It seems that art can’t exist without colors. They allow artists to imitate reality, draw piercing eyes, illustrate metaphors and hidden meanings. The history of color in art is a fascinating story of the changeability of human tastes and the power of our convictions, associations and . . . stereotypes.
The Greek Tetrad of Colours
Nonetheless, the image of naked marble has proven particularly lasting. The entirety of neoclassical aesthetics was based on bare marble—from Canova’s Amor and Psyche, to the White House. Whiteness was associated with beauty and good taste, while color was barbarity, debauchery, and vulgarity. There is even an erotic subtext: male, distinct whiteness was juxtaposed with sensual, blurry colours. According to the New Yorker, Johann Winckelmann, known as the father of German art history, declared in the eighteenth century that “the whiter the body, the more beautiful it is”. While examining works of art excavated in Pompeii and Herculaneum, he noticed the remnants of pigments. He could not come to terms with this; he came to the conclusion that the ginger-haired Artemis in red sandals must have been created by the Etruscans. Even Goethe insisted that only barbarians, simpletons, and children had a weakness for color. Sophisticated people avoided garish-colored clothes and on an everyday basis surrounded themselves with toned-down shades.
To make us realize that white Aphrodite and Apollo have nothing to do with ancient Greece, scholars have reconstructed original polychromes. But it is difficult to get rid of the preconceptions nurtured for such a long time. Rodin came clean —his heart told him that sculptures could never have been colorful . . . There were even cases when art dealers and restorers aided the predilections of their contemporaries by cleaning ancient works of art of the remnants of pigments. In the 1930s, the British Museum polished the famous Elgin Marbles into a pearly white.
Blue
The volatile fate of colors can be examined using blue as an example. Since World War II, multiple surveys in Western countries have shown blue to be people’s favorite color. But the popularity of blue came late. Several ancient languages don’t even have a term for it. Poets described sky or sea waves, but they didn’t see blue in them at all. For Romans, it was an outright barbaric color. Tacitus and Caesar said that Celts and Germanic peoples painted themselves blue to scare off their attackers. Blue eyes were practically perceived as a physical defect—they meant a savage or a woman of easy virtue. Only Egyptians liked blue because they believed it brought good luck in the afterlife. Supposedly they produced this pigment, like glass, from a mixture of limestone, sand, and minerals containing copper. The resulting glaze, ground and mixed with egg whites or glue, produced a pale blue shade and was the first synthetic pigment in history.
Blue only got some appreciation in the Middle Ages. God was associated with light, and light was blue. Pale shades started appearing in the backgrounds of illuminations, and blue glass—next to ruby-colored glass—started getting inset into Gothic windows. At dusk, reds seem almost black, while blues and purples stay visible for longer. The importance of blue in the art of Gothic stained-glass windows is obvious at the very least by its number of shades: from pearl-blue through to turquoise, to saturated sapphire blue. Blue became the color of firmament. Haloes were also often blue, especially the square nimbuses used to distinguish the living saints. Cherubs, the angels of divine wisdom, were equipped with blue wings. But what made blue truly fashionable was the Virgin Mary’s cloak. In the twelfth century, the Capetian dynasty adopted golden lilies on a blue background as their crest. And as such, blue—once considered barbarian—reached the status of a royal color and triumphantly joined black, red, and white in heraldry. In a natural way, it started to complement, but also rival red.
In the fifteenth century, the Renaissance takeover contributed to blue’s growing status. Instead of a gold background in frescoes and panel paintings, bright skies appeared. The Reformation also boosted the importance of blue. Reformation followers advocated sternness, so the painterly palette and clothing were dominated by grey, along with a discreet blue. It wasn’t just its shades that were changing, but also how they were interpreted. Werther wore a blue tailcoat when he had his first dance with Charlotte in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Crowds of exalted young men started wearing the same. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, blue became a romantic and melancholic color impling good. It was also linked to alcohol—in the Middle Ages, dyers were advised to use a drunkard’s urine as a color fixer. In English, the blue hour means the end of the working day, when workers, instead of going straight home, stop for a drink.
In the twentieth century, blue, next to black and grey, dominated clothing. It was the color used for uniforms belonging to policemen, sailors, firemen, customs officers, and postmen. In fact, anyone, young and old, who wore jeans. Invented in the nineteenth century as trousers for Californian workers, jeans became a student staple one hundred years later. In the 1980s, they started to lose popularity in the West, but in Eastern Europe became a symbol of anti-communist revolt. Yet, as noted by Michel Pastoureau, a scholar researching the history of color, jeans could not play this role for long, because . . . they are blue. Blue wasn’t a color of dissent, but rather of consensus and peace. No wonder it can be found on the flags of the European Union, NATO, and the United Nations.
Red
Not all languages of the world have the same names—or the same amount of names—for colors. Some cultures only distinguish between white and black—light and darkness. The next most common color referenced in languages around the world is red. It is also the first color newborns are able to see. Red is the eternal enemy of blue. This antagonism even transferred to dyers producing the two pigments. In Thuringia, the red merchants attempted to convince stained-glass painters to paint devils in blue, to put people off the rival color. In the Middle Ages, red was associated with war and was the color dedicated to men. Women often wore humble blue. Today, everything is reversed: toned-down blue works better in men’s suits, while red dresses are a symbol of a women’s fire and strength.
Red is the color above all colors. It is tempting and forbidden; it signals danger, it is a sign of passion and compassion, martyrdom and revolution. In the nineteenth century, brides in Europe wore red (Indian women still get married in red dresses). But red dresses were also worn by prostitutes; the color branded them and distinguished them from (what society considered) decent women. Red is caritas, but also eros—carnal love, sinful and lustful. In medieval symbolism, red was the only color whose shade mattered. When dark and saturated, it was the color of power.
“The purple of martyr Saint Agnes in Rome, Justinian and Theodora in Ravenna, Pantocrator in Sicilian mosaics—it is a very special color, a dark violet with a brown hue, in which the red is deeply suppressed,” wrote Polish art historian Maria Rzepińska. On the other hand, Mary Magdalene is often depicted wearing a red cloak and “it is always the ‘plain’ red, cinnabar red, and not the mysterious purple, the imperial color.” The color of the cloak distinguished the controversial saint, the fallen woman who found Jesus.
In Christianity, red symbolizes the sacrifice of Christ, passion and the Divine Mercy. And blood also means crimes, carnal sins and Biblical prohibitions. Starting from the mid-thirteenth century, Cardinals have worn purple robes—they adapted the color of the belt worn by Roman senators. In the late Middle Ages, popes wore red robes. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that Pope Pius V changed the color to white—the color of a Dominican habit.
Green
The color of life, youth, and hope. The color of lizards and emerald gems, but also of dragons, absinthe, and poison. You can go green with envy or be a greenhorn—unexperienced or inept. Across centuries, green has been at times the color of anathema; at others the color of safety, serenity, the politically engaged or neutral. The Greeks didn’t have a precise term for green—the word glaukos refers to greenish things, but also means a shade of blue that’s closer to grey, livid, or even a bit yellow or brown. Homer used this term to describe sea water, as well as the color of eyes, leaves, and honey. Latin developed more precise terms for green, perhaps because of the higher sensitivity to nature in Roman culture, with its predominantly rural character. Viridis, from which terms for green in Romance languages are derived, is related to words meaning life, growth, masculinity and strength. The Romans adopted recipes for green pigments from the Celts and Germanic people. However, this color did not play an important role in their everyday lives—exactly because it was associated with the tastes of so-called barbarians. On the other hand, lasting and luminous shades of green were difficult to create, which explains why green started being perceived as a capricious color—it got linked to everything that was fleeting, uncertain, and changing. It was the color of chance, of fate; couples in love wore it, but it also featured prominently on the attire of jesters and hunters. A long time before the introduction of the dollar, gaming tables were painted green.
But green can also be cursed. Supposedly emeralds, considered unlucky, don’t sell as well as other precious stones. Stage actors refuse to act in green costumes, because the French playwright Molière was wearing one when he collapsed on stage and died soon after. Though these can all be brushed off as superstitions, there is a pinch of wisdom behind them. Originally, green paints derived from copper compounds were highly toxic. According to one hypothesis, Napoleon’s death was caused by wallpaper in Scheele’s Green, which was an arsenic compound. Queen Victoria had an obsessive fear of green and composer Franz Schubert was ready to run to the other side of the world to avoid this “accursed color” (in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, green is the color of jealousy—the main protagonist falls in love with the maid of the mill and gives her a green ribbon, but the girl chooses a hunter, also dressed in green). In the moral hierarchy of colors, green was usually perceived as the color of deceit, unworthy of a rightful citizen or a pious Christian. No wonder it was so loved by that madman, Nero: during horse races, he always placed his bets on the stable that was green, he dressed in green and gorged on leeks. During breaks between gladiator fights, he used to bring a huge green emerald to his eye and look through it.
However, not all of history has been so cruel to the color. The Middle Ages also cultivated positive associations with green: tables in scriptoria were painted in toned-down shades of the color and a powder made of green stones was used to produce eye ointment. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk and professor at a university in Paris, ascribed its amazing properties to the fact that green is located between the elements: “Gréene colour is most liking to ye sight, for comming togethers of firy parts & of earth. For brightnes of fire yt is in gréene is temperate, & pleaseth ye sight.” Green was often considered a transitional color, good as a background. The fifteenth-century art theorist Cennino Cennini provided a recipe for green paper and stressed that this was best for “drawing on with shade-colors, and with white.” Goethe, who was an advocate of blue, in The Theory of Colours recommended using green for wallpaper, especially in the bedroom. Theologians, who set up liturgical colors, clearly also thought green to be a humble color, since they assigned it to Sundays in Ordinary Time.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, green was commonly seen as the opposite of red. Vincent van Gogh, telling his brother about his freshly finished The Night Café, highlighted the contrasts: “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. […] So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis V green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.”
As a mixed, gentle color opposed to red, green found its way into pedestrian crossings and traffic lights. But the contrast is also a cultural phenomenon—the juxtapositions of green and red or red and yellow are particularly sharp to our eyes. However, in the Middle Ages the combination of green and carmine seemed gentle, while yellow next to green were seen as a clash.
Some are surprised that the association of green with nature was an invention of Romanticism. Before then, nature was described by four elements: fire, air, earth and water. In contemporary times, green has been particularly appreciated, especially when it comes to the natural world—it is linked to the protection of the environment and everything clean and healthy. It is no more a cursed, devilish color; it is associated with a liberal lifestyle in accordance with nature. When spring comes, it’s good to exercise one’s green thumb or lay on green grass.
Yellow
Yellow is as lucky and at the same time, as accursed, as green. The Romans valued the color; yellow robes were worn on festive occasions like weddings. In the Middle Ages, painters used yellow instead of gold out of thriftiness. Associated with light and warmth, it could have become a divine color. But the positive connotations of yellow were already snatched up by gold. By comparison, yellow is a liar. It smells of sulphur, it is unhealthy and as bitter as bile, courtesans were forced to wear yellow symbols in the Renaissance period. Vermeer’s Procuress wears a canary yellow jacket. More or less from the mid-twelfth century onwards, yellow was the color of sin, falsehood, and betrayal. Just recall Judas’s saffron-colored cloak, painted by Giotto in the Capella Dell’Arena in Padua. The ginger-haired twelfth apostle wearing yellow is a Jew from an antisemite’s dream. Yellow excludes and stigmatizes. The Nazis who forced Jews leaving ghettos to wear yellow bands and stars were following a dishonorable tradition. From the Middle Ages, yellow was also the color of madness, and later, a symbol of it (recall nineteenth-century short story, The Yellow Wallpaper—Ed. Note). The complex symbolism of yellow was used by Ewa Kuryluk in her Yellow Installations, conceived over the span of two decades. She paid homage to her dearest ones, branded with mental illness and the history of the Holocaust. “Mum used to have yellow hallucinations: a swarm of yellow birds, yellow snow, yellow smoke from the chimney,” the artist recalled.
We rarely choose it in everyday life. It’s too harsh, daring, urgent. A yellow car is probably a millionaire’s whim or some weirdo’s four wheels. In polls on favourite colors, yellow is at the tail end. It only precedes wishy-washy browns. But possibly it is culture that spoils our tastes. Because children like yellow—they love drawing yellow suns and warm yellow light in the windows of houses.
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