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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 beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue now tells the fascinating social history of the color black in Europe. In the beginning was black, Michel Pastoureau 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 Pastoureau, 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. With its striking design and compelling text, Black will delight anyone who is interested in the history of fashion, art, media, or design.
[...]... 8:58 AM Page 54 Romanesque image was the density of the colored pigment Satan—this is clearly observed in illuminations and seen again in certain sculptures—was almost always the most saturated figure in the image, the most chromatically dense That was a way of emphasizing and evoking the suffocating opacity of darkness in contrast to the translucent quality of light and all that was divine Saint Bernard... drinking the blood of wild animals and eating their flesh in order to take on their powers and be assured of their protection It was most often a matter of the bear and the wild boar.39 But sometimes it was also the crow the raven was a formidable warrior—and this left the missionaries perplexed For the Bible and the church fathers, the crow was an impure bird because it ate carrion and was diabolical because... of all warriors, and veritable memory holder of the world Thus early on the church fathers reserved for it a choice place in the diabolical bestiary and made it the attribute of a great number of vices Its totally black plumage linked it to the negative symbolism of that color, dark, sinister, and deathly.10 The case of the bear is related to that of the crow In much of Europe, it was the king of the. .. celestial dome and Tartarus, in a dark, ill-defined zone beyond the land of the Cimmerians where the sun never appears Still others made it the underground country of shadows, where earth and sea thrust their roots; a triple wall surrounds this place of darkness, realm of Erebus, son of Chaos and brother of Night All insist on the color black for the dwelling place of the dead 33 The Bear, a Wild Animal... example, made Nyx, goddess of the night, the daughter of Chaos, the primordial void, and the mother of Uranus and Gaia, the sky and earth.3 Her dwelling place was a cave located far in the west; she withdrew there during the day before crossing the sky, clothed in black and mounted on a chariot drawn by four horses of the same color In certain traditions the horses had black wings; in others Nyx’s dark... not eat black birds Nevertheless, if the church fathers and the evangelist prelates assigned the crow to the devil’s bestiary, it was not only because of its natural plumage, the color of death They also looked to the Bible, which nearly always presents the crow in a bad light That begins very early, as early as Genesis, with the account of the Flood After forty days on the water, Noah asked the crow... word meaning the adversary,” and in the book of Job it characterized the angel charged with tempting Job in order to test his faith.2 It was the church fathers who gave this name to the head of the rebel angels, who defied God and incarnated the forces of evil The term was rarely used and scholarly; in the feudal period the Latin and then vernacular texts T After the year 1000 the color black began to... objects, and demand that animals of that color be sacrificed to them Fertile black leaves its marks until the middle of the Christian Middle Ages by means of the symbolic N “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth The earth was without form and void: darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was moving over the waters God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light... these two words express especially the brilliant aspect of the color, whether it is black or white By the same token, they confirm what the vocabulary of other ancient languages (Hebrew, Greek, and even Latin) has already taught us: to name the color, the parameter of luminosity is more important than that of coloration The lexicon seeks above all to say if the color is matte or glossy, light or dark,... their value exponentially The fertile nature of primordial black also leaves its mark in the tripartite organization of many ancient and medieval societies: white is generally the color of priests; red the color of warriors; black the color of artisans In early Rome the association of these three colors with the three social classes was particularly pronounced.6 But we also encounter it in many Greek . red the color of warriors; black the color of artisans. In early Rome the association of these three colors with the three social classes was particularly. these leaves; after the eggs are laid, the sap of the tree exudes a material that gradually surrounds the larva and encloses it in a kind of shell; that