Blue The History of A Color (2018) by Michel Pastoureau [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

BLUE

BLUE The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRES-S PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Front cover: The Wilton Diptych (detail), c. 1395. National Gallery, London. Photo: Copyright © National

Gallery, London

Translated from the French by Markus I. Cruse

Back cover: Yves Klein, Blue Sponge &lief, c. 1957-59.

English translation copyright © 2001 Princeton

All rights reserved. No part of

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Germany.

University Press.

2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /

any electronic or mechanical means, including

Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Koln. Copyright © ADAGP, Paris

Frontispiece: Johannes Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (major portion), c. 1663- 64. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Originally published as Bku: Histoire d'une coukur,

copyright © Editions du Seuil 2000

Editions du Seuil, 27 rue Jacob, 75261 Paris English-language edition published by

Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom:

Princeton University Press,

3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 rsY _ www.pup.princeton.edu

Published with assistance from the French Ministry of Culture -Centre National du Livre.

this book may be reproduced in any form or by

information storage or retrieval systems, without

permission in writing from the publishers, except by

a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Printed and bound in France 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Libra ry

I

of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pastoureau, Michel, 1947[Bleu. English]

Blue: the history of a color/ Michel Pastoureau.

P·

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691--09050-5 ( alk. paper)

r. Blue. 2. Color-Psychological aspects­

History. 3. Color--Social aspects-History. 4.

Symbolism of colors-History. 5. Blue in art. I. Title.

BF789.C7 P369 20Cl

155.9' 1145-dc21

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

Color ls Not Black and White 1 AN UNCOMMON COLOR

7

13

Prehistory to the Tweljth Century

2 A NEW COLOR

The Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century

3 A MORAL COLOR

49

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

Index

213

Photography Credits

216

INTRODUCTION Color ls Not Black and White

Color is a natural phenomenon, of course, but it is also a complex cultural construct that resists generalization and, indeed, analysis it­ sel£ 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. T here is no transcultural truth to color per­ ception, 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.

I.

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 '-apis '-azuli, attributing to the latter the powers of the former.

7

Historians are largely to blame for this situ­ ation because they have spoken about color only rarely. Their silence is the result of different fac­ tors 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 prob­ lems stand in the way of such a conception. The first set of problems concerns docu­ mentation 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 it, black-and-white photographs and, despite the current di:ff:usion of color

p

hotog­

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 p rob­ lems, because among the numerous facts

p

er­

taining to color, a researcher tends to select those facts that supp ort his study and to ign ore those that contradict it. This is dearly a poor way to conduct research. And it is made worse by the temptation to ap ply 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 analy­ sis-is to proceed as do

p

aleontologists (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 df particular objects and motifs, their distribution and disposition, the rela­ tionships between upper and lower registers, between left and right, back and front, center and perip hery. In short, one undertakes the

8

INTRODUCTION

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 epistemo­ logical: 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. W hen it is a question of the definition and taxonomy of color, the danger of anachro­ nism 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 differ-

ently 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 epistemolog y, 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 chis 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

Color Is Not Black and White

9

the pictorial, artistic, or scientific realms. .z 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, scien­ tific 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 per­ spective focused on a single culture, permitting him to study specific practices, codes, and sys­ tems 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 inter­ disciplinary 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, an­ nounce, connect, or divide. This is also the case for the dyeing of fabric and clothing, in which we see the close links between chemistry,

10

INTRODUCTION

production techniques, materials, professional codes, and the social, ideological, and sym­ bolic problems they accompany. For the medi­ evalist, 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 paint­ ings. 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 histor y. 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 his­ torical conundrum. It was little valued by the cultures of antiquiry; 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, artis­ tic, 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

I

..

,.

. ..(.,. ,

.

,

1 + AN UNCOMMON COLOR 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 Paleo­ lithic 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 fe w millennia later, in the Neolithic period, when human societies 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� ISt century A.D. + Though many wall­ paintings survive at Pompeii­ buried when Mount Msuvius 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 chis 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 trans­ mitting 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. T he 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 che color blue, or at least see it as we do. Today such questions are no longer considered relevant. Bue 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 face of history chat 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 dye ing, 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 pre­ occupations. Fabrics and cloth lend them­ selves perfectly to interdisciplinary study and

14

AN UNCOMMON COLOR

will reappear througho ut the rest of the book. The s ilence of documents and the lack of evidence prevent us, however, from studying 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 8.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 As ia and Africa. In Europe, the oldest evidence dates to the fourth millen­ nium B.C. All of these ancient cloth fragments were dyed in tones of red. This last obs ervation 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 pro bably the most ancient dye, as well as others such as kermes and certain mollusks -penetr�ted deeply into cloth fibers and res isted the effects of sun-

light, water, and detergents better than o ther dyes. They also resulted in richer and more nuanced colors than those produced by dyes in other colors . Fo r many millennia the dye ing of clo th was thus done primarily in red. This even had an effect on the ancient vo cabulary: in the Roman era, the Latin words coloratus (colored) and ruber ( red ) were synonyms.2 The primacy of red in ancient civili­ zations, then, seems to go b ack 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

3· Chinese flasks lapis lazuli) ,9th century. Musee Guime t) Paris. Asia is rich in deposits lapis lazuli (in Iran) Afghan­ istan) 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. Th ey are always small because the stone 's rarity and the difficulty carving it.

of

of

+

of

of

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; around them were organized all social codes and most systems of representa­ tion based on color. Without reaching for tran s cendent arch e­ types , the h i s torian can legitimately claim that, for ancient cultures,

Pre h i s t o ry to t h e Tw e l ft h C e n t u ry

15

4·

Babylonian frieze of polychrome brick showing processional route leading to the Ishta r gate (detail). Babylon, c. 580 B.C. Pergamon­ museum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. + In the ancient lan­ guages of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, the language barrier separating green and blue is often fluid. Thisfusion can also be seen in colored objects and works of art: the production of pigments as well as techniquesfor glazing and enameli ng tended to juxtapose blue and green, and even meld them. )

red was long associated with dyed cloth, white with undyed cloth and thus purity and cleanliness, and black with undyed cloth that had been sullied. 3 The two deep-seated char­ acteristics 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 in­ tensity 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 g reen 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.

DYEI N G I N B L U E: WOAD AN D I N DIGO 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, day-rich soil in a number of Europe's temperate regions. The principal

16

A N U N C O M M O N C O LO R

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 lacer- in the thirteenth century, when the new fashion for blue tones in clothing 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 varieties 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 chat of Indi a- also became an export product. Biblical peoples were us ing it well before the birch of Christ, but it was expen­ sive 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 chat it was different from the woad used by the Celts and Ger­ mans, 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

P re h i st o ry to t h e Tw e l ft h C e n tu ry

17

from a plant, believing instead that it was a stone, lap is indicus, because it arrived from the East in the form of compact blocks; in fact, these were a dried paste made of pulverized leaves. 7 Because they thought indigo was a mineral,

many

authors-following

the

example of Dioscorides (a doctor and bot­ 5. Sacredfish 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 magnijicent artificial blue pigmentsjrom copper silicates. Also familiar with the principks of glass­ making, they made spkndid objects in blue and blue-green Jaimee. These were usually funerary pieces (statuettes, figurines, beads) whose color was believed to have a magical or protective power.

18

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 in­ digo plants in the New World in the sixteenth century. Though the Bible speaks a great deal of 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 prob­ lems of vocabulary, the historian must be attentive to the different versions and trans­ lations of the biblical texts that are used by him and by the authors he cites (such as the

A N U N COMMO N CO LOR

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 Hebre w, 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 g reen. Where

the Hebrew or Greek have "pale," the Latin is sometimes

albus and sometimes viridis, which

in the vernaculars become

white and green.

W here 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 under­ take 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 cer tain. A Hebrew word that raised a heated debate among specialists dearly illustrates why it is dangerous to translate ancient words de­ noting materials or light quality into modern terms for color. The word in question,

tekbflet,

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 Mediter ranean during the biblical period produced a stable and dearly definable colorant. On the con­ trary, all of these mollusks provide a wide range of tones, which include red, black, nu­ merous shades of blue and violet, and some­ times even yellow and green. Moreover, once a

Pre h i sto ry to t h e Twe l fth C e n tu ry

19

+

dye has penetrated the fibers of a fabric it continues to change, acquiring different nu­ ances over time; this was especially true of the purple dyes used in antiquity. To translate tekbilet 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.

PAI N TI N G I N B L U E : L API S LAZ U LI AN D AZ U RITE 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 pro­ vides 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. 1 0 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 dearly distinguished from each other in encyclo-

6. Pa inting from the tomb of the pharaoh Horemheb, 1332-1305 B. C. Rijksmuseum van Oud­ hedm, Leiden, the Netherlands. The New Empire (c. 1500c. l l OO B. c) was the high point of Egyptian wall painting. The blue tones used are quite varied but serve primarily as background colors. Sometimes derivedjrom organic sources (azurite, mala­ chite) but more ojtm art!ficial (blue vitrio0, they provide lovely blue surfaces that evoke the waters of the Nile in scenes illustrating the passage of the deceasedjrom the city of the living to that of the dead on the river's jar bank.

pedias and lapidaries, but the same terms denote sometimes one stone and sometimes the other (azurium, lazurium, lapis lazuri, lapis Scytbium, sappbirum). 1 1 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 semi­ precious today, and in its natural state is a deep blue with fine gold and white veins. Lapis was 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

Pre h i sto ry to th e Tw e l fth C e n t u ry

21

7. Royal bustfrom Egypt made from glass, zyh century B.C. Musie du Louvre, Paris. In Egypt, as in the rest of the Middle East, blue had beneficent powers and was used infunerary rites to protect the dead in the afterlife. Blue was often associ­ ated with green, the color of resurrection, which played a similar ro'-e in Egyptian culture. Indeed, it is dijficult to distin­ guish blue and green on ce rtain funerary statuettes made from faience.

+

were required co transform the mineral into a pigment

and the Middle Ages. It is

usable by painters. In fact,

not a stone but a mineral com­

iapis contains more impurities

posed of basic carbonate of

than blue particles, and these particles must be completely sep­ arated out co make the pigment. The Greeks and Romans were careless in processing lapis and often did not bother to s eparate 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, lacer, in Islamic and Christian art. (Medieval artists discovered 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

h.1gw·1ght. 1 3

Azurite was less expensive and was the blue pigment most often used in classical antiquity

copper. It is less chemically stable than lap is (changing eas ily to green or black) and its blues are much less pleasing, especially when it is poorly process ed. 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 (lap is armenus), from Cyp rus (caeruleum cyprium), and from Mount

Sinai. During the Middle Ages it was extrac­ ted from the hills of Germany and Bohemia, . name •-" mountam . blue.,, 14 whence its

Ancient peoples also knew how to produce artificial blue pigm ents from copper s�avings mixed with sand and potassium. The Eg yp­ tians were exceptional in their ability to produce splendid blue and blue-green tones from copper, silicates, sud1 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

22

A N U N COM MON C O L O R

peoples of central Asia and the Middle East, blue was attributed beneficent powers and was believed to dispel evil and bring prosperity. 1 6 In Greece blue was less prized and less common, even though in architecture and sculpture it sometimes served as a background color on which figures were carved (as on 17

certain friezes of the Parthenon). The domi­ nant colors in Greek culture were red, black, yellow, white, and gold. 18 The Romans de­ meaned 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,

8.

COU L D T H E G REEKS AN D ROMAN S SEE B L UE? Because o f 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

Temple of Aphaea at Aegina (drawing executed c. 1860). Bibliotheque des Arts DicoratifsJ Paris. The colorless Greek tempi.es we admire today were, in fact, painted partially and perhaps even completely. In the nineteenth century archaeol.og ists and architects tried to reconstruct the original col.or schemes by examining traces of polycbromy left on these temples. Their research was translated into drawings and watercolors, like the one below. Their colors are often e ither much too pale or too bright andJail 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 th ey appear in the architectural drawings.

+

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 m­ herit the luminous legacy of the mosaics.

.

-,

24

A N U NCO M M O N CO LO R

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 analysis of Homer's poetry shows that out of sixty adjectives describing elements and landscapes 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 feeble­ ness or weak concentration. For this reason it is used to describe the color of water, eyes,

leaves, or honey.23

These philological difficulties are com­ pounded by the fact that Greek authors some­ times des cribed objects that are naturally tinted blue, such as plants or minerals, by using terms that are not part of the blue lexi­ con. 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

9· Greek Red-Figure Vcise (detail), 5th century B.C. The Br itish 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 pr incipal iconographic source for understanding ancient Greek civ­ ilization, we have the impression that blue had no place in the ir culture. This is jar Jrom true: the Greeks knew how to dye and paint with blue pigments, th ey distinguished between dYferen t shatks 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.

colors than would those of "primitive" or ancient cultures. 25

These theories, which stirred a heated debate and continue to have their proponents,

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 bio­ logical phenomenon) with perception ( which is a function of a1lture). 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

Pre h i st o r y to t h e Twe l fth C e n tu r y

25

perceived, and color as it is named. The terms for blue in the Greek color lexicon s hould be studied first as par t of the history and function of this lexicon itsel£ and then in relation to the ideologies of the cultures that use it; but they s hould 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 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. T he silence,

hesitation,

evolution,

and

frequency or rarity of words give the historian studying the color blue an extremely imp or­ tant body of evidence. The difficulty that the Greeks had in naming blue recurs in classical Latin ( and later in i ts medieval form). There were, of course, numerous terms for blue

(caeruleus, caesius, glaucus, cyaneus, lividus, venetus, aerius, jerreus),

but they were all polyvalent,

chromatically imprecise, and s ometimes con­ tradictory. The mos t common word

caeruleus, wax

was

whose etymology evokes the color of

(cera-a

color between white, brown, and

yellow); it denoted cer tain shades of green and black before attaching firmly to the blue spectrum.27 This lack of lexical precision for blue s hades reflects how little Roman authors, and the medieval ones who followed them, cared about blue . They left a gap in the Latin color vocabular y that would later be filled by two foreign words for blue, the Germanic

blavus

and the Arabic

azureus.

T hese words

eventually gained the upper hand and replaced their Latin predecess ors in all the romance languages . Thus in English, as in French, Ital­ ian, 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-centur y s pecialists thought, but they certainly were indifferent to it-if not downright hostile . For them, blue was above all the barbari ans' color. Both Caes ar and Tacitus remarked that the Celts and Germans dyed their bodies blue in order

9 to terrify their opponents .2 Ovid wrote that

elderly Germans dyed their hair with woad in order to cover the white. Pliny went so far as

26

A N U N C O M M O N C O LO R

Pages

28-2 9

10.

to assert chat Breton women painted their bodies dark blue before joining in orgiastic rituals. He concluded chat blue was a color to be distrusted and avoided.30 Wearing blue was looked down upon in Rome as a sign either of eccentricity (espe­ cially during , the republic and the early empire) or of mourning. No shade was con­ sidered acceptable: bright blue was ugly, and dark hues were troubling. Blue was often asso ciated with death and the underworld. 3 1 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 inate, barbarian, or laughable trait. The thea­ ter played with these beliefs by exaggerating chem 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

I S THERE B L U E I N T H E RAI N BOW? 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

Mural painting from the Mlla Livia, Prima Porta. Museo Nazionalt Romano Jelle Terme, Rome. + Blue tones are not very common in Roman painting, usually serving only as back­ ground colors or as the groundfor inscriptions. However, landscape 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 painti ng -that evoke gardens and enchanted paradises such as those imagined to exist in the Orient.

classical antiquity chat discuss the nature of color and its perception.35 le is true chat 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 chis discourse was picked up by medieval Arab scientists before being trans­ mitted co 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 v1s1on are very ancient and traversed the centuries largely

P r e h i s to ry to t h e Tw e l ft h C e n tu ry

27

unchanged in either Greek or Roman science, while others appeared later and proved to be more dyn amic. There were three general and opposing currents of thought about color in antiquity. 37 One belief, expoup.ded by Pythag­ oras six centuries before Christ, held that the eyes emit rays that seek the substance and the "qualities" of the objects being 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 develop­ ment 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 per­ ceived.

38

This is a hybrid theory of color

vision, based on the environment, the compo­ sition of objects, and the identity or person­ ality 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 ( discovered by Galen in the second century

A.o.),

it was the hybrid theory inherited from

Plato and the Greek philosophers that endured in the West until the Renaissance.40 This the­ ory 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 dyn amic 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

" co1or ph enomenon " to

o ccur, 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

30

AN U N CO M M ON CO LOR

not exist. 42 Though it is a somewhat anachro­ nistic 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

Meteorolog ies 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 r ays.44 These authors rarely agree, but they displ ay a great desire to know about, and prove the causes and nature o£ 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 def. . . m1t1on o f the rai· nbow ancient op inions 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 Lucre­ tius 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; Amrnianus 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 reflec­ tion and refraction or on the length and absorption of light rays. This ancient heritage of observations on the rainbow-with its speculation, proofs� and

Pre h i s to ry to t h e Tw e l fth Ce n t u ry

31

11.

Vault of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy, 5th century. + Unlike wall painting, Roman mosaic empl oys 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 divin ity.

various descriptions of the vis ible spec­ trum-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, Witelo-contributed their own observations on the rainbow in commentaries on Aristotle's Meteorolog ies and on Alhazen's treatise on optics.46 Each of these medieval authors advanced understanding of the rain­ bow but, as with the ancients, none described it as we do today or perceived in it the slightest trace of blue.

THE HIG H MIDD LE AG ES: THE SI LENCE OF B L U E As in Roman antiquity, blue had little sym­ bolic 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 por tr ayed 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.o.). 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.o.), however, these habits died out. Emperors, nobles, and their entourages adop• ted Roman customs and preferred red, white,

a...'1d purple. Green was sometimes paired with red; unlike moderns who see these as dashing 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 centur y.

32

AN U N C O M M O N C O LO R

Clothing underscores blue's marginal role m daily life of the high Middle Ages. Bue 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, chat incorporate a word or root related to blue. le had much too little symbolic or social value

to inspire such denominations.48 The oppo­ site is true of red, white, and black, whose presence in a multitude of names is one indi­

cation of their enduring influence on West­ ern culture well into the Middle Ages. We

34

A N U N CO M M O N CO LOR

12.

might ex pect 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. Early Christian priests celebrated mass and other rituals dressed in their ordinary clothes, which were made from whi te or undyed fab­ rics. 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 conver ted.49 Yet dyeing fabric pure white is a difficult process, and the radi­ ant white sought for Easter remained unat­ tainable. Until the fourteenth century only linen could be dyed whi te, 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

Saint Benedict in blue, from a lectionary from Monte Cassino, first ha!f of the 1 1th century. Uitican Library, Rome; Ms. Cod. Lat. 1202, folio 138. + In the monastic rule he composed around 540, Saint Benedict urged monks not to be concerned witb the color of the habits th ey wore. Because black was the colo r of humility and penance, however, it became tbe obligatory colo r of monastic dress as of the ninth century. This was tbe ideal, anyway; in practice, dye ing cloth black remained d!fficult 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 him­ se!f in this image).

such as magnesium, chalk, and cerussite ( a mineral lead carbonate) yielded whi tes that were always darkened by gray, green, or blue tints.50

T H E B I RT H O F L I T U R G I CA L C O LO R S 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 vest­ ments. Because the liturgy was largely under the

Pre h i sto r y to t h e Twe l fth C e n t u r y

35

13·

Bathing the Christ Child.

Detail from The Nativity, in a wall painting jrom the church of Goreme, 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 defi.nitive symbolic and pictor ial color.for water until the seventeenth century.

+

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.s1 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 obser­ vations continued unabated for · centuries, until the Council of Trent (1545..·-63). 52 White remained the focus of attention because it was

so symbolically charged, representmg mno­ cence, purity, baptism, conversion, resurrec­ tion, and the glory of eternal life.53 Treatises on the religious symbolism of colors became more common after the year 1000•

54

Tending to be anonymous and diffi­

cult to date and to place, they are more the products of personal reflection than system­ atic descriptions of practices and beliefs. T hey 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

1s

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, coccinus, pur­ pureus), white (albus and candidus), and black (ater

and n�er), 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 T hey tended to agree on the meaning of the three principal hues: white evokes purity and inno­ cence; 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 centuries, none of these authors mentioned blue.

14.

Lucifer. Mosaic, late 12.th or early IJth century, west wall of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Italy. + Dark colors dominate medieval scenes of hell, especially in the repre­ sentations of the devil and his minions. During the high Middle Ages, brown, black, red, and gre�n occur much more frequently than blue. Blue devils and demons first appear in the Romanesque period (c. 950-l l50). In this image, a blue Satan is seated on a dragon throne and holds his son, the Antichrist, on his lap.

P re h i story to t h e Tw e l fth C e n t u ry

37

1 5.

The Devil of Zillis. Detail

T his is the case even m 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 11 94_ 9 5, when Pope Celestine III had removed him from the curia, Lothar wrote a famous treatise on the Mass entitled De sacro sancti a ltari myster io. 57 Composed using the

common medieval techniques of compilation and citation, this text is nonetheless useful for us because it summarizes and completes previ­ ous medieval discussions of the liturgy. Its detailed observations about the colors and fabrics of liturgical vestments are especially 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. T his situation changed enormously during

the thirteenth century thanks to Innocent Ill's immense prestige. T he notion that Roman custom had an almost legal power over the rest of Christendom became more and more firmly implanted. Innocent Ill's proclamations and treatises were received as authoritative pronouncements on church practice. T his 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 thirteenth-century authors, and it also influ­ enced 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

Jrom the painted ceiling of the Church of St. Martin, Zillis, Graubiinden, Switze rland, c. 1 140? + The iconography of the hideous and bestial devil became fixed during the Roman­ esque 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 ,4). 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 Jasbionable color that was threatening their pro.fits. Their pleas went unanswered, and blue ceased to be considered a diabolical color.

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 he used for the feast days of angels, virgins, and confes­ sors, as well as for Christmas, Epiphany, Holy T hursday, Easter Sunday, the Ascension, and All Saints Day. Here, as before, red evokes the

Pre h isto ry to t h e Twe l ft h C e n t u r y

39

blood spilled by and for Christ and is used for the feasts of the apostles, martyrs, the holy cross, and for Pentecost. Black, the color of grief and penance, is used for masses for the

ancient society to whose company was added green, a tag-on for ordinary d ays.

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 s ays abso­ _ lutely nothing about the color blue. His reticence is all t.he more striking be­ cause Innocent wrote at the end of the twelfth century, by which point blue had already permeated

church

life

in

stained-glass

windows, enamels, paintings, fabrics, and vest­ ments. 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

PRO- AND ANTI- COLOR PREL ATES 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, depen­ ding 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

40

A N U N C O M M O N C O LOR

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 back.ground color to evoke the majesty of rulers and prelates; as a celes­ tial color sign ifying divine presence and intervention; and, even at this early date, some­ times the color of robes worn by the emperor, the Virgin Mary, and certain saints. T he 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 con­ tinued to play this role a few decades later in twelfth-century stained glass, where blue signi­ fies divine light or provides a back.ground 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 back.grounds 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 grad­ ually became the color of the heavens, the Virgin, and royalty. First, though, we must examine more closely the debates and contro­ versy 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

Pre h i s to ry to t h e Twe l ft h C e n t u ry

41

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 "chromo­ philes" and the "chromophobes:' In the years between

1120

and

11 50,

the color controversy

even sparked a violent argument between the monks of Cluny, a wealthy and powerful mon­ astery, and Citeaux, the center of the reformist Cistercian movement chat opposed monastic excess. This clash is particularly instructive because it not only concerns the role of blue in church practice, it also raises perennial ques­ tions 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" (Saint Augustine), and as such a manifestation of God. Applied to color, this idea becomes a conundrum: if color is light, is it also im­ material? 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. I£ 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 die 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 chis 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

42

A N U N C OM M O N C O LO R

16.

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes.

Miniature from a Bibk copied and painted in the late 1 1 th century in the Umbrian region of Terni. Biblioteca Palatina, Parma, Italy; Cod. Lat. 7,jolio 72. + Blue is already prominent in cer ­ tain miniatures from the second half of the ekventh 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 Pro phet Hosea.

Stained-glass windowfrom Augsburg Cathedral, c. l l O