This series delves into the captivating and often surprising journeys of colors through human history and culture. Each volume explores the rich past and symbolism of a single hue, tracing its evolution from ancient times to modern perception. It reveals how colors embody societal values, aesthetic ideals, and evolving human attitudes across centuries. This is an engaging exploration of how visual experiences shape our collective mentality and historical narratives.
. . . 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
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.
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.
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
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