Michel Pastoureau is a leading French historian whose work delves deeply into the history of visual symbols, particularly colors and animals. His scholarship explores how these symbols have evolved and the impact they have had on Western thought and culture. Pastoureau approaches his research with remarkable erudition, dissecting the intricate web of meanings embedded within these visual elements. His writing offers readers a fresh perspective on subjects often taken for granted, revealing their profound cultural underpinnings.
Traces the history of yellow around the world, telling the story of the color's evolving place in art, religion, fashion, literature, science, and everyday life, and revealing how its meaning has changed profoundly over millennia and varied among cultures
Praise for Michel Pastoureau's Green :[S]umptuously illustrated. . . . These are books to look at, but they are also books to read. . . . Individual colors find their being only in relation to each other, and their cultural force depends on the particular instance of their use. They have no separate life or essential meaning. They have been made to mean, and in these volumes that human endeavor has found its historian. - Michael Gorra, New York Review of Books
What remains of the colours of our childhood? What are our memories of a blue rabbit, a red dress, a yellow bike – and were they really those colours? What colours do we associate with our student years, our first loves, our adult lives? How does colour leave its mark on memory? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, Michel Pastoureau presents us with a journal about colours that covers half a century. Drawing on personal recollections, he retraces the recent history of colours through an exploration of fashion and clothing, everyday objects and practices, emblems and flags, sport, literature, museums and art. This text – playful, poetic, nostalgic – records the life of both the author and his contemporaries. We live in a world increasingly bursting with colour, in which colour remains a focus for memory, a source of delight and, most of all, an invitation to dream.
This beautifully illustrated book presents a captivating history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to the present. The author examines how the perception and meaning of green have evolved in art, clothing, literature, religion, science, and daily life, revealing how cultural shifts have altered our understanding of colors over millennia. Filled with engaging anecdotes, it illustrates green's ambivalence as a symbol of life, luck, and hope, yet also of disorder, greed, and poison. The challenges of producing and fixing green pigments contributed to its association with changeability, reflecting childhood, love, and money. It wasn't until the Romantic period that green firmly became linked with nature. The text explores various historical connections, including its ties to the Roman emperor Nero, its significance in Islam, Goethe's view of it as the color of the middle class, and the speculation that ancient Greeks might not have perceived green. Additionally, it discusses how artists like Kandinsky and the Bauhaus rejected the color. Ultimately, the narrative reveals a history of dramatic reversal: once overlooked, green is now a prominent symbol of environmentalism and the quest to protect the planet. With its striking design and compelling narrative, this work will appeal to those interested in history, culture, art, fashion, media, or design.
Presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of the color white in European societies, from antiquity to today. Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images ranging from the ancient world to the twenty-first century
Black, favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics, fashion designers and fascists, has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty, good and bad. In this book, the author of Blue now tells the fascinating social history of the color black in Europe. In the beginning was black, he tells us. The archetypal color of darkness and death, black was associated in the early Christian period with hell and the devil but also with monastic virtue. In the medieval era, black became the habit of courtiers and a hallmark of royal luxury. Black took on new meanings for early modern Europeans as they began to print words and images in black and white, and to absorb Isaac Newton's announcement that black was no color after all. During the romantic period, black was melancholy's friend, while in the twentieth century black (and white) came to dominate art, print, photography, and film, and was finally restored to the status of a true color. For the author, the history of any color must be a social history first because it is societies that give colors everything from their changing names to their changing meanings, and black is exemplary in this regard. In dyes, fabrics, and clothing, and in painting and other art works, black has always been a forceful and ambivalent shaper of social, symbolic, and ideological meaning in European societies.
. . . a rich volume, intelligently illustrated. . . . With sure-footed scholarship, trenchant opinions, Michel Pastoureau goes beyond a perfunctory visit: he makes us realize the importance of this material and avoids the errors of a number of other historians.--Le Monde
From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear's centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends. Michel Pastoureau considers how this once venerated creature was deposed by Christianity and continued to sink lower in the symbolic bestiary before rising again in Pyrrhic triumph as the teddy bear.
What do prostitutes, referees, and Renaissance clowns have in common? They all wear stripes, and The Devil's Cloth tells us why. Pastoureau's lively study of stripes offers a unique perspective on the evolution of fashion, taste, and visual codes in Western culture. schovat popis
The book explores the rich and evolving significance of pink throughout history, revealing its transformation from a masculine hue in the eighteenth century to its modern feminization linked to the Barbie doll. It details the development of pink pigments, the cultural symbolism attached to the color, and its associations with various themes such as softness, pleasure, and sexuality. With captivating illustrations, it offers a comprehensive visual and social history of pink in art, fashion, literature, and everyday life from antiquity to the present.