It is now hard to imagine, but before the mid-1960s most books, and not only on art historical subjects, appeared without a speck of color. It was not as if color printing technology was unavailable, but we had been conditioned by the circulation of millions of black-and-white photographic images, starting in the middle of the 19th century, to what the French historian Michel Pastoureau calls a “black-and-white reality.” Cinema extended this domination into the mid-20th century. Who can imagine Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in color?
Pastoureau traces the hegemony of black and white to 19th-century Protestant capitalists in whose hands were the great industrial and financial enterprises. Even when the chemical industry could produce any color desired, the first objects of mass production—household appliances, telephones, fountain pens, automobiles—were in black, gray, or brown. Henry Ford is supposed to have rejected any color but black for his Model T. This moralizing of color, as we learn here, has a long history. The changing status of red from prehistoric times to the present tells much about the development of a particularly Western sensibility.
Red represents the fourth installment of a series that began in 2001 with Blue and continued with Black and Green, each bearing the same subtitle. (The next volume in the series, also to be published by Princeton, will consider yellow.) Pastoureau does not analyze the subjective effects of specific colors on humans—as did, for instance, Goethe in his quarrel with Newton over the spectrum. Whether blue, for instance, is a “cold” color or evokes “distance,” as Goethe believed, is not his remit. Instead, these gorgeous books are part of a magisterial project on which Pastoureau has labored for a half-century illustrating, by way of color, the evolution of Western social codes.
Red is “the first color,” the most primordial and symbolic, for thousands of years in the West “the only color worthy of that name.” It is the basic color of all ancient peoples (and still the color preferred by children the world over). It appears in the earliest artistic representations, the cave paintings of hunter-gatherers 30,000-plus years ago. Blood and fire were always and everywhere represented by the color red. Both were felt to be sources of magical power, and both played a role in human communication with gods through bloody sacrifices. Humans also painted their bodies red, and shells and bones painted red are found in abundance in burials from 15,000 years ago.
Like painting, dyeing was achieved in ranges of red, as can be seen in the earliest surviving cloth from the third millennium b.c.. But how did Neolithic humans get the idea of digging underground for madder root, then removing the skin, harvesting the red center, crushing it, and using it as dyestuff? Somewhere along the way, Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Greeks gathered up bits of such expertise and passed it along to the Romans. By the time of Augustus, certain regions of the Roman Empire were true industrial centers of the dyeing craft, principally in red.
Pastoureau reminds us that ancient Greek and Roman towns were not sites of white marble architecture (a misperception of our earlier “black-and-white reality”). Red was prominent on houses and in towns, on movable objects, on fabrics and clothing. Despite its high price and toxicity, cinnabar (extracted from mines in Spain) was present throughout Pompeii in wall painting. In civilized Rome, it played a central role in rituals, evoking power, danger, strength, and chaos, always more strongly symbolic than any other color. Lexicons of ancient languages indicate red’s dominance, followed by black and white.
A new symbolic color system arose with Christianity but, until the 18th century, red remained the color with the most powerful poetic and aesthetic associations, both beneficent and malefic. Roman Catholic cardinals were devoted to red, as were emperors, symbolically linking themselves to the imperial Roman tradition; but the church fathers added colors to words that in the Bible simply indicated spiritual qualities. Red was the color of the flames of hell and also of disreputable and evil figures (Judas, the dragon of the Apocalypse, the Devil and his demons) yet could also mark the intervention of God (as in the column of fire guiding the Hebrews from Egypt). Menstruation could be seen as continuing God’s punishment for Eve’s sin, but as in Christ’s blood, red was fertile and beneficial, signifying the blood of martyrs and appearing on the banners of Crusaders. Associated with wars and tournaments and the hunt, red flourished on coats of arms, and in the High Middle Ages, as Pastoureau writes, it was “the color of love, radiance, and beauty”—as on the cheeks of fair maidens—but also the color of the clothing of the condemned and their executioners.
In the 13th century, great chromatic changes began to occur, producing what Pastoureau calls a profound upheaval in the relationships between all colors and displacing the red-white-black triad that had been the focal point of Western color systems since antiquity. It was at this time that blues and blacks became major competitors to red in the West.
Blue, interestingly, is seemingly absent in the consciousness of the earliest humans, with a meager presence in the ancient world (Egypt excepted), poorly adapted to transmitting ideas or evoking emotional or aesthetic responses. Again, ancient lexicons provide evidence, lacking the distinctions that we now take for granted. The Latin terms, blavus and azureus, were imported from the Germanic languages and Arabic. Blue, the color of the eyes of the Germanic peoples, had negative connotations. Likewise their red hair.
The “silence of blue” continued in Christian worship until the creation of blue stained glass in the 12th century, when it began to achieve lexical and artistic existence. The Virgin, in earlier centuries portrayed in dark colors, now became the first person in the West to be clothed in blue, if still in tones indicating mourning. The sky appeared as blue in illuminated manuscripts. The French king Saint Louis, who died in 1270, adopted the unprecedented custom of wearing blue, and was quickly imitated by his entourage.
While painters of the late Middle Ages left works remarkable for the range of reds, “chromophobia” now entered the consciousness of Western Europe. A “veritable dogmatic and chromatic confrontation” was the Cluniac-Cistercian controversy (1124-46) regarding church luxury. In the reconstruction of Saint-Denis, the great abbot Suger of Cluny used every means at his disposal—painting, stained glass, enamels, gems, metalwork—to transform the basilica into a “temple of light and color” and “to evoke the splendor of creation.” The Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux was of a different mind, waxing hostile to the fantastical color and decoration of Romanesque churches. As Pastoureau writes, color for Bernard was “an envelope, a mask, a vanitas that men should do without and that must be banished from the church.”
The chromophobic discourse reached its height in the Reformation, which declared war on color, with red the principal target, representing no longer Christ’s blood but the folly of humanity. For Martin Luther it was emblematic of papist Rome, “decorated in red like the infamous Whore of Babylon.” Churches became as bare as synagogues as Protestants cleared the interiors of paintings and statues (their polychromy suggested idols). The Roman Catholic “theater of color” was abolished, including the church’s code of liturgical colors, and replaced with white, black, and gray.
The advent of printing in the 1450s assisted the Reformers’ cause and inadvertently generated “a black-and-white culture and sensibility.” Throughout Reformed Europe there would be a rejection of red, with Rembrandt’s “color asceticism” illustrating the divergence of the Protestant palette from the Catholic one. Chromophobia was most strongly felt in clothing, which itself was a sign of sin and shame: Clothes should not draw attention to the body. As the “Protestant style” made black and white distinct from other colors, blue emerged as the only color “worthy of a good Christian.” The great Reformers set an example by appearing in dark colors in portraits, sometimes against a background of blue evoking the heaven to which they all aspired.
This “ethical dimension of black” had already found expression in sumptuary laws regarding dress following the plague years of 1346-50. These laws, aiming to prevent ostentatious luxury and debt, created a segregation of classes by dress that likewise affected the status of red. Perhaps from a “sincere desire for greater austerity and virtue,” urban patricians and officeholders in Italy began to adopt black dress while the luxurious black of princes and kings originated in the Burgundian court, from where it was transmitted to the Spanish Habsburgs. This trend prolonged the rage for black, making it the most popular color in men’s clothing between the 15th and 19th centuries, especially for the sober Protestant business class. The legacy today: dark suits, tuxedos, mourning clothes, even blue jeans and uniforms.
The 17th century, a very dark one, was also a period of research into the measurement of light. Newton’s discovery of the spectrum upended the ancient and medieval color hierarchy in which red had occupied the dominant position. In the spectrum, the colors appeared in a continuum, always in the same order: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. As “colorimetry” invaded the arts and sciences, colors lost much of their mystery in being mastered. They were no longer felt to be rebellious or uncontrollable. For Newton, colors were “objective” phenomena.
The 18th century, a “light-filled interlude” between the darkness of the 17th and 19th centuries, marks a high point in red’s status. Paris was the city most luminous and unrestrained in colors until the revolution. Red for lips and cheeks became “almost obligatory in court circles,” even for men; but it began to retreat in daily life. Pink, already developed by Venetian dyers in the 15th century, emerged and assumed a kind of autonomy, suggesting delicacy and mystery.
It was the century of blue’s ascend-ance, in fabrics and as the favorite color of European society. Indigo from New World plantations filled the Habsburgs’ coffers, while the cheap slave labor that produced it expanded its use in dyeing fabrics, along with a newly discovered artificial pigment, Prussian blue. The Romantic movement contributed to blue’s prominence. Its deepest poetic reach was found in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Rilke.
In the 19th century, red experienced the last stage of its symbolic power, serving for over a century as the ideological color par excellence. Red flags were adopted by workers, union movements, and socialist parties. The Soviet regime made it official, China went on to inundate the world with its Little Red Book, and in 1968, protest movements carried red flags. Red is not placid—thus, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Army Faction—but today the legacy of such ancient social codes is restricted to denoting things forbidden or dangerous: “Red warns, prescribes, prohibits, condemns, and punishes.” Fire extinguishers are often the only red objects in office buildings.
Red and blue can be regarded as bookends, and their reversal in prestige from the Paleolithic era to the present suggests a pacification of Western sensibilities. In everyday life and private space, blue outdistances red and has become associated with peace and tolerance. In Pastoureau’s telling, blue is the color of consensus, of moderation and centrism. It does not shock, offend, disgust, or make waves; even stating a preference for black, red, or green is a declaration of some sort. It invites reverie, but anaesthetizes thinking. Even white has more symbolic potential. What a shock the electoral map must have been to those Americans of blue sensibility on the morning of November 9, 2016.
Elizabeth Powers is a writer in New York.
