear a uniform that made them such visible targets, and it is likely that these red pants—a symbol of the French army for generations— contributed to the severe losses suffered at the beginning of the war. In December it was decided to replace the red pants with blue ones, but it took five months before all the troops could be dressed in the new “horizon blue” uniform.

navy blue. There was no systematic transformation, and there were numerous excep­tions, but it is true that everywhere uni­forms were worn in Europe and the United States, black increasingly gave way to blue in some form or another between 1910 and 1950. And soon civilians were imitating this shift: beginning in Anglo-­ American countries in the 1930s, and then in the rest of Europe, many men abandoned their black suits for navy blue. The blazer remains the most visible sign of this revolution, which was, without a doubt, one of the great fashion events of the twentieth century—the transformation from black to navy blue.49 In the period between the wars, then, blue regained its place as the most commonly worn color in Europe and the United States, and its

vic­tory over the other colors in Western dress for the past two, three, or even four generations in large part to jeans. It is worth taking a closer look at the history of this extraordinary garment. As with all objects endowed with mythic significance, the historical origin of jeans remains shrouded in mystery. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is the fire after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, which destroyed the archives of Levi Strauss & Co.—creator of the famous denim pants half a century earlier.50 It was in the spring of 1853 that the twenty-­four-­year-­old Levi Strauss (his first name remains uncertain)—a Jewish

popularity since then has continued to grow. Uniforms, business suits, sky blue shirts, blazers, sweaters, bathing suits, and athletic clothes have all greatly contributed to the triumph of blue among all social classes and categories. But there is another garment that has played a role almost as important as all of these others combined, notably since the 1950s: blue jeans. Blue owes its smashing

83. Charles Camoin, Le Poilu, c. 1915. Musée des Deux Guerres Mondiales, Paris. A “poilu” (a colloquial French term for a World War I soldier) wearing horizon blue. It is not easy to give an exact description of the “horizon blue” that French troops wore as of 1915. It was a blue made dull and gray on purpose, above all to make the soldiers less visible than they had been in their previous uniform.

of ready-­to-­wear clothing and a textile industrialist. With his brother-­in-­law he founded a company that continued to grow over the years. Although they diversified production, overalls and pants remained the best-­ selling items. These were not yet blue, but different shades ranging from off-­white to dark brown. Canvas was very strong, but it was also a heavy and rough cloth difficult to work with. Between 1860 and 1865 Strauss had the idea of gradu84. Edgar Degas, Portraits in an Office (New Orleans), 1873. Musée des Beaux-­Arts, Pau, France. In Europe, as in the United States, the nine­teenth century was a period of Protestant capitalism. It imposed its own social morality of color, which echoed the sixteenth-­century values of the Reformation. This was especially visible in dress, with black the most sober and dignified color, especially for men. Gray, white, and certain blue tones were tolerated, but reds, greens, and yellows were rejected as colors unworthy of an honest man.

merchant from New York (and of Bavarian origin)—arrived in San Francisco, whose popu­ lation had continued to grow rapidly since the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada in 1848. He brought with him a large quantity of canvas for tents and wagon covers, which he hoped to sell, but his sales were mediocre. A pioneer explained to him that in that part of California what was most needed was strong and functional pants, not tent canvas. This gave the young Strauss the idea of making pants out of his canvas. Their success was immediate, and the merchant from New York became a designer

ally replacing it with denim, a twilled fabric imported from Europe and dyed with indigo. Blue jeans were born.51 The origins of the word denim are much debated. It is possible that it is a contraction of the French serge de Nîmes, a fabric that has been made from wool and silk in the region around Nîmes since the seventeenth century. In the late eighteenth century, however, this term designated a fabric made from linen and cotton that was produced throughout the lower Languedoc region and exported to England. What’s more, a fine wool fabric pro­duced on the Mediterranean coast between Provence and Roussillon was called “nim” in Occitan. This

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85. Edgar Degas, Achille De Gas as a Naval Ensign, c. 1856–57. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Chester Dale Collection. In France, navy blue began to replace black in certain uniforms during the second half of the nineteenth century. At first minor, this change in fashion expanded greatly after World War I, affecting not only sailors and soldiers but also policemen, mailmen, fire­ men, customs agents, and others. Later, civilians of both sexes also began to wear navy blue. Seen from a historical perspective, the triumph of navy blue in European dress is the most important color phenomenon of the twentieth century.

Right 86. Poster by Van Caulaert for the film La Goualeuse, c. 1938. Département des Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. In the Romantic period blue became the color of dreams, or at least of the invitation to dream. Moreover, as a cousin to black, blue has long been used in typography. This is why in the period between the wars numerous film posters used blue to attract the passerby’s eye with an invitation to come dream in dark movie halls.

to a family of fabrics originally made in Genoa and the region around it; at first woven from a combination of wool and linen, and later of linen and cotton, since the sixteenth century these fabrics had been used to make boat sails, sailors’ pants, and canvas for tents and all kinds of coverings. cloth may be the origin of “denim.” All of this remains conjecture, especially since the chauvinism of the authors who have written about these questions complicates the task of historians of dress.52 Whatever the truth may be, in the early

Opposite 87. Pauline Boty, Portrait of Celia Birtwell, 1966. Whitford & Hughes, London. The idea that jeans are transgressive apparel, the emblem of rebellious youth in search of freedom, is inaccurate, if not totally false. For most of their long history, jeans have been viewed as sensible, utilitarian, and even conformist pants. They have been worn primarily by ordinary people, many of whom were not partic­ ularly young, let alone rebellious. In Europe, it was only in the late 1960s that jeans became a sym­bolic object and that their mythic dimension began to overwhelm their social reality.

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nineteenth century denim in England and the United States denoted a very strong fabric made from cotton and dyed with indigo. It was used primarily in clothing for miners, workers, and slaves. And it was denim that, in the 1860s, little by little replaced the “jean” fabric that Levi Strauss had used for his overalls and pants. The word jean derives from the Italo-­English word genoese, which meant simply “from Genoa.” The canvas that young Strauss used belonged

In San Francisco, Levi Strauss’s pants had metonymically acquired the name of their material in the years 1853–55, becoming “jeans.” When the material changed about ten years later, the old name remained. Jeans were henceforth made out of denim, and not canvas from Genoa, but their name did not change as a result. In 1872 Levi Strauss formed a partnership with a Jewish tailor from Reno named Jacob W. Davis, who two years before had decided to produce trousers for lumberjacks with the back pockets attached by rivets. From then on, Strauss’s jeans had rivets as well. Although the expression “blue jeans” didn’t make its first commercial appearance until the 1920s, Strauss’s pants were all blue as of the 1870s, because their denim cotton was dyed with

indigo. Denim was too dense to absorb the dye completely, so there was never a guarantee that the color would last. It was precisely this instability, however, that made it a success: the color seemed to be alive, changing over time (as did the wearer of the jeans or overalls). Several decades later, when progress in chemical colorants allowed any fabric to be dyed deeply and uniformly with indigo, jeans producers were obliged to whiten and discolor their pants artificially in order to recapture the washed-­ out shades of the original product. In 1890 the patent protecting the jeans made by Levi Strauss’s company ran out. Com­ peting brands appeared, offering less-­expensive pants made from lighter material. The Lee company (founded in 1911) had the idea of replacing the buttons on the fly with a zip­ per in 1926. But it was the Blue Bell com­pany (which became Wrangler in 1947) that, beginning in 1919, offered Levi’s the stiffest competition. In response, the powerful San Francisco firm (whose founder had died a billion­aire in 1902) created “Levi’s 501 jeans,” made from a double layer of denim, with sturdy rivets and metallic

buttons. In 1936, to avoid any confusion with the competing brands, a small red label bearing the brand name was stitched onto the right back pocket to mark authentic Levi Strauss jeans. This was the first time that a brand name was overtly displayed on the outside of a garment.

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Meanwhile, jeans had ceased to be only work clothes. They had become attire for lei­ sure time and vacations, notably for rich tour­ists from the eastern United States who spent their vacations in the West and wished to ap­ propriate the image of cowboys and pi­oneers. In 1935 Vogue magazine accepted its first ad for jeans, which had now become chic. At the same time, jeans were adopted by students on certain college campuses, especially sopho­ mores who tried to prohibit freshmen from wearing them. Jeans became the clothing of young people and of the city, and later of women.53 After World War II their vogue reached Western Europe. At first Europeans depended on American supplies, until differ­ent producers set up factories in Europe. Be­tween 1950 and 1975 an increasing number of youths began to wear jeans. Socio­logists saw in this phenomenon—which

was

encouraged

by

extensive advertising—an authentic sign of social change, with this androgynous garment becoming an emblem of youthful dissent and rebellion. In the 1980s, however, many young people in the West began to abandon jeans for

pants with differ­ent cuts and made from other fabrics offering more variety in texture and color. Despite attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to increase the number of colors, blue in its different shades has remained the dominant color of jeans. While jeans were in decline in Western Europe (the coolest fashion was to avoid them entirely in the late 1980s), in communist coun­ tries (and in developing and even Muslim countries) jeans became a garment of dissent and of openness to the freedoms, fashion, and value systems of the West.54 That said, when we consider the entire history of jeans, it is clear that it is inaccurate to see them only as a statement of liberty and dissent. Their very color and origins make such a narrow apprais­al impossible. Jeans were at first a work gar­ ment for men, gradually becoming leisure clothing, and spreading to women and then to all social classes and categories. There has never been a period, even in recent decades, when youth had a monopoly on jeans. When we look closely at their history—that is, when we take the time to consider where,

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when, and by whom jeans were worn in north America and Europe between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth century—we see that jeans are an ordinary garment, worn by ordinary people who hardly seek to stand out, to rebel, or to transgress. On the contrary, they simply want to wear a sturdy, sober, and comfortable garment—indeed, they want to forget that they are wearing anything in particular. We could even say that jeans are a Protestant gar­ ment—though they were invented by a Jew—because they correspond so perfectly to the dress code promoted by the Protestant values discussed earlier: simplicity, chromatic auster­ity, and uniformity.

THE FAVORITE COLOR At the same time that blue became the most common color in twentieth-­ century Western dress, it also became the favorite color. The preference for blue, which was more intellectual or symbolic than physical in its motivations, had ancient roots. We saw earlier how, in the thirteenth century, blue began to compete with red as the color of aristocracy and

royalty. With the Protestant Reformation and all the value systems it produced, blue became a dignified and moral color, which its rival red was not; as a result, blue’s presence expanded in numerous areas at the expense of red. It was during the Romantic period, how­ever, that blue attained the lasting rank of the West’s favorite color. It has not fallen from that position since and even seems to have in­creased its dominance over other colors. It is true that the historian does not have precise figures for the period before the late nine­ teenth century, but the numerous pieces of evi­dence we can examine (social, economic, literary, artistic, symbolic) all indicate the same thing: blue was everywhere (or almost everywhere) the favorite color in the nine­ teenth century. And when opinion polls were taken in the 1890s, the figures showed that blue had a considerable lead over the other colors. This remains the case today. All of the studies focusing on the “favorite color” question conducted since World War I show, with striking regularity, that more than half the people polled in Western Europe and the United States indicate that blue is their

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  169

88. Pablo Picasso, undated sketch from notebook 1, folio 13 verso. Musée Picasso, Paris. Picasso (1881–1973) was far from being a great colorist. Nevertheless, the first critics of his art broke his youthful work into periods designated by color. The “blue period” describes those works produced between 1900 and 1904. Relatively indifferent to the preoccupations and experiments of other contemporary painters, Picasso in those years made blue the dominant color in his canvases. In later years his blue became more subtle, but it regularly recurred in all of his art, whether painted, drawn, or sculpted.

favorite color. Next come green (a little under 20 percent), white and red (8 percent each), and the other colors far behind.55 These are the figures in the West for the adult population. Among children, the prefer­ ences are noticeably different, and they vary more according to country and age as well as over time; contrary to what we see with adults, what was true for children in the 1930s or 1950s is no longer so today. However, always and everywhere, children prefer red to the other colors, with either yellow or blue in second place. Only children over the age of ten some­times express more marked preferences for so-­called cold colors, like the majority of adults. In both cases, there is no difference between the sexes. The figures are identical for girls and boys, as they are for men and women. By the same token, social class and profession seem to have little influence on the responses. The only important distinction is age. It is because of advertising and marketing strategies, of course, that these opinion polls

about preferred colors have multiplied over the past century. The historian who consults them is guaranteed to find worthwhile infor­ mation: not only are the results interesting in terms of the history of contemporary per­ ception, but they also inspire reflection about past circumstances and help formulate ques­ tions essential to understanding the long-­term evolution of attitudes toward color. However, it must be pointed out that such polls do not exist for all spheres of human activity nor, more importantly, for all societies. Moreover, they are generally targeted at certain groups and by certain motives, and thus are more or less corrupt as statistical analyses go. Soci­ ologists and psychologists often go too far when they apply these figures—which originally were intended only for advertising, selling, or specific fashion information—to the study of sociocultural, sym­bolic, or affective phenomena. The notion of a favorite color is itself extremely fluid. Can you say in absolute terms, outside of any context, what color you

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prefer?56 And what real influence should this notion have on the work of the social scientist, and especially the historian? When a person states a preference for blue, for example, does this mean that he or she truly prefers blue to all the other colors and that this preference applies to all customs and values, to clothing as well as to habitat, to political symbolism as well as to ordinary objects, to dreams as well as to aesthetic feeling? Or does this response mean that in answering such a question (“what is your favorite color?”), our hidden motivation is to be, ideologically and culturally, ranked and counted in the group of people who will respond “blue”? This point is important. It tweaks the historian’s curiosity all the more because when he attempts—a bit

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  171

Below 89. Pablo Picasso, poem “In the Painting of April 30th.” Musée Picasso, Paris. At the end of the sixteenth century, artists liked using blue-­tinted paper, but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that such paper began to be used for correspondence. Picasso, a “painter of blue,” is here doubly faithful to this tradition in the first version of this short poem.

anachro­nistically—to pro­ject into the past his own reflections on the evolution of “favorite” colors, he can never find information per­ taining to psychology or individual responses; he is limited to the facts of collective perception, to the activities of a whole society (lexicon, clothing, emblems and coats of arms, trade in pigments and colorants, poetic and pictorial creation, scientific discourse). In any case, are things different when we study our own period? Do individual preferences and personal taste really exist? Everything that we believe, think, admire, love, or reject is always perceived in relation to the gaze and judgment of others. Man lives not alone, but in society. Moreover, most of the opinion polls mentioned above do not take into account the

different fields of social science, professional activities, or the effects of daily life on their questions. On the contrary, their goal is to attain the absolute and distill a global vision. Advertising is always the motor behind these color polls, and in order for them to be considered valid, the people questioned must respond “spontaneously”—in less than five seconds, without reflection or clarifying questions such as “color in clothing, or in a painting?” We do well to question the legitimacy of, and the motives behind, this spontaneity required of the public; any researcher will be suspicious of such artificial constraints. The fluidity, and even the flaws, of a concept can nevertheless prove fruitful and relevant to

Opposite 90. Yves Klein, Blue Sponge Relief, c. 1957–59. Wallraf-­ Richartz-­Museum, Cologne, Germany. The painter Yves Klein (1928– 1962) remains famous for his monochromatic blues, at once very deep and very luminous. With the help of the pigment merchant Edouard Adam, Klein perfected a special ultramarine pigment whose chemical composition is protected by a patent filed under the name IKB (International Klein Blue).

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specific questions. Such is the case here when we notice to what extent the statistical results for the adult population have remained the same over time. The few figures that we have from the end of the nineteenth century are very close to those cited above, and they come from the same regions.57 This last point is worth

and red (20 percent). These results pose several problems for Japanese multi­national firms. In advertising, for example (posters, brochures, photographs, and tele­vised images), these firms must adopt two distinct strategies: one aimed at the domestic audience, the other made for export to the West. Of course, color is not the 91. Packs of Gauloises Bleues, redesigned in 1947 by Jacno. Galerie-­Musée de la S.E.I.T.A., Paris. In 1910 the French tobacco authority put a new brand of cigarettes on the market: Gauloises. The bright blue of their packs became an emblem not only of the brand but of France itself, the country where these cigarettes remained the most popular brand for a long time. The expression “Gauloises bleu” even became a colloquial term for a light and grayish shade of blue, with a touch of violet.

underlining: for a long time now, Western culture has been united in its attitudes toward blue.58 Everywhere the figures are the same, placing blue ahead of green in popularity. Only Spain and, above all, Latin America present a few differences.59 The situation is quite different when we leave the West, however. For example, in Japan—the only non-­ Western country that provides figures based on similar polls—the preferred colors are not at all like those in the West: white comes first (preferred by 30 percent of those polled), ahead of black (25 percent)

only reason for these divergences, but it is an important dimension. A company that wants to seduce consumers around the globe is obliged to take color preferences into account. This is so despite the speed and extent of “global­ization” (which at any rate seems to be occur­ring at a slower pace where color is concerned than in other spheres). The Japanese example is interesting for other reasons. It highlights the great extent to which the “color” phenomenon is defined, practiced, and lived differently according to the culture in question. In Japanese percep­ tion, it is sometimes less important to know if something is blue, red, or some other color, and more important to know whether or not the color is dull or shiny. This is the essential,

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telling characteristic. As a result, there are many words for white in Japanese, denoting shades from the most somber to the most luminous.60 The Western eye, unlike the Japa­nese, is not able to distinguish between them; and the vocabulary of European languages de­voted to white shades is much too poor to name them. What is apparent in Japan, a country that in many ways is deeply Westernized, is even more obvious in African, Native American, and other Asiatic cultures. In most sub-­ Saharan African societies, for example, there are certain situations in which little impor­tance is placed on the line separating red tones from brown or yellow, or even from green and blue. On the other hand, it is of fundamental importance to know whether a color is dry or damp, soft or hard, smooth or rough, mute or sonorous, joyful or sad. Color is not a thing in itself, much less a phenomenon related only to sight. It is apprehended in conjunction with other sensory experiences, and as a result, shades and nuances are not essential aspects

of color perception. Moreover, among many peoples in West Africa, the chromatic culture, the perception of colors, and the vocabulary that expresses it vary according to gender, age, and social status. In certain tribes in Benin, for example, the lexicon for brown—at least, what a Western eye would define as brown— is extensive and not identical for men and women.61 These differences among societies are fundamental and the historian (like the eth­nologist and linguist) must constantly keep them in mind. They underscore not only the profoundly cultural nature of color per­ception and the lexicon it creates, but also the important role of synesthesia and the mixing of sensory experience in the perception and understanding of color. Finally, these differ­ences remind the historian to be cautious when pursuing comparative studies of per­ception that juxtapose different places and periods.62 A Western researcher can, at best, grasp the importance of the concepts of dullness and brilliance as they are articulated by the color system of contemporary Japan.63

The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century  175

Above and opposite 92 and 93. Above: Malam Suleiman, silk cloth dyed with indigo (detail), 1973. Private collection, London. Opposite: Traditional covering from Mali, 19th century. Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, Paris. Blue is rare in the traditional garb of black Africa, but it is used abundantly in luxury fabrics and ceremonial cloths. Dyeing cotton with indigo just in tepid water can yield subtle tones of dark blue, which are rarely uniform and are largely unknown to Europeans.

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But this same researcher is apt to be more disoriented by the color universe as experienced in certain African societies: what is a dry color? a sad color? a mute color? Such questions take us far from blue, red, yellow, and green. And how many other character­istics defining color elsewhere remain totally unknown?

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5

B LU E TO DAY

What remains today of the color blue’s long and rich history in our daily lives, in our social codes, in our sensibilities? First of all, as we have just emphasized, is the fact that blue is the West’s favorite color, far surpassing the others. This is true despite gender, social origins, profession, or cultural baggage: blue dominates all the others. The principal manifestation of this popularity is in dress. In all the countries of Western Europe, and indeed in the entire Wes­ t­­ern world, blue in all its shades has been the most popular dress color for several decades (ahead of white, black, and beige). It will prob­­­ ably remain so for quite some time because changes in fashion do not seem to under­mine

this dominance in any way. In fact, there is still a considerable gap between the haute couture foc­used on by the media (which concerns a tiny percentage of the population), and the clothing actually worn by most social classes and categories. The former is reinvented every season; the latter changes according to much slower rhythms. Lexical facts confirm these clothing practices: blue has become a magical word, a word that seduces, pacifies, and invites revery. And a word that sells. Many products, compa­nies, sites, and artistic creations that have only a faint rapport with this color (or no rapport at all) are today referred to as “blue.” The music

94. Satellite image of the earth showing North and South America. Seen from a great distance, the earth displays different colors but blue is largely dominant because of the oxygenation of the surrounding atmosphere. Hence the expression “blue planet,” which became common in the 1960s, during the first voyages into space. The poets had preceded the astronauts, however: in 1929 Paul Eluard wrote in a famous poem: “the earth is blue like an orange.”

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95. United Nations flag in Cambodia, 1992. Blue was a color of peace as early as the Middle Ages. Contemporary symbolism has made it a neutral color. These two properties explain why today all the major inter­ national organizations use blue in their emblems. This is notably the case of the United Nations, whose soldiers—referred to in Europe as the “blue helmets”— are given peacekeeping missions, and whose flag—an azure field with the globe between two olive branches—attempts to bring a message of peace to the world.

of this name is often sweet, pleasant, liquid; its semantic field evokes the sky, the sea, repose, love, travel, vacations, the infinite. The same is true in many other languages: bleu, blue, blu, blau are reassuring and poetic words that link color, memory, desire, and dreams. They are present in a great many book titles, and their presence alone confers a particular charm that no other color term could offer. However, contrary to what one might think, this pronounced taste for blue is not the expression of particularly strong symbolic im­pulses or motives. One even has the impres­sion that blue is so popular because it is less sym­bolically “marked” than other colors (notably red, green, white, or black). The fact that in opinion polls blue is least often given as a disliked color seems to confirm its neutral position. It does not shock, offend, or disgust. By the same token, the fact that blue is the favorite color of more than half the popula­tion is at the very least a sign that it is neither violent nor transgressive, and probably an ex­ pression of its relatively weak symbolic poten­tial. When we declare that our favorite color is blue, after all, what do we really reveal about ourselves? Nothing, or

almost nothing, because the response is so predictable, whereas stating a preference for black, red, or even green . . . This is one of blue’s essential character­istics in Western color symbolism: it doesn’t make waves, but is calm, pacified, distant, almost neutral. It invites revery, of course (we recall again the Romantic poets, Novalis’s blue flower, and the blues), but these melancholy dreams have an anesthetizing quality. Today we paint hospital walls blue, we package tran­qui­lizing drugs in it, and we employ it as a col­or of political consensus. Blue is not ag­gres­­­sive and violates nothing; it reassures and draws together. The major international organi­­ zations that have chosen blue for their emblematic color are not mistaken in doing so: formerly it was the color of the League of Nations, and today of the UN, UNESCO, and the European Union. Blue has become an international color charged with the mission

180 blue today

of promoting peace and under­standing be­tween peoples; United Nations soldiers—known as the “blue helmets” in Europe—pursue this goal throughout the world. Blue has become the most peaceful and neutral of all the colors. Even white seems to possess a greater, more specific, and more directed sym­bolic force. The symbolic connection between blue, calm, and peace is an old one. It was already more or less present in medieval color sym­ bolism and was clearly evident in the Romantic period. More recent, however, is the link between blue and water and, above all, between blue and the cold. These subjects could not be discussed extensively in this book, but they are an important dimension of the color blue, especially in the modern and contemporary periods. In the abstract, of course, there are no warm and cool colors. These are purely a matter of conventions, which vary in time and space. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, blue was considered a warm color, and sometimes even the warmest of all. It was only in the seventeenth century that it began to “cool” gradually, and only in the nineteenth century that it achieved its true status as a cool color

(for Goethe, as we saw, blue was still partially a warm color). In studying this aspect of color’s past, the his­torian must constantly be on his guard against anachronism. For example, an art historian study­ing the ways a late medieval or Renais­sance painter distrib­uted warm and cool colors in a painting would be totally mistaken if he classified blue, as we do today, among the latter. In this evolution from warm to cool, it was probably the increasingly common associ­ ation of blue with water that played the most im­portant role. In ancient and medieval socie­ ties, in fact, water was rarely seen or conceived of as blue. In images it could be any color but, symbolically, it was mainly associated with green. On the oldest maps of both sea and land, water (oceans, lakes, rivers, streams) was almost always green. It was only in the late fifteenth century that this green—also used to represent forests—began to give way to blue. In the collective imagination and daily life, however, it took quite a while for water to become blue, and for blue to become cold. Cold like our contemporary Western societies, for which blue is at once the emblem, symbol, and favorite color.

BLUE TODAY  181

N OT E S INTRODUCTION COLOR IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE 1. Michel Pastoureau, “Vers une histoire sociale des couleurs,” in Couleurs, images, symboles: Études d’histoire et d’anthropologie (Paris, 1989), 9–68; “Une Histoire des couleurs est-­ elle possible?” Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (October–December 1990): 368–77; “La Couleur et l’his­torien,” in Pigments et colorants de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Guineau (Paris: CNRS, 1990), 21–40. The present book sprang from several seminars I gave at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales between 1980 and 1995. A first version preceded it in an article entitled “Jésus teinturier: Histoire symbolique et sociale d’un métier réprouvé,” published in the journal Médiévales 29 (1995): 43–67. 2. A typical example of this perspective is the book by John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). This is without doubt the largest and most ambitious work ever devoted to the history of color, but it is limited to the history of science and art. Despite its title, this fine book hardly addresses the social practices sur­ rounding color—vocabulary and its consequences, dress systems, dyes, emblems, and social codes (heraldry, flags, signs and symbols). See my review in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (Paris) 54 (Winter 1995): 115–16.

1. AN UNCOMMON COLOR PREHISTORY TO THE TWELFTH CENTURY 1. Franco Brunello, L’arte della tintura nella storia dell’umanita (Vicenza, Italy, 1968), 3–16. 2. Jacques André, Étude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine (Paris, 1949), 125–26. The word colorado is still used to mean “red” in Castilian. 3. L. Gerschel, “Couleurs et teintures chez divers peuples indoeuropéens,” Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 21 (1966): 603–24. 4. Let us note in passing that in certain cultures, black and red have a direct relationship that is not mediated by white (this is true of Muslim culture most notably), while in other cultures this is not the case. 5. Brunello, L’arte della tintura, 29–33. 6. On the ancient uses of woad as a dye, see J. and C. Cotte, “La Guède dans l’antiquité,” Revue des études anciennes 21, no. 1 (1919): 43–57. 7. Pliny, however, did not actually say it was a stone, but a kind of foam or deposit that was solidified and then ground: “Ex India venit indicus, arundi­num spumae adhaerescente limo; cum teritur, nigrum; at in diluendo mixturam purpurae caeruleique mirabilem reddit” (Natural History, bk. 35, chap. 27, par. 1). 8. Concerning these questions allow me to cite myself: Michel Pastoureau, “Ceci est mon sang: Le christianisme médiéval et la couleur rouge,” in Le Pressoir mystique: Actes du colloque de Recloses, ed. D. Alexandre-­Bidon (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 43–56; and “La

182 

Réforme et la couleur,” Bulletin de la Société d’histoire du protestantisme français 138 (July– September 1992): 323–42. 9. See most recently B. Dov Hercenberg, “La Transcendance du regard et la mise en perspective du tekhélet (‘bleu’ biblique),” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse (Strasbourg, France) 78, no. 4 (October–December 1998): 387–411. 10. Sapphire is notably the fifth of the twelve precious stones on the breastplate of the high priest (Exod. 28:18; 39:11); the seventh of the nine stones in the cloak of the kings of Tyr (Ezek. 28:13); and, above all, the second of the twelve stones in the foundations of the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21:19). 11. The same confusion of terms occurs in medieval Latin for all blue pigments. The Latin words azurium and lazurium come from the Greek lazourion, itself der­ived from the Persian word denoting the stone, lazward. The same word pro­duced the Arabic lazaward (lazurd in the spoken language). 12. L. von Rosen, Lapis Lazuli in Geological Contexts and in Ancient Written Sources (Göteborg, Sweden, 1988); Ashok Roy, ed., Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol. 2 (Washing­ton, D.C., and Oxford, 1993), 37–65. 13. Despite numerous attempts, some going back a long time, to produce a synthetic pigment with the properties of lapis lazuli, it was only in 1828 that the chemist J. B. Guimet succeeded in cre­ating an “artificial ultramarine” by heat­ing in a vacuum a mixture of kaolin, sodium sulfate, coal, and sulfur. 14. Roy, Artists’ Pigments, 23–35. 15. Fabienne Lavenex Vergès, Bleus égyptiens: De la Pâte autoémaillée au pigment bleu syn­ thétique (Paris and Louvain, France, 1992). 16. J. Baines, “Color Terminology and Color Classification in Ancient Egyptian Color Terminology and Polychromy,” American Anthropologist 87 (1985): 282–97.

17. See the excellent exhibition catalogue Paris, Rome, Athènes: Le Voyage en Grèce des architectes français aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: École Nationale des Beaux-­Arts, 1982). 18. V. J. Bruno, Form and Colour in Greek Painting (Oxford, 1977). 19. Natural History, bk. 35 par. 32: “It was by using only four colors that Appellus, Aëtion, Melanthius, and Nicomachus—all famous painters—created the immor­ tal masterpieces that everyone knows. For whites, melinum; for yellows, Attic sil; for reds, sinopis from the Black Sea; for blacks, atramentum” (translation into English from the French translation by J.-­ M. Croisille [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997], 48–49). On the passages in Pliny’s Natural History concerning art, see K. Jex-­Blake and E. Sellers, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, 2nd ed. (London, 1968). 20. L. Brehier, “Les mosaïques à fond d’azur,” in Études byzantines, vol. 3 (Paris, 1945), 46 and following. See also the studies by F. Dölger, especially “Lumen Christi,” Antike und Christentum 5 (1936): 10 and following. 21. W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (Oxford, 1858), 3:458–99; H. Magnus, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, trans. J. Soury (Paris, 1878), 47–48; O. Weise, “Die Farbenbezei­ chungen bei der Griechen und Römern,” Philologus, 46 (1888): 593–605. For an opposite opinion, see K. E. Goetz, “Waren die Römer blaublind,” parts 1 and 2, Archiv für lateinische Lexicographie und Grammatik 14 (1906): 75–88; 15 (1908): 527–47. 22. Magnus, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, 47–48. 23. On the Greek color vocabulary and the difficult problems it poses, see L. Gernet, “Dénomination et perception des couleurs chez les Grecs,” Problèmes de la couleur, ed. I. Meyerson (Paris, 1957), 313–26; C. Rowe, “Conceptions of Colour and Colour Symbolism

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  183

in the Ancient World,” in Eranos Jahrbuch, 1972 (Leiden, the Netherlands, 1974), 327–64. 24. See the examples cited by K. Müller-­ Boré, Stilistische Untersuchungen zum Farbwort und zur Verwendung der Farbe in der älteren griechischen Poesie (Berlin, 1922), 30–31, 43–44, and passim. 25. Among the philologists who support these arguments: Gladstone, Studies on Homer 3, 458–99; A. Geiger, Zur Entwick­lungs­geschichte der Menschheit, 2nd ed. (Stutt­gart, Germany, 1878); Magnus, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, 61–87; T. R. Price, “The Color System of Virgil,” Ameri­can Journal of Philology 4 (1883): 18 and following. Among those against them: F. Marty, Die Frage nach der geschicht­ lichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes (Vienna, 1879); Goetz, “Waren die Römer blaublind.” A good synthesis of the different points of view was done by W. Schulz, Die Farben­empfindungsystem der Hellenen (Leipzig, Germany, 1904). 26. I am thinking of the book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), which sparked violent debates in the 1970s among linguists, anthropologists, and neurologists. 27. André, Étude sur les termes de couleur, 162–83. The etymology linking caeruleus and caelum (sky) is made clear by pho­netic and philological analysis. See, however, the hypotheses of A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1979), 84, where they propose an ancient (and unattested) form caeluleus. For medieval authors, whose etymologies were based on a different kind of knowledge and methodology than that used by twentieth-­century scholars, the link be­tween ceruleus and cereus was self-­evident. 28. Among the abundant literature on this topic, see above all Andres M. Kristol, Color: Les Langues romanes devant le phénomène de la couleur (Bern, 1978), 219–69. For the difficulties that Old French had

in naming blue before the mid-­thirteenth century, see Barbara Schäfer, Die Semantik der Farbadjective im Altfranzösischen (Tübingen, Germany, 1987), 82–96. In Old French, the words bleu, blo, and blef (which come from the Germanic blau and mean “blue”) were often con­fused with the word bloi (which comes from the popular Latin blavus, a deforma­tion of flavus, and means “yellow”). 29. “Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem, atque hoc horridiores sunt in pugna aspectu” (Caesar The War in Gaul 5.14.2). 30. “Simile plantagini glastum in Gallia vocatur, quo Brittanorum conjuges nurusque toto corpore oblitae, quibus­dam in sacris et nudae incedunt, Aethi­ opum colorem imitantes” (Pliny the Elder Natural History 22.2.1). 31. Lia Luzzatto and Renata Pompas, Il significato dei colori nelle civiltà antiche (Milan, 1988), 130–51. 32. André, Étude sur les termes de couleur, 179–80. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. “Magnus, rubicundus, crispus, crassus, caesius / cadaverosa facie” (3.4.440–41). Latin treatises on physi­ognomy fully confirm the disdain in Rome for blue eyes. 35. The essential study in this field remains that of M. Platnauer, “Greek Colour-­Perception,” Classical Quarterly 15 (1921): 155–202. It is completed by H. Osborn, “Colour Concepts of the Ancient Greeks,” British Journal of Aesthetics 8 (1968): 274–92. 36. These writings can be found in W. Kranz, “Die ältesten Farbenlehren der Griechen,” Hermes 47 (1912): 84–85. On the history of medieval theories of vision, see D. C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-­Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976); K. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics (1250–1345) (Leiden, the Netherlands, 1988). 37. See the texts published by J. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcmaeon to

184  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Aristotle (London, 1906), as well as Lindberg, Theories of Vision. 38. Essentially the Timaeus, pars. 67d–68d. On Plato and color, see above all F. A. Wright, “A Note on Plato’s Defini­tion of Colour,” Classical Review 33, no. 4 (1919): 121–34. 39. Notably by De sensu et sensato, pars. 440a–442a. The treatise De coloribus, which was very popular in the Middle Ages and attributed to Aristotle, is not by him or Theophrastus but by one or several of their more or less distant disciples. It does not add a great deal to Aristotle’s theories, but it did contribute to the spread of a linear classification of colors that remained common for more than a millennium: white, yellow, red, green, (blue—not always included), vio­let, black. See the excellent edition and translation of the Greek text by W. S. Hett in Aristotle: Minor Works, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 14 (Cambridge, 1936), 3–45. 40. D. E. Hahm, “Early Hellenistic Theories of Vision and the Perception of Colour,” Perception: Interrelations in the History and Philosophy of Science, ed. P. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 12–24. 41. Aristotle even added a fourth parameter, air, which allowed him to see the “color phenomenon” as the interaction of the four elements that compose the universe: luminous fire, the matter (i.e., earth) of objects, the humors (i.e., water) of the eye, and finally air, which modulated the optical medium. See Meterologics, pars. 372a–75a. 42. See the texts assembled by G. M. Stratton, Theophrastus and the Greek Physi­olog­ical Psychology before Aristotle (London, 1917). 43. Aristotle, Meteorologics, 372–76 and passim. 44. On the history of theories of the rainbow, see C. B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (New York, 1959); M. Blay, Les Figures de l’arcenciel (Paris, 1995).

45. See W. Schultz, Das Farbenempfindung­system der Hellenen (Leipzig, Germany, 1904), 114; André, Étude sur les termes de couleur, 13, sees in the exceptional use of the word caeruleus by Ammianus Marcel­ linus an allusion to violet or indigo (that of Newton) and not to blue as such. 46. Robert Grosseteste, De iride seu de iride et speculo, vol. 9 of Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ed. L. Baur (Mün­ ster, Germany, 1912), 72–78; see also C. B. Boyer, “Robert Grosse­ teste on the Rainbow,” Osiris, vol. 11 (1954): 247–58; B. S. Eastwood, “Robert Grosseteste’s Theory of the Rainbow: A Chapter in the History of Non-­ Experimental

Science,” Archives

inter­nationales

d’histoire des sciences 19 (1966): 313–32. John Pecham, De iride, in John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva communis, ed. D. C. Lindberg (Madison, Wis., 1970), 114–23. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, ed. J. H. Bridges (Oxford, 1900), pt. 6, chaps. 2–11; see also D. C. Lindberg, “Roger Bacon’s Theory of the Rainbow: Pro­gress or Regress?” Isis 17 (1968): 235–48. Thierry de Freiberg, Tractatus de iride et radialibus impressionibus, ed. M. R. Pagnoni-­Sturlese and L. Sturlese, vol. 4 of Opera omnia (Hamburg, 1985), 95–268 (replaces the often-­ cited old edition by J. Würschmidt published in vol. 12 of Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters [Münster, Germany, 1914]). Witelo, Perspectiva, ed. S. Unguru (Warsaw, 1991). 47. Between the fourteenth and the seven­teenth century the juxtaposition of green and red began to be seen as a relatively strong contrast. Only with the definitive formulation of the theory of primary and complementary colors, however, did red and green— red’s comple­ment, accord­ing to the theory—become a strongly op­posed pair. This evolution occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Later on, marine, railroad, and road signals used this couple extensively, which contributed to the perception that they are stark contrasts.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  185

48. The only historical personage of the high Middle Ages whose surname evoked the color blue was Harald Blue­tooth (c. 950–86), the king of Denmark, and son of Gorm the Elder. On the other hand, surnames incorporating red, white, and black were quite numerous and were allusions to hair, beard, or skin color, as well as to character and bearing. 49. For example, the church fathers Ambrose and Gregory the Great (see R. Suntrup, Die Bendeulung der liturgishen Gebärden und Bezvegungen in lateinischen und deutsche Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts [Munich, 1978], 454–56); later, in the early seventh century, in the Expositio brevis liturgiae gallicanae by Pseudo-­ Germain of Paris (ed. H. Ratcliff [1971], 61–62); finally, and above all, because of its widespread diffusion, De ecclesiasticis officiis by Isidore of Seville (ed. H. Law­son, vol. 113 of Corpus Christianorum, series latina [Turnhout, Belgium, 1988]). See also Vincenzo Pavan, “La veste bianca battesimale, indicium escatologico nella Chiesa dei primi secoli,” in Augustinianum (Rome) vol. 18 (1978): 257–71. 50. Bleaching with chloride and chlorides did not exist before the end of the eighteenth century; these were discovered only in 1774. Bleach made with sulfur was known in the Middle Ages, but it was not properly used and damaged wool and silk. It is necessary to soak the fabric for a day in a bath of diluted sulfuric acid: if there is too much water, the bleaching is not very effective; too much acid, and the fabric is corroded. 51. Two great liturgical treatises of the Carolingian period do not discuss it: De clericorum institutione by Rhabanus Maurus (ed. Knöpfler [Munich, 1890]) and Liber de exordiis et incrementis quarumdam in obser­ vationibus ecclesiasticis rerum by Walah­­frid Strabo (ed. Knöpfler [Munich, 1901]). On the other hand, the Liber officialis by Amalaire of Metz (ed. J. M. Hanssens [Rome, 1948]), compiled between 831

and 843, discusses white at length and states that it purifies all sins. 52. Michel Pastoureau, L’Étoffe du Diable: Une Histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés (Paris, 1991), 17–47. 53. “In candore vestium innocentia, castitas, munditia vitae, splendor mentium, gaudium regenerationis, angelicus decor”: this is the symbolism of white explained by Saint Ambrose and repeated by Alcuin in a letter concerning baptism: Monument Germaniae Historica, Ep. IV, 202, pp. 214–15. 54. One of these texts, perhaps compiled at the end of the tenth century and inter­esting in many respects, is in J. Moran, ed., Essays on the Early Christian Church (Dublin, 1864), 171–72. 55. Honorius Augustodunensis, De divinis officiis; Sacramentarium (Patrologia Latina, 172); Rupert de Deutz, De divinis officiis (ed. J. Haacke, Corpus christianorum, continuatio medi­aevalis, vol. 7 [Turnhout, Belgium, 1967]); Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacra­mentis christianae fidei, etc. (Patro­logia Latina, 175–76); Jean d’Avranches, De officiis ecclesiasticis (ed. H. Delamare [Paris, 1923]); Jean Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis (ed. R. Reynolds, Corpus christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis, vol. 41 [Turn­ hout, Belgium, 1976]). 56. Virginitas, munditia, innocentia, castitas, vita immaculata —these are the words they associate most often with white; black—poenitentia, contemptus mundi, mortificatio, maestitia, afflictio; red—passio, compassio, oblatio passionis, crucis signum, effusio sanguinis, caritas, misericordia. See, for example, the glosses by Honorius in his Expositio in cantica canticorum (Patrologia Latina, vol. 172, cols. 440–41), repeated and com­pleted a little later by Richard of Saint Victor, In cantica canticorum explicatio, chap. 36 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 196, cols. 509–10). 57. Patrologia Latina, vol. 217, cols. 774–916 (colors in cols. 799–802).

186  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

58. This last notation is particularly striking, since green and yellow have absolutely no relationship in medieval chromatic systems before the fifteenth century. 59. More-­detailed comments on these questions can be found in my study “L’Église et la couleur des origines à la Réforme,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 147 (1989): 203–30. 60. On Suger’s aesthetic and his attitude toward light and color, see P. Verdier, “Réflexions sur l’esthétique de Suger,” in Mélanges E. R. Labande (Paris, 1975), 699–709; L. Grodecki, Les Vitraux de Saint-­ Denis: Histoire et restitution (Paris, 1976); E. Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasure, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1979); S. M. Crosby et al., The Royal Abbey of St. Denis in the Time of Abbot Suger (1122–1151) (New York, 1981). 61. See, for example, pp. 213–14 in the edition by A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, 1867). Chapter 34 is devoted entirely to stained-­glass windows; Suger thanks God for allowing him to find a splendid materia saphirorum to illuminate his new abbey church. 62. On Suger and the new conceptions of light in the first half of the twelfth century, aside from the works already mentioned, see John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 69–78. 63. On Saint Bernard’s attitude toward color see Michel Pastoureau, “Les Cisterciens et la couleur au XIIe siècle,” Cahiers d’archéologie et d’histoire du Berry 136 (1998): 21–30. 64. Let us note that the etymology connecting the word color to the celare family is today accepted by most philol­ogists. See, for example, A. Walde and J. B. Hofman, Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg, 1934), vol. 3: 151–52, and A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la Langue Latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959), 133. Let us note

as well that Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, 19, par. 17, 1) links color to calor (heat) and discusses how color is born from fire or sunlight: “Colores dicti sunt quod calore ignis vel sole perficiuntur.” 65. For the historian, this question becomes complex and interesting when the prelate is both a theologian and a man of science. This is the case with Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), one of the greatest minds of the century, the first scientist at Oxford and the princi­pal Franciscan professor in the city for many years, later appointed bishop of Lincoln (the largest and most populated diocese in England) in 1235. It would be worthwhile to study in greater detail the links that might exist between Robert’s color ideas in his various capacities: to see the interaction between the man of science, who studied the rainbow and light refraction; the theologian, who saw light as the origin of all things; and the bishop, whose design and building decisions at Lincoln Cathedral and else­where were influenced by mathe­matical and optical laws. See D. A. Callus, ed., Robert Grosseteste: Scholar and Bishop (Oxford, 1955); R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1972); J. J. McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, Exegete and Philosopher (Aldershot, England, 1994); N. Van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early Uni­ versity: The Case of Robert Grosseteste (Leiden, the Netherlands, 1995); as well as the fine book, still worth consulting, by A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (1100–1700), 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1971). The same study could be done for John Pecham (c. 1230–1292), another great Franciscan thinker and professor at Oxford, who wrote the most widely read optical treatise of the Middle Ages (the Perspectiva communis) and spent the last fif­ teen years of his life as archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ecclesiastical position in the land. On John Pecham, see the interesting introduction by D. C. Lindberg to the critical edition of Per­spec­tiva communis (Madison,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  187

Wis., 1970). On the Oxford Franciscans in the thir­ teenth century, including Grosseteste and Pecham, see also D. E. Sharp, Fran­ciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thir­teenth Century (Oxford, 1930); A. G. Little, “The Franciscan School at Oxford in the Thir­­teenth Century,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 19 (1926): 803–74.

5. This is no doubt underscored by the use of a specific vocabulary to designate heraldic colors. Thus in Old French and Anglo-­Norman the terms gueules (red), azur (blue), sable (black), or (yellow), and argent (white). 6. During the same period, the rate of appearance

2. A NEW COLOR THE ELEVENTH TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 1. Also, in funeral processions, the toga pulla for men and the palla pulla for wom­en. See J. André, Étude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine (Paris, 1949), 72. 2. On the blue of Chartres and, more generally, on blue in Romanesque stained glass, see R. Sowers, “On the Blues of Chartres,” Art Bulletin 48, no. 2 (1966): 218–25; L. Grodecki, Les Vitraux de Saint-­ Denis, vol. 1 (Paris, 1976), passim, and Le Vitrail roman (Fribourg, Switzer­ land, 1977), 26 –27 and passim; John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Mean­ing from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 71–73. 3. L. Grodecki and C. Brisac, Le Vitrail gothique au XIIIe siècle (Fribourg, Switzer­land, 1984), 138–48 and passim. On the relationship between color and stained glass, see the remarks by F. Perrot (“La Couleur et le vitrail,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale [July– September 1996]: 211–16), who rightly asks if the idea of lumi­nosity was the same in the Middle Ages as it is today, and indeed if it was the same in the twelfth century and the late Middle Ages. 4. Michel Pastoureau, “Ordo colorum: Notes sur la naissance des couleurs liturgiques,” La Maison-­Dieu: Revue de pastorale liturgique 176, no. 4 (1988): 62–63.

for gueules (red) declined: 60 percent around 1200, 50 percent around 1300, 40 percent around 1400. For all of these figures see the tables I published in my Traité d’héraldique (Paris, 1993), 113–21, and my study “Vogue et perception des couleurs dans l’Occident médiéval: Le Témoignage des armoiries,” in Actes du 102e congrès national des sociétés savantes, vol. 2, Section de philologie et d’histoire (Paris, 1979), 81–102. 7. Ibid., 114–16. 8. See the different studies that I assembled in L’Hermine et le Sinople (Paris, 1982), 261–314, and in Figures et couleurs: Études sur la symbolique et la sensibilité médiévales (Paris, 1986), 177–207. 9. Not only the knight’s shield but also his surcoat, his banner, and his horse’s caparison are monochromatic and visible from far away. This is why texts speak of chevalier vermeil, chevalier blanc, chevalier noir, and so on. 10. Words evoking red shades also some­times provide supplementary information about the knight they refer to: vermeil describes a knight of noble birth (who is, at the same time, a threatening charac­ter); affoué (from the Latin affocatus), an angry knight; sanglant, a cruel and homi­ cidal knight; roux, a disloyal and hypo­critical knight. 11. Two blacks exist in the symbolism and sensibility of the feudal age: a negative black, which evokes mourning, death, sin, and hell; and a valorized black, a sign of humility, dignity, or temperance. The latter is the monastic black. 12. In the fourteenth century, on the other hand, certain white knights in literary texts become rather threatening and have an ambiguous relationship with death and the world of ghosts. This is unknown,

188  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

however, before 1320–40 (except perhaps in the literature of Northern Europe). 13. See the complete list of these mono­chromatic Arthurian knights in Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and the Thirteenth Centuries, with Special Reference to Arthurian Literature (Oxford, 1972), 31–35. See also the examples cited by M. de Combarieu, “Les Couleurs dans le cycle du Lancelot-­Graal,” Senefiance 24 (1988): 451–588. 14. See the edition by J. H. M. Taylor and G. Roussineau, eds., 7 vols. (Geneva, 1979–99), and the dissertation by J. Lods, “Le Roman de Perceforest” (Lille, France, and Geneva, 1951). 15. See Brault, Early Blazon, 32. 16. N. R. Cartier, ed., “Le Bleu Chevalier,” Romania 87 (1966): 289–314. 17. On the birth of the coat of arms of the French king, see Hervé Pinoteau, “La Création des armes de France au XIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société nationale des anti­quaires de France (1980–81): 87–99; B. Bedos, “Suger and the Symbolism of Royal Power: The Seal of Louis VII,” Abbot Suger and Saint-­Denis: A Symposium (New York, 1984), 95–103; Michel Pastoureau, “La Diffusion des armoiries et les débuts de l’héraldique (vers 1175–vers 1225),” in La France de Philippe Auguste, Colloques internationaux du CNRS (Paris, 1982), 737–60, and “Le Roi des lis: Emblèmes dynastiques et symboles royaux,” in Archives Nationales, Corpus des sceaux français du Moyen Âge, vol. 2, Les Sceaux de rois et de régence (Paris, 1991), 35–48. 18. The rise in the popularity of azure in heraldry was paralleled by a similar development in literary and imaginary coats of arms (heroes of epics and courtly romances, biblical and myth­ological figures, saints and divine figures, personifications of the vices and virtues), but at a slower pace. These literary and imaginary crests are always endowed with greater symbolism than were real coats of arms. On literary crests and the place of blue in Arthurian

heraldry, see Brault, Early Blazon (Oxford, 1972), 31–35; Michel Pastoureau, “La Promotion de la couleur bleue au XIIIe siècle: Le Témoignage de l’héraldique et de l’emblématique,” in Istituto Storico Lucchese, Il colore nel medioevo. Arte, simbolo, tecnica: Atti delle Giornate di studi (Lucca, Italy, 1996), 7–16. 19. G. De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale en Flandre et en Artois, 3 vols. (Bruges, Belgium, 1951), 1:150–68. 20. Normandy seems to have been one of the first regions to manifest this new demand for blue clothing. In Rouen and Louviers in the early thirteenth century, dyers used a considerable amount of woad imported from neighboring Picardy. See M. Mollat du Jourdain, “La Draperie normande,” in Istituto Interna­zionale di Storia Economica F. Datini (Prato, Italy), Pruduzione, commercio e consumo dei panni di lana (XIIe–XVIIe s.) (Florence, 1976), 403–22, and especially 419–20. Unlike Rouen, Caen long remained faithful to the red cloth that had enriched it in the twelfth century. Until the late Middle Ages, the blues of Rouen were contrasted with the reds of Caen. 21. J. Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), 136–39. It is likely that the preference for blue garments that Saint Louis displayed after his return from the Crusades was as much a moral as a royal statement, given the temperance and asceticism that he applied to all areas of his life. Thanks to Joinville and several other biographers of the saint-­king, we know that in the 1260s he decided to drop “scarlet and fur” from his wardrobe, a clear indication of his rejection of fabrics considered too luxurious and no doubt his rejection of their overly bright tints as well. See Jean de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1995), 35–38. On the king’s new desire for sartorial austerity, see also Le Goff, Saint Louis, 626–28. 22. Brault, Early Blazon (Oxford, 1972), 44–47; Michel Pastoureau, Armorial des chevaliers de la Table ronde (Paris, 1983), 46–47.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  189

96. Delhi. Blue is rare in traditional Indian dress. In the environment, however, and especially in the south of India where the indigo plantations provide an abundant source, blue tones are often striking in their intensity and in their contrasts with other colors.

23. In Florence the fashion for patrician blues seems to have appeared earlier than in Milan, Genoa, and above all Venice. In the second half of the thir­ teenth century in Florence, the splendid scarlatto and the joyous vermiglio were challenged by several different blue tones: persio, celeste, celestino, azzurino, turchino, pagonazzo, bladetto. See H. Hoshino, L’arte della lana in Firenze nel basso medioevo (Florence, 1980), 95–97. 24. Although the two words are often used interchangeably, in modern English woad is most often used for the plant and pastel for the colorant produced from it. 25. Elizabeth M. Carus-­Wilson, “La Guède française en Angleterre: Un grand commerce au Moyen Âge,” in Revue du Nord 35, no. 138 (1953): 89–105. Until the early fourteenth century, the French woad exported to England came mainly from Picardy and Normandy (around Bayeux and Rouen). It greatly enriched cities like Amiens and Corbie. In later years, until the mid-­ sixteenth century, it was the region around Tou­ louse that dominated pastel exports to England. These producers profited from the decline of woad cultivation not only in England itself, but also in Normandy, Brabant, and Lombardy. In England, pastel was the second most popular import from France, after wine. 26. F. Lauterbach, Der Kampf des Waides mit dem Indigo (Leipzig, Germany, 1905), 23. Before discussing the conflicts between woad and indigo merchants in the early modern period, Lauterbach provides an interesting look at the rivalries between woad and madder in Thuringia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See also the pertinent remarks by H. Jecht, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des ostdeutschen Waidhandels und Tuchmachergewerbes,” parts 1 and 2, Neues Lausitzisches Magazin 99 (1923): 55–98; 100 (1924): 57–134. 27. Jecht, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” part 1, p. 58.

28. J. B. Weckerlin, Le Drap “escarlate” du Moyen Âge: Essai sur l’étymologie et la signifi­cation du mot écarlate, et notes techniques sur la fabrication de ce drap de laine au Moyen Âge (Lyon, France, 1905). In the courtly milieus of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, violet and dark red tones began to re­place most other red shades, especially in men’s clothing. 29. In Paris, the oldest mention of a “masterpiece” made in blue and not in red occurs in a text of dyers’ statutes produced by order of King Francis I in 1542: “and the said servants and appren­ tices of the said profession will not be able to pursue it independently without first being examined by the four judges and guardians of the said profession and merchandise, showing that they know how to make a vat of flerée or of indée and how to use the vat well and properly; and after their masterpieces have been made they will be shown in their entirety to the judges of the said profession, who after having seen them and found them good will draw up their report in the customary manner within twenty-­four hours after the visit” (Archives Nationales Y6, piece 5, fol. 98, article 2). Flerée is a vat of blue used for mild dyeing, indée a vat for deep tints, and both use pastel. This regulation con­cerning the produc­tion of the “master­piece” was reiterated in most of the later statutes and rules. 30. The oldest surviving statutes con­cerning the dyeing profession are those of Venice. They date to 1243, but it is likely that Venetian dyers had already formed a confraternità in the late twelfth century. See Franco Brunello, L’arte della tintura nella storia dell’umanita (Vicenza, Italy, 1968), 140–41. In the immense collection by G. Monticolo, I capitolari delle arti veneziane. . . , 4 vols. (Rome, 1896–1914), one finds a great deal of informa­tion about the dyers in Venice from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. In the Middle Ages, Venetian dyers seem to have had much more freedom than those who worked in other cities in Italy, notably Florence and Lucca. For the latter city,

190  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

we have preserved statutes almost as old as those in Venice, from 1255. See P. Guerra, Statuto dell’arte dei tintori di Lucca del 1255 (Lucca, Italy, 1864). 31. The large and learned work by Franco Brunello cited in the preceding note is concerned more with the chemical and technical history of dyes than with the social and cultural history of dyers. What’s more, the pages devoted to the Middle Ages are disappointing compared to his later studies of the period. I have in mind, most notably, his book on the Venetian guilds: Arti e mestieri a Venezia nel medievo e nel Rinascimento (Vicenza, Italy, 1980); and his studies of pigments used by illuminators: “De arte illuminandi” e altri trattati sulla tecnica della miniatura medievale, 2nd ed. (Vicenza, Italy, 1992). See also E. E. Ploss, Ein Buch von alten Farben: Tech­nologie der Texilfarben im Mittelalter, 6th ed. (Munich, 1989), which focuses more on dye recipes and manuals (and deals with painting as well as dyeing, which the subtitle does not indicate) than on the artisans who use them. 32. See especially De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale en Flandre et en Artois (especially 1:150– 94). His discussion of dyeing sub­ stances and techniques, however, is to be read with caution (notably in 1:150–94): not only is he much more a philologist than a historian of techniques and trades, but above all his science is not—or only rarely—drawn from medieval documents themselves; rather, its principal sources are seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century works. This sometimes leads him to describe as medieval practices that were employed only in later periods. 33. For poor quality fabrics, which Latin texts refer to as panni non magni precii, the wool may be dyed when it is raw, especially when it is going to be mixed with another cloth material. 34. R. de Lespinasse and F. Bonnardot, Le Livre des métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, 1879), 95–96, articles 19 and 20. See also R. de Lespinasse, Histoire

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  191

générale de Paris: Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, 3:113. The original text of the privilege granted by Queen Blanche when she was regent has never been found. 35. Traité de police, copied by Delamare, counselor to the king at the Chatelet (1713), 620. I borrow this excerpt and the following one from the thesis by Juliette Debrosse, “Recherches sur les teinturiers parisiens du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle” (Paris, EPHE [fourth section], 1995), 82–83. 36. Traité de police, 626. 37. I thank Mr. Denis Hue for giving me this information drawn from manu­ script Y16 of the Bibliothèque Munici­pale in Rouen: 11 December 1515, the municipal authorities established a calendar (and even an hourly schedule) regulating access to the clean water of the Seine for woad (blue) and madder (red) dyers. 38. Besides their specialization by color and by colorant, dyers were also distin­guished by the fabric they used (wool or silk, sometimes linen and, in Italy, cotton) and by the mordant processes they used. Dyers who used the “de bouillon” method—hot water—used a lot of mordant, while dyers “de cuve” or “de bleu” used very little or none at all. 39. In Germany, Magdeburg was the great center of madder (red tones) production and distribution, and Erfurt that for woad (blue tones). The rivalry between the two cities was fierce in the thirteenth and fourteenth century when blue tones, newly in style, offered stiffer and stiffer competition to red tones. However, by the end of the fourteenth century, the greatest German dye city—the only one that could be compared to Venice or Florence—was Nuremburg. 40. R. Scholz, Aus der Geschichte des Farb­ stoffhandels im Mittelalter (Munich, 1929), 2 and passim; F. Wielandt, Das Konstanzer Leinengewerbe. Geschichte und Organisation (Constance, Germany, 1950), 122–29.

41. Lev. 19:19 and Deut. 22:11. The biblio­graphy on biblical prohibitions against mixing colors is abundant but disap­poin­t­­ing. The studies that offer the most fruitful perspectives for the historian are those by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, devoted to the notions of the pure and impure. See, for example, Purity and Danger, new ed. (London, 1992). 42. Michel Pastoureau, L’Étoffe du Diable: Une Histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés (Paris, 1991), 9–15. 43. Scholz, Aus der Geschichte, 2–3, states that he never came across a German manual of dye recipes that explained that green was made from the mixture or superimposing of blue and yellow. This did not appear in texts until the sixteenth century (which does not mean, however, that it was not done exper­imentally in workshops before that date): Michel Pastoureau, “La Couleur verte au XVIe siècle: Traditions et mutations,” in Shakespeare: Le Monde vert: Rites et renouveau, M. T. Jones-­ Davies, ed. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), 28–38. 44. Aristotle did not produce any single work devoted only to color. Rather, dis­ cussions of color are dispersed in several of his works, notably in De anima, in the Libri Meteorologicorum (concerning the rain­bow), in works on zoology, and above all in De sensu et sensato. This last treatise is perhaps the clearest expression of his ideas about the nature and the perception of colors. In the Middle Ages there circ­ulated a treatise entitled De coloribus, which was devoted especially to the nature and vision of colors. It was attributed to Aris­ totle and therefore often cited, glossed, copied, and recopied. However, this treatise was written neither by Aristotle nor by Theophrastus, but probably by a later follower of the Peripatetic school. It had a tremendous influence on the encyclopedic knowledge of the thirteenth century, notably visible in the nineteenth book of De proprietatibus rerum by Barthol­ om ­ aeus Anglicus, half

192  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

of which is de­voted to colors. A good edition of the Greek text of this treatise is given by W. S. Hett in the Loeb Classical Library, vol. 14: Aristotle, Minor Works (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 3–45. As for the Latin text, it has often been published with the Parva naturalia. On Bartholomaeus Angli­cus and color, see M. Salvat, “Le Traité des couleurs de Barthélemy l’Anglais,” Senefiance 24 (Les Couleurs au Moyen Âge) (1988): 359–85. 45. On these prohibitions, see De Poerck, La Draperie médiéval en Flandre et en Artois, 1:193–98. In practice, these restrictions could be violated. While two dyes were never mixed in the same vat, and a piece of cloth was never soaked in two vats with different dyes to obtain a third color, there was nevertheless a certain tolerance for wool cloth dyed with two colors: when the first dye did not pro­duce the desired result (which happened fairly often), the dyer could resoak the cloth in the vat of a darker dye, generally gray or black (made with bark and the roots of the alder or the walnut tree), to remove the flaws of the first dye. 46. G. Espinas, Documents relatifs à la draperie de Valenciennes au Moyen Âge (Lille, France, 1931), 130, no. 181. 47. I have already discussed these issues in other studies (Couleurs, images, symboles: Études d’histoire et d’anthropologie [Paris, 1989], 24–39, and “Du bleu au noir: Ethiques et pratiques de la couleur à la fin du Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 14 [1988]: 9–22), but I will return to them a bit later in the present volume in the passages on sumptuary laws, because they are an essential element of medieval value systems. 48. On the collections of dye recipes in the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, see Ploss, Ein Vuch von Alten Farben. See also the database of all these manuals that is currently being compiled, referred to in note 50, below. 49. Liber magistri Petri de Sancto Audemaro de coloribus faciendis, in Original Treatises Dating from

the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries on the Arts of Painting . . ., ed. M. P. Merrifield (London, 1849), 129. Another useful study is the École des Chartes thesis, un­fortunately not yet published, by Inès Villela-­Petit, “La Peinture médiévale vers 1400: Autour d’un manuscrit de Jean Le Bègue” (1995). 50. A database listing all the medieval collections of color recipes (for dyeing and painting) is being compiled; it was begun by Francesca Tolaini, a doctoral student at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. See Francesca Tolaini, “Una banca dati per lo studio dei ricettari medievali di colori,” Centro di Recerche Infor­matische per i Beni Culturale (Pisa). Bollettino d’informazioni 5 (1995): fasc. 1, pp. 7–25. 51. On the history of the manuals, see R. Halleux, “Pigments et colorants dans la Mappae Clavicula,” in Colloque international du CNRS: Pigments et colorants de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Guineau (Paris, 1990), 173–80. 52. The history of the increasingly fierce “rivalry” between red and blue is clearly visible in the dyeing treatises and man­uals compiled or published in Venice between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth. In a Venetian recipe collection from the years 1480–1500, preserved at the municipal library of Como (G. Rebora, Un manuale di tintoria del Quattrocento [Milan, 1970]), 109 of the 159 recipes are devoted to dyeing in red. This proportion is more or less the same as that found in the famous Plictho by Rosetti, published in Venice in 1540 (S. M. Evans and H. C. Borghetty, The “Plictho” of Giovan Ventura Rosetti [Cam­bridge, Mass., and London, 1969]). Recipes for red gave way to those for blue, however, in the new and numerous editions of the Plictho produced through­out the seven­teenth century. In that of 1672, published by the Zattonis, blue even overtook red. And it far outstrips red in the Nuovo plico d’ogni sorte di tinture by Gallipido Tallier, published in Venice by Lorenzo Basegio in 1704.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  193

53. Villela-­ Petit (“La Peinture médiévale vers 1400”) examines these questions with regard to French and Italian painting of the fifteenth century and provides rel­evant analysis of Jacques Coene and the Boucicaut Hours, and of Michelino da Besozzo (pp. 294–338). 54. It is true that the treatise is composed essentially of reading notes that Leonardo did not have the time to put into order (although certain scholars believe that his thoughts are already well formed in these notes). On the treatise, the manuscript of which is preserved at the Vatican Library, see A. Chastel and R. Klein, Léonard de Vinci: Traité de la peinture (Paris, 1960); 2nd ed., 1987. 55. Sone de Nansay, ed. M. Goldschmidt (Tübingen, Germany, 1889), 285, lines 11014–15. 56. Jean Froissart, Poésies lyriques, ed. V. Chichmaref (Paris, 1909), 1:235, lines 1–4. 57. While it seems undeniable that between the late twelfth and the mid-­thirteenth century Western dyers made considerable progress in using woad to dye in blue, we do not yet know how this evolution came about or what form it took. Perhaps there was not a trans­for­mation in dyeing techniques but an innovation in the production of pastel itself. The oldest method, already attested to in antiquity, consists of soaking fresh woad leaves in hot water. This produces bluish water in which wool or other fabrics can be soaked. This method provides only a weak concentration of dye, however, and the operation must be repeated several times to obtain a dark color. A more effective method, wide­spread in the late Middle Ages, con­sisted of grinding the fresh leaves and letting the

the first method to the second that explains the rapid progress in blue dyeing in the early thirteenth century. Unfortunately, no document can confirm this hypothesis. 58. See my remarks on this subject in “Une Histoire des couleurs est-­elle possible?” Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (October–December 1990): 368–77. 59. See the fundamental study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), and the no less important critique of it by G. C. Conklin, “Color Categorization,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 4 (1973): 931–42. See also Serge Tornay, ed., Voir et nommer les couleurs (Nanterre, France, 1978). 60. From Aristotle to Newton, the most common linear classification of colors gave this order: white, yellow, red, green, blue, black. In this system, yellow is closer to white than to red (and not in the middle of the range), and green and blue are near black. From this came further subdivision of the six colors into three groups: white-­yellow/red/green-­blue-­black. 61. On epics, see for example J. Grisward, Archéologie de l’épopée médiévale (Paris, 1981), 53–55, 253–64. 62. J. Berlioz, “La Petite Robe Rouge,” in Formes médiévales du conte merveilleux (Paris, 1989), 133–39. 63. Another good example of this is chess, which throughout its history has opposed either a black side to a red side, red to white, or white to black. The game appeared in India in the sixth century a.d., and spread first in the Indian and then in the Muslim world: at the

resulting paste slowly dry and fer­ment. This paste

time it opposed black and red pieces (which survive in

was then formed into balls (the famous “cocagnes” of

Muslim countries to the present). When chess made

Languedoc). This process offered three advantages:

its way to the West, however, white pieces quickly

it preserved the colorant much longer, made it easy

replaced black ones because, for Western culture, the

to transport, and offered a much more concentrated

contrast between black and red had little force. The

dyeing product. Perhaps it was the transition from

opposition between red and white pieces in Euro­pean chess lasted until the end of the Middle Ages. In later years, after the invention of printing and the mass

194  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

diffusion of engraved images in black and white, this pair of colors began to be perceived as contrasting more strongly than red and white (which had not been the case in the feudal period), and red pieces were replaced bit by bit on the chessboard by black ones.

Pleasures: Sumptuary Laws and the Ideology of Moral Decline in Ancient Rome [London, 1987]). Ovid, in his Ars matoria (3.171–72), makes fun of the wives of Roman magistrates and patricians who wore garments

3. A MORAL COLOR THE FIFTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1. Not that the bibliography is small, but it is disappointing, like the recent book by Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (London and New York, 1996), which lacks serious historical reflection (this book devotes little space to the Middle Ages). On specific cities, see John M. Vincent, Costume and Conduct in the Laws of Basel, Bern and Zurich (Balti­more, 1935); M. A. Ceppari Ridolfi and P. Turrini, Il mulino delle vanità: Lusso e ceri­ monie nella Siena medievale (Siena, Italy, 1996). And see above all Frances E. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Relation in England (Baltimore, 1926); Liselotte C. Eisenbart, Kleiderordnungen der deutschen Städte zwischen 1350 –1700 (Göttingen, Ger­ many, 1962)— probably the best study ever devoted to dress laws; V. Baur, Kleiderordnungen in Bayern von 14. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1975); D. O. Hugues, “Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. J. Bossy (Cam­bridge, 1983), 69–99; and “La moda prohibita,” in Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne (1986), 82–105. 2. In truth, the phenomenon is not new. In ancient Greece and Rome, people were already spending fortunes on clothing and expensive dyes. Many sumptuary laws tried in vain to remedy this situation (for Rome, for example, see the study by D. Miles, Forbidden

whose colors cost a fortune: “Cum tot prodierunt pretio levore colores / Quis furor est census corpore ferre suos!” (When there are so many inexpensive colors / What folly it is to wear all of one’s fortune!) 3. Concerning marriages and funerals in Siena in the fourteenth century, see the examples cited by Ceppari Ridolfi and Turrini, Il mulino delle vanità, 31–75. For a more general study of this numerical folly in the late Middle Ages, see J. Chiffoleau, La Comptabilité de l’au-­delà: Les Hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–ver 1480) (Rome, 1981). 4. In the regions of the Holy Roman Empire, it was not rare for certain colors to be reserved for specific social functions (thus red for justice, green for the hunt and later for the mail); as a result, the use of these colors by commoners was limited or prohibited. It was mainly in the modern era, however, that these pro­hi­bitions multiplied in conjunction with uniforms and liveries. 5. Michel Pastoureau, L’Étoffe du Diable: Une Histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés (Paris, 1991), 17–37. 6. New studies of discriminatory marks and signs of shame would be welcome. In the meantime, one must consult the mediocre article by Ulysse Robert, “Les Signes d’infamie au Moyen Âge: Juifs, sarrasins, hérétiques, lépreux, cagots et filles publiques,” Mémoires de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France 49 (1888): 57–172. One can complete and correct this study, today outmoded in many respects, by consulting the many recent articles and books devoted to prosti­tutes, lepers, outcasts, Jews, heretics, and other marginal and excluded groups in medieval society. The following notes cite many of these works.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  195

7. S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), 60–70, 308–9. Let us note, however, that the same Fourth Lateran Council also imposed the wearing of specific marks and garments on prostitutes as well. 8. In Scotland, a dress regulation from 1457 permitted peasants to wear gray clothes on ordinary days and reserved blue, red, and green for feast days only. Acts of Parliament of Scotland (London, 1966), 2:49, par. 13. See also Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 129. 9. On the garments and distinctive signs imposed on prostitutes: L. Otis, Prosti­ tution in Medieval Society. The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, 1985); J. Rossiaud, La Prostitution médiévale (Paris, 1988), 67–81, 227–28; M. Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, 1990). Scattered references can be found in W. Dankert, Unehrliche Leute: Die verfemten Berufe, 2nd ed. (Munich and Ratisbonne, Germany, 1979), 146–64; R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); J. Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London, 1990). 10. The authors include B. Blumenkranz or R. Mellinkoff, whose studies are nevertheless important. Among their abundant scholarship, we should note: B. Blumenkranz, Le Juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris, 1966); and Les Juifs en France: Écrits dispersés (Paris, 1989); R. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1991). One can read with caution A. Rubens, A History of Jew­ish Costume (London, 1967), and L. Finkel­stein, Jewish Self-­Government in the Middle Ages, new ed. (Westport, Conn., 1972). 11. F. Singermann, Die Kennzeichnung der Juden im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1915); and above all G. Kisch, “The Yellow Badge in History,” Historia Judaica 19

(1957): 89–146. There existed, however, numer­ ous exceptions to this trend toward the uniform use of yellow. In Venice, for example, the yellow hat became red over time. B. Ravid, “From Yellow to Red: On the Distinguishing Head Covering of the Jews of Venice,” Jewish History 6 (1992): fasc. 1–2, pp. 179–210. 12. There is an extensive bibliography given in the articles by Kisch and Ravid cited in the preceding note. One can also consult the thesis, still unpublished and in typescript, by Danielle Sansy, “L’Image du juif en France du nord et en Angle­terre du XIIe au XVe siècle” (Université de Paris X-­Nanterre, 1993), 2:510–43. By the same author: “Chapeau juif ou chap­eau pointu?” in Symbole des Alltags: Alltag der Symbole. Festschrift für Harry Kühnel zum 65. Geburtstag (Graz, Austria, 1992), 349–75. 13. I use the word patrician here deliber­ ately, though today it is avoided or rejected by certain historians (despite the fact that it is convenient—too convenient?). The term is useful here because it encompasses different urban realities and can be applied both to Italian cities and to those in Germany and Holland. On the debate over this word, see P. Monnet, “Doiton encore parler de patriciat dans les villes alle­mandes à la fin du Moyen Âge?” in Mission historique française en Allemagne. Bulletin 32 (June 1996): 54–66. On the variations in cloth prices according to color, see the very instructive tables published by A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie (Stuttgart, Germany, 1901), 506–17. See also, for Venice, the old but still relevant study by B. Cechetti, La vita dei veneziani nel 1300. Le veste (Venice, 1886). 14. Many authors have been able to study the vogue for colors in the court of Savoy in the fourteenth and fifteenth century thanks to numerous and detailed archival sources; one would like to have such sources for other courts. See, for example, L. Costa de Beauregard, “Sou­venirs du règne d’Amédée

196  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

VIII. . .: Trousseau de Marie de Savoie,” Mémoires de l’Académie impériale de Savoie, 2nd ser., 4 (1861): 169–203; M. Bruchet, Le Château de Ripaille (Paris, 1907), 361–62; N. Pollini, La Mort du prince: Les Rituels funèbres de la Maison de Savoie (1343 –1451) (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1993), 40–43; and above all Agnès Page, Vêtir le prince: Tissus et couleurs à la cour de Savoie (1427 –1457) (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1993), 59–104 and passim. 15. The famous “Black Prince” (1330–1376), eldest son of King Edward III of England, whom certain authors have claimed always wore black armor in wars and tournaments, played no role in the diffusion of black among the English nobility. For one thing, he died a gener­ation too early to have launched the fashion for black; for another, he never showed a particular interest in this color while he was alive: fourteenth-­century documents do not speak of such a taste, and it was only in the 1540s—almost two centuries after his death—that historians began to give him the title Black Prince (for reasons that remain unclear). See R. Barber, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine (London, 1978), 242–43. On English clothing in the fourteenth century, see S. M. Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–1365 (London, 1980). 16. On Philip the Good and the color black, see E. L. Lory, “Les Obsèques de Philippe le Bon . . . ,” Mémoires de la Com­ mis­ sion des Antiquités du département de la Côte d’or 7 (1865–69): 215–46; O. Cartellieri, La Cour des ducs de Bourgogne (Paris, 1946), 71–99; M. Beaulieu and J. Baylé, Le Costume en Bourgogne de Philippe le Hardi à Charles le Téméraire (Paris, 1956), 23–26, 119–21; A. Grunzweig, “Le Grand Duc du Ponant,” Moyen Âge 62 (956): 119–65; R. Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (London, 1970). 17. See, for example, the explanations offered by Georges Chastellain, who in his history devotes

long passages to the murder of John the Fearless (it is even the starting point for his narrative) and to the ways Philip the Good showed his attachment to black. Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. 7 (Brussels, 1865), 213–36. 18. R. Vaughan, John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power (London, 1966). 19. On the black and gray of René d’Anjou, see François Piponnier, Costume et vie sociale: La Cour d’Anjou (XIVe –XVe siècles) (Paris and The Hague, 1970), 188–94. 20. Charles d’Orléans, Poésies, ed. P. Champion (Paris, 1923), chanson no. 81, lines 5–8. On gray as a symbol of hope in the late Middle Ages, see the fine article by A. Planche, “Le Gris de l’espoir,” Romania 94 (1973): 289–302. 21. This question relates to the intermi­ nable debates over the cultural role of images and their place in the sanctuary. After the Second Council of Nicea in 787, color entered western churches on a grand scale. The eighth-­ century debates over color have not received the attention they deserve from modern historians, despite the fact that those concerning images have inspired numerous studies. A bibliography of these can be found in the volume edited by François-­Dominique Boespflug and Nicolas Lossky, Nicée II, 787 –1987: Douze Siècles d’images religieuses (Paris, 1987). 22. On the debates surrounding the etymology of color, see A. Walde and J. B. Hofmann, Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Heidelberg, 1930–54), 151–53; and above all A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959), 133. 23. Among the major reformers, Luther in fact seems to have shown the most tolerance for the presence of color in the church, the service, art, and daily life. It is true that his essential concerns lay elsewhere and that for him Old Tes­tament

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  197

prohibitions against images were no longer valid. This explains the orig­inality of the Lutheran attitude toward iconography, the arts, and other uses of color. Concerning the general question of the image in Luther’s doctrine (there are no studies devoted specifically to color), see the fine article by Jean Wirth, “Le Dogme en image: Luther et l’icon­og­raphie,” Revue de l’art 52 (1981): 9–21. See also C. Christensen, Art and the Refor­mation in Germany (Athens, Ga., 1979), 50–56; G. Scavizzi, Arte e archit­tetura sacra: Cronache e documenti sulla contro­versia tra riformati e cattolici (1500 –1550) (Rome, 1981), 69– 73; C. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 69– 72. 24. Jer. 22:13–14. Also Ezek. 8:10. 25. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Von Abtung der Bylder. . . (Wittenberg, Germany, 1522), 23, 39. See also the passages cited by Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, vol. 1 (Leipzig, Germany, 1905), 386–91; and, for Haetzer, C. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 110–11. 26. In studying color terms (and the commentaries they have inspired), the historian should be very attentive to the editions, versions, and states of the texts and translations used by the great reformers. From Greek and Hebrew to Latin, and from Latin to the vernac­ulars, the history of the translation of color terms is full of infidelities, over­readings, and slippages of sense. Even before the Vulgate, medieval Latin had introduced a great many color terms into the Bible where the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek used only words for matter, light, density, or quality. 27. The expression is Olivier Christin’s, Une Révolution symbolique: L’Iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris, 1991), 141 n. 5. See also R. W. Scribner, Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside-­Down (Stuttgart, Germany, 1980), 234–64.

28. Michel Pastoureau, “L’Église et la couleur des origines à la Réforme,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des chartes 147 (1989), 214–17; J.-­C. Bonne, “Rituel de la couleur: Fonctionnement et usage des images dans le sacramentaire de Saint-­Etienne de Limoges,” in Image et signifi­cation (Paris, 1983), 129–39. 29. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, 155–56. See also the fine study by F. Schmidt-­Claussing, Zwingli als Liturgist (Berlin, 1952). 30. Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, 386; M. Stirm, Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation (Gütersloh, Germany, 1977), 24. 31. Michel Pastoureau, “Une histoire des couleurs est-­elle possible?” Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (October–December 1990): 373–75. 32. Several examples are cited briefly in S. Deyon and A. Lottin, Les Casseurs de l’été 1566: L’iconoclasme dans le Nord (Paris, 1981), passim. See also Christin, Une Révolution symbolique, 152–54. 33. Luther is typical from this point of view. See Wirth, “Le Dogme en image,” 9–21. 34. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, chaps. 4–5. 35. André Bieler, L’Homme et la femme dans la morale calviniste (Geneva, 1963), 20–27. 36. This vibrating quality of the color in Rembrandt’s painting, combined with the powerful light, gives most of his works—even the most profane—a religious dimension. Within the vast bibliography on Rembrandt, see the Berlin conference (1970) volume by O. von Simson and J. Kelch, eds., Neue Beiträge zur Rembrandt-­Forschung (Berlin, 1973). 37. Pastoureau, “L’Église et la couleur,” 204–9. 38. An excellent presentation of the de­ bate over color in the seventeenth century can be found in Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente: Rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique (Paris, 1989). It is still worth­ while to read Cours de peinture par principes (1708), by Roger de Piles, who was a leader of those who believed in color’s primacy in

198  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

painting. Breaking with pre­vi­ous theories and with the Calvinist and Jansenist ideal, de Piles defends color for the same reasons it had been attacked— because it is superficial, illu­sory, seductive, and thus wholly painting. 39. Calvin particularly abhorred men who dressed up as women or animals—hence the problem he had with theater. 40. See Melanchthon’s violent sermon Oratio contra affectationem novitatis in vestitu (1527), in which he recommends that all true Christians wear sober and somber colors and not distinctus a variis coloribus velut pavo (Corpus reformatorum, 11.139–49; see also 2.331–38). 41. E.-­ G. Léonard, Histoire générale du protestantisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1961), 118–19, 150, 237, 245–46. The bibliography is relatively abundant for sixteenth-­century Geneva: Marie-­Lucile de Gallantin, Ordonnances somptuaires à Genève, Mémoires et documents de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Genève, 2nd ser., vol. 36 (Geneva, 1938); Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin, Geneva and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1988), 27–84. See also the remarks in Bieler, L’Homme et la femme dans la morale calviniste, 81–89, 138–46. 42. On the dress revolution proclaimed by the Anabaptists in Münster, see R. Stupperich, Das münsterische Taüfertum (Münster, Germany, 1958), 30–59. 43. In 1666, thanks to experiments with the prism and the accurate description of the spectrum, Newton could finally scientifically exclude black and white from the order of colors, something that culturally had been a part of social and religious practices for several decades. 44. Isidor Thorner, “Ascetic Protestant­ism and the Development of Science and Technology,” American Journal of Sociology 58 (1952–53): 25–38; Joachim Bodamer, Der Weg zu Askese als Ueber­windung der tech­nischen Welt (Hamburg, 1957).

45. Robert Lacey, Ford: The Man and the Machine (New York, 1968), 70. 46. Louis Marin, “Signe et représenta­tion: Philippe de Champaigne et Port-­Royal,” Annales ESC 25 (1970): 1–13. 47. For French painting, see S. Bergeon and E. Martin, “La Technique de la peinture française des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Techné 1 (1994): 65–78. 48. Ibid., 71–72. 49. On lapis lazuli in painting, see Ashok Roy, ed., Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., and Oxford, 1993), 37–65. 50. On azurite and smalt used by painters, see ibid., 23–34, 113–30. On the limited use of indigo in seventeenth-­century painting, see the fine catalogue for the exhibition Sublime Indigo (Mar­seilles, France, 1987), 75–98. 51. See, for example, the comments by Jean-­ Baptiste Oudry in his Discours sur la pratique de la peinture written in 1752 and published by E. Piot in Le Cabinet de l’amateur (Paris, 1861), 107–17. 52. H. Kühn, “A Study of the Pigments and the Grounds Used by Jan Vermeer,” in National Gallery of Art, Report and Studies in the History of Art (Washington, D.C., 1968), 155–202; J. Wadum, Vermeer Illuminated: Conservation, Restoration and Research (The Hague, 1995). 53. On these issues, I refer to Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente; See also E. Heuck, Die Farbe in der französischen Kunst­ theorie des XVII. Jahrhunderts (Strasbourg, France, 1929); Bernard Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1965); and, for the sixteenth century in particular, John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from An­tiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 117–38. 54. As is proved by the use of indigo-­tinted paper by seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century painters for

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  199

sketches (the blue tint prevents yellowing) or for the admirable pen drawings mixing brown ink, indigo wash, and white highlights. 55. Charles Le Brun summed up the posi­tion of color’s opponents when he de­clared that color is “an ocean where many drown while trying to save them­ selves.” Among certain authors and art­ists, how­ever, the arguments were not so clear-­cut and the debate was more nuanced. See the texts presented by Max Imdahl, Couleur: Les Écrits des peintres français de Poussin à Delaunay (Paris, 1996), 27–79. 56. We do not have the space here to examine in detail Newton’s discoveries and their enormous influence on scien­tific and philosophic discourses on color. I refer the reader to the sizeable bibli­ography devoted to them. In French, two studies by Michel Blay are La Conceptuali­sation newtonienne des phénomènes de la couleur (Paris, 1983), and Les Figures de l’arc-­en-­ciel (Paris, 1995), 36–77. It is worthwhile to read Newton’s Opticks, published in Lon­don only in 1704; or for an easier approach, the summaries and explana­tions of it given by Voltaire in his Éléments de la philosophie de Newton mis à la portée de tout le monde (Paris, 1738). 57. John Gage, Color and Culture, 153–76, 227–36. 58. Several decades later neoclassical painting again grew very distrusting of color, and until the end of the nineteenth century most art theorists repeated this stance. Charles Blanc, founder of the Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, in his famous Grammaire des arts du dessin, published in 1867 and reprinted several times, wrote: “Drawing is the masculine sex of art, color the feminine sex. . . . Drawing must preserve its dominance over color. Otherwise, painting runs to its ruin; it will be lost by color like humanity was

60. Notably in his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (1832; reprint, Leipzig, Germany, 1931), 128–29 and passim. 61. On this invention, see the catalogue to the fine exhibition Anatomie de la couleur (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1995), organized by Florian Rodari and Maxime Préaud. See also the treatise by Jakob Christoph Le Blon, Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting Reduced to Mechanical Practice (London, 1725), who recognizes his debt to Newton and affirms the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow (p. 6 and following). For an extensive history of color en­graving, see J. M. Friedman, Color Print­ing in England, 1486 –1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978). 62. “La Couleur en noir et blanc (XVe–XVIIIe siècle),” in Le Livre et l’historien: Études offertes en l’honneur du Professeur Henri-­Jean Martin (Geneva, 1997), 197–213. 63. Essential here is the study by Alan E. Shapiro, “Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors,” Isis 85 (1994): 600–630. 64. This would have to wait until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Let us note, however, that in the early seventeenth century, a few authors made red, blue, and yellow the “principal” colors, while green, purple, and gold (!) are the colors produced by their combinations. The pioneering work in this area is that by François d’Aguilon, Opticorum Libri VI (Anvers, 1613), which offers several “harmony tables” in which green is the product of yellow and blue. On these issues, see Shapiro, ibid.

lost by Eve.” 59. See the list (“the scale of painters”) proposed by Roger de Piles in his Cours de peinture par principes, new ed. (Paris, 1989), 236–41. See also M. Brusatin, Storia dei colori (Turin, Italy, 1983), 47–69.

4. THE FAVORITE COLOR THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1. The expression pays de cocagne (lands of milk and honey) is documented at the end of the twelfth

200  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

century in two epics. A. Rey, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris, 1992), 439. The French word cocagne no doubt comes from the Occitan cocanha, which denotes a small object shaped like an egg (and later a candy, whence the famous “mat de cocagne”). In Latin, English, and German, the biblical expression “the land of milk and honey” (Exod. 3:8) is preferred to describe the rich pastel-­producing regions. 2. On the well-­documented and well-­studied history of Toulousan pastel, see P. Wolff, Commerces et marchands de Toulouse (vers 1350 –vers 1450) (Paris, 1954); G. Caster, Le Commerce du pastel et de l’épicerie à Toulouse, de 1450 environ à 1561 (Toulouse, France, 1962); G. Jorre, Le Terrefort toulousain et Lauragais: Histoire et géographie agraires (Toulouse, France, 1971); Patrice Georges Ruffino, Le Pastel, or bleu du pays de cocagne (Panayrac, France, 1992). 3. The oldest prohibition seems to occur in a Florentine statute dated 1317 regarding the wool arts: “Nullus de hac arte vel suppositus huic arti possit vel debeat endicam facere vel fieri facere.” R. Scholz, Aus der Geschichte des Farbstoffhandels im Mittelalter (Munich, 1929), 47–48. 4. There is a very instructive chart showing the declining price of woad in Nuremburg and other German cities from the fourteenth to sixteenth century in F. Lauterbach, Der Kampf des Waides mit dem Indigo (Leipzig, Germany, 1905), 37. 5. Dye manuals from the seventeenth century also emphasize that one never knows in advance what shade a fabric soaked in indigo will have, and that it is necessary to resoak many times if a dark, uniform color is sought. 6. It is also in Italy that we find the first extensive explanation of indigo dyeing in a recipe collection. The manuscript is preserved at the library in Como (codex ms. 4.4.1), compiled between 1466 and 1514. See the edition of it by G. Rebora, ed., Un manuale di tintoria del Quattrocento (Milan, 1970). In this collection from

Venice, despite the early mention of indigo dyeing, 109 of the 159 recipes are devoted to the color red. Later, in the first dye manual ever printed in the west, the famous Plictho de l’arte de tentori by Giovan Ventura Rosetti (Venice, 1548), there is no discussion of indigo. See the fine and scholarly edition of it by S. M. Evans and H. C. Borghetty, The “Plictho” of Giovan Ventura Rosetti (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1969). 7. Lauterbach, Der Kampf des Waides, 117–18; Scholz, Aus der Geschichtz des Farbstoff­ handels, 107–16; H. Jecht, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des ostdeutschen Waidhandels und Tuchmachergewerbes,” parts 1 and 2, Neues Lausitzisches Magazin 99 (1923): 55–98; 100 (1924): 57–134. 8. G. Schmoller, Die Stassburger Tuch-­und Weberzunft (Strasbourg, France, 1879), 223. 9. M. de Puymaurin, Notice sur le pastel, sa culture et les moyens d’en tirer de l’indigo (Paris, 1810). 10. Let us note that today, certain historians of painting still refuse to accept that past painters could have used colorants meant primarily for dyeing. And yet . . . 11. The exact circumstances of the inven­tion of Prussian blue by Diesbach and Dippel remain unclear to the present. Was it Diesbach or Dippel who wrote the anonymous Latin text, pub­lished in 1710 in the journal of a learned society in Berlin, announcing the discovery of this new blue? (“Serius exhibita notitia coerulei Berolinensia nuper inventi,” Micellanea Berolinensia ad incrementum scientiarum [Berlin, 1710]: 377–81). 12. M. D. Woodward, “Preparatio coerulei prussiaci ex Germanica missa,” Philosophical Transactions (London) 33, no. 381 (1726): 15–22. 13. Madeleine Pinault, “Savants et teinturiers,” in Sublime Indigo, exh. cat. (Marseilles, France, 1987), 135–41. 14. P.-­ J. Macquer, “Mémoire sur une nouvelle espèce de teinture bleue dans laquelle il n’entre ni pastel ni indigo,” Mémoires de l’Académie royale des

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  201

sciences (1749): 255–65; Sublime Indigo (Marseilles, France, 1987), 158, nos. 170, 171. 15. J.-­M. Raymond, Procédé de M. Raymond . . . (Paris, 1811). This process consisted of strongly treating the cloth with a ferrous mordant and then soak­ ing it in a solution of ferrous cyanide and potassium, while avoiding any copper vats or instruments. 16. Nicole Pellegrin, “Les Provinces du bleu,” in Sublime Indigo, 35–39; Dominique Cardon, “Pour un arbre généalogique du jeans: Portraits d’ancêtres,” in Blu/Blue Jeans: Il blu populare, exh. cat. (Milan, 1989), 23–31. 17. See the studies by Madeleine Pinault, especially her (unfortunately unpub­ lished) thesis “Aux sources de l’Encyclopédie: La des­cription des arts et métiers,” 4 vols. (EPHE, fourth section, 1984), as well as “Savants et teinturiers,” in Sublime Indigo, 135–41. 18. It is still a list of thirteen blues that is printed in 1765 in the Encyclopédie article “Teinture,” which repeats the list published at the behest of Colbert in 1669 in the Instruction sur les teintures. In the same period, however, the Description des arts et métiers published by Duhamel de Monceau (which devotes much space to the dyeing arts) gives a list of twenty-­ three or twenty-­four words. In addition to the works cited in the preceding note, see Martine Jaoul and Madeleine Pinault, “La Collection Description des arts et métiers: Étude des sources inédites,” parts 1 and 2, Ethnologie française 12, no. 4 (1982): 335–60; 16, no. 1 (1986): 7–38. 19. Walther von Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 8 (Bonn, 1928–): col. 276–277a; Barbara Schäfer, Die Semantik der Farbadjektive im Altfran­zösischen (Tübingen, Germany, 1987), 82–88; Annie Mollard-­Dufour, Le Dictionnaire des mots et expressions de couleur du XXe siècle. Le bleu (Paris, 1998), 200. 20. Letter of 6 September 1772, from Werther to Wilhelm.

21. In the novel, Charlotte’s gown is not white and blue but only white. On the other hand, she wears a red bow on her chest, a bow she offers to Werther and that he cherishes above all else. 22. The most recent discussion of Goethe’s opposition to the theories of Newton and the Newtonians is by Denis L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Colour (New York, 1988). 23. M. Richter, Das Schrifttum über Goethes Farbenlehre (Berlin, 1938). 24. A considerable bibliography has sprung up around Goethe’s study of color. Essential references include A. Bjerke, Neue Beiträge zu Goethes Farben­ lehre (Stuttgart, Germany, 1963); H. O. Proskauer, Zum Studium von Goethes Farbenlehre (Basel, Switzerland, 1968); M. Schindler, Goethe’s Theory of Colours (Horsham, England, 1978). 25. Zur Farbenlehre, IV, pars. 696– 99, and VI, pars. 758–832. See also P. Schmidt, Goethe’s Farbensymbolik (Stuttgart, 1965). 26. On the other hand, Goethe was hostile to blue rooms inside dwellings; they make the space seem larger but they are “cold and sad.” He preferred rooms hung with green. 27. On this novel and its reception, see Gerhard Schulz, ed., Novalis Werke commentiert, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1981), 210–25 and passim. 28. See the texts assembled by Angelica Lochmann and Angelica Overath, Das blaue Buch: Ein Lesarten einer Farbe (Nördlingen, Germany, 1988). 29. Alain Rey, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 1, (Paris, 1992), 72. 30. In Dutch the expression “Dat zijn maar blauwe bloempjes” (literally “those are nothing but little blue flowers”) is pejorative; it describes not fairy tales, but actual lies. In Holland, the blue cloak (“de blauwe Huyck”) is the attri­bute of liars, hypocrites, deceivers, and traitors (a role generally played by yellow

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garments). See L. Lebeer, “De blauwe Huyck,” Gentsche Bijdragen tot de Kunst­geschiedenis 6 (1939–40): 161– 226 (on the blue cloak in the famous painting by Breughel depicting proverbs). 31. I thank Inès Villela-­Petit for this information. 32. On the history and characteristics of the blues and its relationship to the origins of jazz, see P. Carles, A. Clergeat, and J.-­L. Comoli, Dictionnaire du jazz (Paris, 1988), 108–10. 33. Since the early twentieth century, Italy has been notable for the loyalty its sports teams show to the blue jersey. It would be interesting to know why this is so, since this color is not present in the Italian flag and, historically, was never the dynastic color of the house of Savoy or of any other ruling family in Italy. It is a mystery that the Italians themselves cannot explain. Is it because of the mys­terious origins of this national blue that, in many sports, the squadre azzurre who represent Italy are often invincible? 34. Strange as it may seem, the genesis of the French flag during the Revolution remains a little-­ studied and still-­debated historical problem. Contrary to what one might think, studies devoted to it are not numerous. I mean serious scholarly studies, because as with any subject con­nected to the world of symbols, there is an abundance of bad literature on it. It is undeniable that we still have a lot to learn about the origins of the tricolor flag. The same is true for many other flags, whether ancient or recent, European or not. It is as if flags needed to wrap their origins, birth, and earliest meanings in mystery in order to properly fulfill their functions (which are em­blematic, symbolic, liturgical, mytho­logical). A flag whose history and meanings are fully understood would be a tepid, weak, and ineffective symbol. See A. Maury, Les Emblèmes et les drapeaux de la France, le coq gaulois (Paris, 1904), 259–316; R. Girardet, “Les Trois Couleurs,” in P. Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1 (Paris, 1984), 5–35; Hervé Pinoteau, Le Chaos français

et ses signes: Étude sur la symbolique de l’État français depuis la Révolution de 1789 (La Roche-­Rigault, France, 1998), 46–57, 137–42, and passim; Michel Pastoureau, Les Emblèmes de la France (Paris, 1998), 54–61, 109–15. 35. Gilbert, marquis de La Fayette, Mémoires, correspondances et manuscrits, vol. 2 (Paris, 1837), 265–70. 36. Jean-­Sylvain Bailly, Mémoires, vol. 2 (Paris, 1804), 57–68. 37. On the tricolor cockade see Pinoteau, Le Chaos française, 34–40; Pastoureau, Les Emblèmes de la France, 54–61. 38. So much so that at the court, from the fourteenth century on, the blue-­white-­red sequence composed the livery of the Valois and Bourbon kings of France; it was worn by all of those working in the king’s household. 39. Michel Pastoureau, L’Etoffe du Diable: Une Histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés (Paris, 1991), 80–90. 40. For the army nothing had been de­cided, because in this period, as during the entire ancien régime, a “flag” was above all meant for maritime use. On 22 October 1790, the Assembly nevertheless ordered the colonels of every regiment to attach ribbons with the national colors to their flags. This order was re­issued several times until the summer of 1791. On 10 July of that year, it was decided that every regiment should have, in one form or another, a flag with the colors of the nation. The arrangement of these colors seems to have been left to the regiments themselves. It was recommended that every first infantry batallion have a white flag with a white cross decorated with three horizontal bands of blue, white, and red. In practice, the color arrangements were numerous and varied— some were audacious, others attractive, others complicated or even incoherent. It was sometimes forgotten that a flag is a piece of cloth meant to be seen at a

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  203

distance. This situation persisted until 1804, when it was decided to base the flags of all the regiments on a model some had already used: a large white diamond with, in the corners, two blue and two red triangles. The large blank surface of the diamond left space for various inscriptions and emblems. 41. The French flag, in fact, is not particularly pretty. It is certainly loaded with meaning and history—which gives it beauty of a certain kind—but it is not a visual success, either geometrically or aesthetically, as are, for example, the five Scandinavian flags, the Japanese flag, and many others. There is a simple reason for this: the three bands of color are not arranged on the right axis. In a rectang­ular piece of cloth, the division in three parts is much more natural and attrac­tive if it corresponds to the long side of the rectangle (as in the Dutch, German, and Hungarian flags) and not the short side. With the formula used for the French flag, and for all the tri­color flags it has inspired, one has the impression that the base of the rectangle, placed horizontally, has been cut up, which is unpleasant to the eye. Of course, this is the case only when the flag flies in the wind or is depicted by a flat image. 42. Pierre Charrié, Drapeaux et étendards du XIXe siècle (1814–1880) (Paris, 1992). 43. On the red flag, see M. Dommanget, Histoire du drapeau rouge des origines à la guerre de 1939 (Paris, 1967). On the white flag, J.-­P. Garnier, Le Drapeau blanc (Paris, 1971). 44. M. Agulhon, “Les Couleurs dans la politique française,” Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (1990): 391–98. 45. Yellow, a color long devalued in European traditions, is rarely used in political symbolism and emblems. It most often denotes traitors and strike-­ breakers. See A. Marsaudon, Les Syndicats jaunes (Rouen, France, 1912); M. Tournier, “Les Jaunes: Un mot-­fantasme de la fin du XIXe siècle,” Les Mots 8 (1984): 125–46.

46. To the works cited in the preceding note, add A. Geoffroy, “Etude en rouge, 1789–1798,” Cahiers de lexicologie 51 (1988): 119–48. 47. See the interesting study by M. de Puymaurin, Notice sur le pastel, sa culture et les moyens d’en tirer de l’indigo (Paris, 1810). 48. Cited by Georges Dilleman, “Du Rouge Garance au bleu horizon,” La Sabretache 1971 (1972): 68. 49. The blazer, a light sportcoat, originally came in any color, especially bright ones, with two colors, or with stripes. In this form it migrated to the Continent from England in the 1890s. After World War I, however, the bright colors and stripes were toned down, giving way to somber tones and especially navy blue. Since the 1950s, the Franglais word blazer has almost always denoted a navy blue jacket. 50. On the history of jeans and the famous San Francisco company, there are many works of varying quality. See above all H. Nathan, Levi Strauss and Company: Tailors to the World (Berkeley, Calif., 1976); E. Cray, Levi’s (Boston, 1978); Daniel Friedman, Une Histoire du Blue Jeans (Paris, 1987); as well as numerous exhibition catalogues: Blu/Blue Jeans: Il blu populare (Milan, 1989); La Fabuleuse Histoire du jean (Paris: Musée Galliera, 1996). 51. On the origins of jeans, see Nathan, Levi Strauss and Company, 1–76. 52. Martine Nougarède, “Denim: Arbre généalogique,” in Blu/Blue Jeans, 35–38; as well as the exhibition catalogue Rouge, bleu, blanc: Teintures à Nîmes (Nîmes, France: Musée du Vieux Nîmes, 1989). 53. S. Blum, Everyday Fashions of the Twenties as Pictured in Sears and Other Catalogues (New York, 1981); and Everyday Fashions of the Thirties as Pictured in Sears and Other Cata­logues (New York, 1986). 54. Gabriel Haïm, The Meaning of Western Commercial Artifacts for Eastern European Youth (Tel Aviv, 1979).

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55. Among the abundant but uneven literature one should see, above all, F. Birren, Selling Color to People (New York, 1956), 64–97; M. Deribéré, La Couleur dans les activités humaines (Paris, 1968), passim; M.-­A. Descamps, Psychosociologie de la mode, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1984), 93–105. For Germany, see the figures published in the excellent book by Eva Heller, Wie die Farben wirken (Hamburg, 1989), 14–47. 56. See the comments by G. W. Granger, “Objectivity of Colour Preferences,” Nature 170 (1952): 18–24. 57. Birren, Selling Color to People, 81–97, and Color: A Survey in Words and Pictures from Ancient Mysticism to Modern Science (New York, 1963), 121. 58. It is, in any case, the color that has symbolized Europe in the five Olympic rings since the early twentieth century and that, in 1955, became the color of the Council of Europe (and later that of the European Union). See Michel Pastoureau and J.-­ C. Schmitt, Europe: Mémoire et emblèmes (Paris, 1990), 193–97. 59. In most Latin American countries, red comes ahead of yellow and blue. European chromatic values seem to be influenced and enriched here by those of the native societies. These cultures offer complex examples of chromatic acculturation. For a more general dis­ cussion, see Serge Gruzinski, La Pensée métisse (Paris, 1999).

60. Color Planning Center (Tokyo), Japanese Color Name Dictionary (Tokyo, 1978). 61. See the different studies published under the direction of S. Tornay in Voir et nommer les couleurs (Nanterre, France, 1978), especially those by Carole de Féral (pp. 305–12) and Marie-­ Paule Ferry (pp. 337–46). The entire collection offers a great deal of material to the historian, most of it drawn from ethnolinguistics. 62. See the relevant remarks by Harold C. Conklin, “Color Categorization,” Ameri­can Anthropologist 75, no. 4 (1973): 931–42, concerning the stimulating but contro­ versial book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Univer­sality and Evolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1969). 63. The Western eye is becoming more accustomed to certain color criteria emphasized in Japan. The best example of this is matte and glossy photographic paper, which was practically unknown in the West until after World War II, but which Japanese domination of the pho­tography industry has diffused through­ out the world. The matte/glossy duo has become an essential part of the way we develop photographs in the West, while in the past more attention was paid to graininess, or to the warmth and coldness of colors.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  205

B I B LI O G R A P H Y

I have included here only a few works chosen from the vast bibli­ography de­voted to the history of color. I have left out the numerous (and for the most part useless) publi­cations that are superficial, esoteric, not grounded in historical fact, or that smack of pop psychol­ogy. Among the many works on the his­tory of cloth­ing and dress practices, I have included only those that, like the present book, deal specifically with the question of color (there are fewer such studies than one would expect). The same criteria hold true for studies of the history of pig­ments, colorants, and dyes; those repre­sented here consti­ tute only a sampling based on my own readings and experi­ence. Only those works that are useful to the social his­torian have been included, leaving aside specialized studies of the physics

and chemistry of colors. Despite their great value, laboratory analyses of art­works and textile samples have also been excluded. I have had to be even more severe in my choice of studies de­ voted to art history and painting. Many hundreds of books and ar­ticles could have been in­cluded, but I have listed only a few publi­cations that focus on the connec­tions be­ tween colors, artis­ tic theories, and social practices. These choices seemed jus­ti­fied given that this book is concerned primarily with the social history of the color blue and not with its pictorial his­tory. The reader who is interested speci­fically in the history of color in art will find an extensive bibliography in the excellent book by John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1993).

206 

1. GENERAL WORKS ———. Dictionnaire des couleurs de notre Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, CA, 1969. Birren, Faber. Color: A Survey in Words and Pictures. New York, 1961. Brusatin, Manlio. Storia dei colori. 2nd ed. Turin, 1983. Translated as Histoire des couleurs, Paris, 1986. Conklin, Harold C. “Color Categorization.” American Anthropologist 75, no. 4 (1973): 931–42. Eco, Renate, ed. “Colore: Divietti, decreti, discute.” Special number of Rassegna (Milan) 23 (September 1985). Gage, John. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. London, 1993. Heller, Eva. Wie Farben wirken: Farbpsychologie, Farbsymbolik, Kreative Farbgestaltung. 2nd ed. Hamburg, 2004. Indergand, Michel and Philippe Fagot. Bibliographie de la couleur. 2 vols. Paris, 1984–88. Meyerson, Ignace, ed. Problèmes de la couleur. Paris, 1957. Pastoureau, Michel. Bleu: Histoire d’une couleur. Paris, 2000.

temps: Symbolique et société. 4th ed. Paris, 2007. ———. Noir: Histoire d’une couleur. Paris, 2007. ———. Vert: Histoire d’une couleur. Paris, 2013. Portmann, Adolf, and Rudolf Ritsema, eds. The Realms of Colour. Die Welt der Farben. Leiden, 1974. (Eranos Yearbook, 1972). Pouchelle, Marie-Christine, ed. “Paradoxes de la couleur.” Special number of Ethnologie française (Paris) 20, no. 4 (October– December, 1990). Rzepinska, Maria. Historia coloru u dziejach malatstwa europejskiego, 3rd ed. Warsaw, 1989. Tornay, Serge, ed. Voir et nommer les couleurs. Nanterre, 1978. Valeur, Bernard. La Couleur dans tous ses états. Paris, 2011. Vogt, Hans Heinrich. Farben und ihre Geschichte. Stuttgart, 1973. Zahan, Dominique. “L’homme et la couleur.” In Histoire des mœurs, ed. Jean Poirier, vol. 1, Les Coordonnées de l’homme et la culture matérielle, 115–80. Paris, 1990. Zuppiroli, Libero, ed. Traité des couleurs. Lausanne, 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 207

2. ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES Frodl-Kraft, Eva. “Die Farbsprache der Beta, Simone, and Maria Michela Sassi, eds.

gotischen Malerei: Ein Entwurf.” Wiener

I colori nel mondo antiquo: Esperienze lin-

Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 30–31 (1977–

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4. PROBLEMS OF PHILOLOGY AND TERMINOLOGY

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5. THE HISTORY OF DYES AND DYERS

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6. THE HISTORY OF PIGMENTS

Montagna, Giovanni. I pigmenti: Prontuario

Ball, Philip. Histoire vivante des couleurs:

Reclams Handbuch der künstlerischen

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Bridbury, Anthony R. Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey. London, 1982. Eisenbart, Liselotte C. Kleiderordnungen

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Harte, N. B., and Kenneth G. Ponting, eds. Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of E. M. Carus-Wilson. London, 1982. Harvey, John. Men in Black. London, 1995. Translated as Des hommes en noir. Du costume masculin à travers les âges. Abbeville, 1998. Hunt, Alan. Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Laws.

7. THE HISTORY OF CLOTHING

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Baldwin, Frances E. Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Relation in England. Baltimore, 1926. Baur, Veronika. Kleiderordnungen in Bayern von 14. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1975. Boehn, Max von. Die Mode: Menschen und Moden vom Untergang der alten Welt bis

London, 1982. Madou, Mireille. Le Costume civil: Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, vol. 47. Turnhout, 1986. Mayo, Janet. A History of Ecclesiastical Dress. London, 1984. Nixdorff, Heide, and Heidi Müller, eds.

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8. THE PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE

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P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T S

Permission to reproduce illustrations is provided by courtesy of the owners or custodians as listed in the captions. Addi­tional photography credits are as follows: © adagp, 2000 (plate 90) Alinari/Giraudon (plate 32) Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte/Paris (plates 4, 5, 9, 10, 57); J.-­F. Amelot (plates 25, 31); S. Domingie (plates 41, 49, 50, 63–67, 69, 70, 82, 84, 85); G. Mermet (plates 13,

Ikona (plate 12) Lauros/Giraudon (plate 53) Magnum (plate 45); E. Lessing (plates 6, 16, 18, 24, 90); Raghu Rai (plate 96) Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit-­Palais, 2000 (plate 77)

17, 19)

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Bibliothèque Nationale de France (plates 26–29, 46, 59,

Oronoz (plate 38)

60, 62, 86) Bibliothèque Sainte-­Geneviève, Paris (plate 39) The Bridgeman Art Library (plates 2, 33, 75, 87) Bridgeman/Giraudon (plate 35) Centre International de Conservation du Livre/Arles (plate 55) Serge Chirol (plates 20–22) Cosmos (plate 94); Vaughan Fleming/Science Photo Library (plate 1) Dagli Orti (plates 7, 8, 11, 34, 37, 48, 76, 83) Giraudon (plates 36, 40, 71, 77, 79) André Held (plate 15)

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