Colour in the Middle Ages

https://www.medievalists.net/2024/06/colour-middle-ages/

by Pamar • 2 years ago

154 106 2 years ago

wongarsu5• 2 years ago

One thing I find fascinating is how crass many medieval objects and garments are colored, often to the point they are offensive to our modern tastes. Our fiction depicts the Middle Ages as a mix of gray and earth tones, but reality is the opposite: people in the Middle Ages loved colors (just as the people before them). It's the wide availability of synthetic colors that lead to us using them less and less in modern times, preferring everything to be muted, gray or colored in black, off-white and earth tones.

ddmf• 2 years ago

I love the modern term of "greige" for the grey home decor we see in a lot of homes for sale of late.

ndsipa_pomu• 2 years ago

Presumably somewhere between "grey" and "beige"

KineticLensman2• 2 years ago

preferring everything to be muted, gray or colored in black, off-white and earth tones

My nephew's plastic toys disagree, as do my sister-in-laws clothes. Also, Barbie.

[Edit] This was a bit tongue-in-cheek but I think the point stands. There is massive diversity about what colours and colour combinations are acceptable in different contexts and to different groups of people. I would agree that is currently a trend for grey furnishings in domestic contexts but society as a whole has never had a wider range of colours on show, I suspect, certainly if you consider all the new possibilities delivered by screens.

grotorea2• 2 years ago

I don't know how old your sister-in-law is, but children are probably the biggest exception to "discrete colours" in modern culture.

wongarsu5• 2 years ago

Yes, toys follow a different color palette. The acceptable colors for toys are white, black (only for rubber parts), the four colors red, yellow, green and blue in full saturation, as well as their pastel variants (baby pink, baby yellow, baby green, baby blue). If you justifiably need more colors you can even use all seven official "colors of the rainbow", as well as their pastel variants (side note: how many colors are in a rainbow, and which ones, is another great entry point to the history of color).

But even there tastes are shifting: saturated colors are now associated with cheap plastic (despite brightly colored toys far predating cheap plastic). If you want to signal quality you have to show natural wood grain (only light wood colors though) or gunmetal grey.

wongarsu5• 2 years ago

Re your edit about never showing a wide range of colors:

The range of colors has certainly increased. But we use the extreme colors in much more moderation, and even the use of colors overall is on a decreasing trend. Sure, there is still plenty of red, green and blue in energy drink cans. But on the other hand cars have lost all colors over the last couple decades. Home exteriors used to be painted in red or yellow tones in the 1930s but are predominantly white with black or gray accents now. Interior walls and furniture has become less colorful. And the counter-movements to making everything black and white make everything wood-colored and earth-toned, not colorful. And all of these examples are just about what happened in the timeframe from our grandparent's childhood until now. In the Middle Ages gaudy green chairs were fashionable.

sva_• 2 years ago

Similar to how spices in foods seemed to have been more popular when there was less of an abundance in western cuisine.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

I see a lot more spices in food in the US over the last several decades.

johncoltrane6• 2 years ago

20 years ago, a friend of mine participated to the renovation of an old chapel somewhere in the south of France. The initial plan was to clean it up and make it all nice and stone-colored, as churches should be, but the first scrubbings revealed lots of pigment traces, enough to get a good idea of what it looked like originally. The sky was deep blue, the saints had skin color and red lips, etc.

The project took a complicated turn because some of the stakeholders wanted the chapel to look like a serious chapel while others wanted it to look "original".

The "original" camp prevailed but it was an uphill battle.

jeltz• 2 years ago

Do you have any photos of the result?

ninalanyon• 2 years ago

In England at least it was only after Reformation that the colour was removed from churches. And this has been known forever.

"Before the Reformation, English churches were typically ornate and richly decorated," [1]

So it's a surprise to me that anyone would believe that an old chapel in the south of France would necessarily be austere and plain, I would expect rather the opposite. And there are plenty of modern churches in Catholic countries that are very richly decorated today.

[1] https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/a-level/history/how-did-t...

Isamu• 2 years ago

The restoration of the Sistine Chapel also attracted a lot of criticism because people liked the dark and mysterious muted images, and when cleaned it was revealed that Michelangelo used vibrant color.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_of_the_Sistine_C...

floxy2• 2 years ago

I think there are some missing words or phrases here. Was this the restoration of a mural in an old chapel?

mountainb• 2 years ago

Part of the reason for this is also is that the underlying clothes and fabrics were also very very expensive relative to what they became in the post-industrial world. So you would want to show off what you had.

Pamar• 2 years ago

In his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Kerr_(Japanologist) explained that ancient Japanese works, once restored to the original looks, often would look bright and garish to modern taste, no matter if you were Japanese or coming from a Western culture.

In his opinion, the choice of colors was a consequence of poor light conditions inside ancient building. Not just because at night you had only oil lamps or similar sources, but because glass windows were not available either, so wall openings were smaller, and ofter protected by blinds or paper screens to mitigate the humid warm climate.

I suppose same applies to ancient buildings in other parts of the world, too.

beardyw2• 2 years ago

I am not sure white, grey and black are colours at all, since they are just degrees of illumination. To me a colour has distinct series of wavelengths. Maybe I'm wrong.

grotorea2• 2 years ago

Everything in a paint store is a colour!

kanbara• 2 years ago

our eyes invent colors that aren’t even there “physically” in tbe true sense of the word. and colours are even cultural, so there is a lot of leeway with what a colour even is. even in genders there are differences in cultural colour perception.

non-spectral colours are very real: greyscale, pink, brown, and purple which are mixes of multiple wavelengths of light

then you have things like:

* green is blue (japan/china)

* homer’s wine dark sea

* colour word development which has some near-universal linguistic phenomenon where the start is light and dark words, then red, and there’s a list on and on.

gsich2• 2 years ago

homer’s wine dark sea

easily imaginable for the sea at sunset.

AlotOfReading2• 2 years ago

What you're referring to is usually called a spectral color. It's the most common form of color, but it's not the entirety of the term. Whites and grays are the achromatic colors.

Metameric colors can have different spectra even when they look identical. You're probably familiar with magenta, a color that has no monochromatic wavelength. More exotic is stygian blue, a color that has no wavelengths at all.

Different people don't perceive the same wavelengths identically either. For example, colorblindness exists and there are genes which slightly shift the opsin sensitivity curves in your eyes.

Color is a very, very deep rabbit hole.

wongarsu5• 2 years ago

The obvious follow-up questions: Is magenta a color, despite requiring two wavelengths? Is brown a color despite being just dark orange? Is metallic gray different from gray (i.e. does light scattering matter)? What about subsurface light scattering, like in skin or translucent plastic?

Color is a bit like our classification of continents: it's useful, but only makes sense if you don't look too hard. And maybe it's fine if webdesign and miniature painting have different opinions on what makes a color a color.

nzach• 2 years ago

For context, Technology Connections did an entire video on the brown color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

beardyw2• 2 years ago

All colours (pretty much) are a wide spectrum with varying amounts of every wavelength. Our eyes do a pretty poor job, compared to sound to our ears, of separating out the wavelengths, just boiling them down to a single hue.

The folks examining fine art do a full spectral analysis of paint to verify it's authenticity. Something the human eye can't do.

steveBK123• 2 years ago

This would be an overcomplication in every day vernacular.

What color shirts do you have? Oh we have green, blue, red and none.

How many types of none? Oh we have bright illumination, dark illumination, and 50%.

Telemakhos• 2 years ago

Michel Pastoureau’s book on blue begins by highlighting the neglect this colour faced among the ancient Greeks and Romans, who rarely wrote about it or used it. He even explores the intriguing question of whether ancient peoples could perceive blue at all!

The first synthetic pigment was calcium copper silicate or Egyptian Blue [1], so called because the Egyptians manufactured it from at least the fourth millennium BC; from the Egyptians, the rest of the Mediterranean learned to make and use this artificial pigment, so that it is widely attested in art from the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Greeks (if distinguishable from the Mycenaeans), Romans, and so forth up until the middle ages. Given that Egyptian Blue is a synthetic pigment that must be manufactured by human skill and ingenuity, it boggles the mind that people keep falling for this idea that ancient peoples could not perceive blue. I have no idea how someone could write a book suggesting that ancient people did not write about (Plato certainly did) or use a color that they in fact synthesized, manufactured, and used in art. The ancient Greek word for the color is κυανοῦς, the Latin caeruleus (but of the eyes, caesius).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue

sdenton42• 2 years ago

Thanks for this! I've been painting a bunch of ancients miniatures lately and feeling a bit sheepish about using some blue. Good to know some additional background.

AlotOfReading2• 2 years ago

Egyptians in particular went bonkers for blue. Everything and anything they could make out of faïence tended to use shockingly bright blue hues to mimic Lapis, much as modern products come in gold to appear "premium".

jmyeet• 2 years ago

Perhaps this isn't entirely accurate, but there was a time before "zero" as a concept was invented. You don't need it to count. You don't need it to do arithmetic on an abacus. Saying "there are 0 apples" I guess didn't compute. Instead it was "I have no apples". So zero really incorporated the absence of something into the number system and that wasn't always the case.

I wonder if blue was like that for ancient people. It's not that they couldn't see the blue things but that blue, given that it was the color of the sky and arguably the sea, wasn't really a colour at all. It was the absence of colour.

Essentially blue was a baseline and wasn't thought of as a colour at all. Or at least that's the way I've always thought about it.

nemomarx3• 2 years ago

if you look into Japanese history, they used one word for what we would call blue and green. so they could surely see it, but they might think of it as a special case of green, like how pink and orange can be a special case of red in some historical eras. I believe treating blue as "dark green" is sometimes seen?

dumpsterdiver4• 2 years ago

Essentially blue was a baseline

If you think about it, the sky (and its colors) are one of the few things that most humans throughout history could readily point at and say, “That is that.”

Not many other things explain themselves so readily as the sky above our heads.

franciscop• 2 years ago

In Japan the traffic light will go green, and if you ask they'll look at you straight at your face and say "it's blue". There's even a wikipedia page noting this for every culture, see how in Japan green is a tone of blue and only came after the WWII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

gsich2• 2 years ago

Simmilar concepts exist for English (and other languages too). Take "white wine" which is not white as milk.

philipov2• 2 years ago

It has been long understood in linguistics that languages don't divide the continuous spectrum of light wavelengths into the same buckets of arbitrary color words. It is just as well understood that this doesn't have any impact on peoples' ability to perceive those wavelengths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Colour_t...

https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/1797

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660766

qup• 2 years ago

In America I will go outside with my beard, and if you ask they'll look straight at my face and say "it's red."

It's roughly the color of the HN title bar.

octopusRex2• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37982495#:~:text=%3E%20....

irrational2• 2 years ago

Is it possible the author means they lumped blue in with another color, like green or purple, and didn’t differentiate it as its own color? Like how this list of Medieval colors also didn’t list orange. I assume orange was lumped in with red or yellow.

PittleyDunkin• 2 years ago

Yes, this is how I interpreted it. Arguably before the 20th century we had few commonplace references for most of the hues we've now named at all. Plus, most of the references we do have are often localized regionally and linguistically to people who recognize the term. The constant colors—things like "blood" and "dark" and "bright-white"—are actually pretty rare. Even the sun, the sky, the ocean, earth etc are capable of producing far too many hues to reliably use as a reference point, and often different hues in different place. Which is not so say that it's not very poetic when it works!

cafeinux• 2 years ago

Funnily, when I was a child my favourite colour was "dark yellow". It was orange, but I would have died on the hill that said it was dark yellow.

dimensional_dan• 2 years ago

Sometimes we find it hard to see the things that are closer to home, and presume that these phenomena are do do with other peoples and cultures.

But consider in English we currently do this blue and light blue. Where say Spanish calls them different colours - blue and celeste, and they are linguistically seen as different named colours.

Interestingly we don't do this with red, there's no red and light red, but red and pink.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

No the explanation is much simpler.

The myth about the Ancient Greeks and Romans not distinguishing various colors has arisen in the 19th century, because those who knew well enough Ancient Greek or Latin to be able to read the ancient literature were ignorant in chemistry, mineralogy and biology, so they were not able to recognize the chemical substances, minerals, plants or animals described in the ancient literature, so they were unable to recognize which were their colors.

Ancient Greek and Latin and also most old languages had very few words that were just color names. Most colors were referred to as "the color of X", where "X" was some well known colored thing. Even for the very few words that were just color names, like "red", a phrase like "the color of X" was preferred for naming precise hues. For instance, "red" could mean either pure red or purple, so when precision was needed the former was referred as "the color of coccos", while the latter was referred as "the color of purple", where "coccos" was a red dye extracted from certain beetles and "purple" was the purple dye extracted from marine snails.

When those reading the ancient literature could not identify "X", they could not identify the color that was named there. At the end, after ignoring most colors mentioned in a text, their (wrong ) conclusion was that the text did not contain color references, except perhaps to red, white, black or gray.

So it is not a fact that the Ancients did not discuss about many colors, but the modern scholars with a not wide enough knowledge were those who could not understand the ancient phrases used to name colors like blue, blue-green, green, brown and others.

crazygringo5• 2 years ago

Yeah, I mean, the sky is blue. It's not a rare color.

It doesn't really matter if people didn't have a unique name for it -- I can distinguish tons of colors I don't have names for.

As you grow older, you learn learn the importance of color terms like "salmon" and "ecru". But you can be guaranteed you were perceiving them since you were little...

But claims like that are made as part of the everything-is-relative-and-culturally-determined movement. That denies men and women have any biologically determined average personality differences whatsoever, for example. Or that "harmful" emotions like anger are culturally imposed rather than innate, and all we need to do is "unlearn" them and maybe we'll get world peace.

dumpsterdiver4• 2 years ago

Yeah, our vision is calibrated around blue and yellow - knowledge about the color blue is in our DNA.

usrnm2• 2 years ago

the sky is blue

Not everywhere. For example, Russian has a separate word for that kind of light blue colour that you can see in the sky on a sunny day. For me, as a native Russian speaker, the sky is _not_ blue

Tainnor• 2 years ago

There's a great deal of research on colour expression and perception in different languages - some of it summarized very well in Guy Deutscher's very accessible pop-sci book "Through the Language Glass". Nobody (edit: apparently except this historian cited in TFA - well, he's a historian, not a psycholinguist) seriously doubts (anymore) that humans fundamentally perceive the same colours (barring specific disabilities), but we do carve up the colour space in different ways, although usually along a predictable path: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Color-term_hierar...

The whole idea that the Ancient Greeks were maybe colour blind came up due to Homer's epics containing descriptions such as "the wine-dark sea" while never really using a specific term for blue (that would be found in later Greek). Nowadays we understand this to mean that colour description in Homeric times was more focused on light vs. dark than on exact hues.

There have been at least some studies showing measurable, though small, effects of this on processing speed, e.g. Russians being slightly faster at distinguishing different shades of blue than English speakers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

In my opinion this is consistent with the general idea that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk, but some weak effects of language patterns influencing habitual thought can be found.

When you write

But claims like that are made as part of the everything-is-relative-and-culturally-determined movement.

it sounds like you're trying to engage in some cultural war thing that I will stay out of, but in general it's probably better to look at the actual data instead of dealing in sweeping generalisations.

wrp• 2 years ago

A good deal of confusion in topics like this comes from assuming that not having vocabulary to describe differences means that people weren't aware of the differences. That's silly. Have you ever tried to pick a paint for your house and had to choose between a hundred variations of the basic color you wanted? Even without specialist color vocabulary, you could perceive the differences.

Anthropologists have found tribal societies whose number vocabulary included only One, Two, Three, and Many. Do you think they couldn't tell the difference between having 5 or 10 cows? There have also been some languages with very few color words. In fact, there is known a rule that if a language has only three color words, they will be White, Black, and Red.

dullcrisp• 2 years ago

You could perceive the difference, but then you go home with a swatch of the color instead of just remembering what color it was.

KevinMS• 2 years ago

Given that Egyptian Blue is a synthetic pigment that must be manufactured by human skill and ingenuity, it boggles the mind that people keep falling for this idea that ancient peoples could not perceive blue.

Doesn't mean they perceived it as blue. Maybe they saw a weak green, or even a grey. Says it was named it 1809, so it wasn't Egyptians calling it blue.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

No, already the Ancient Greeks called it like this (more precisely using a phrase meaning "Egyptian blue pigment"), because they were importing it from Egypt as a cheaper substitute for the ultramarine blue pigment.

The name of the ultramarine blue pigment in all the ancient world was "cyano-" (cyanos in the nominative case in Ancient Greek; the name is already encountered in Hittite documents, a millennium before the Greek documents). The same name was used for the cheaper surrogate pigments, qualified when necessary to emphasize that substitutes were used, not the real thing.

Due to the popularity of the ultramarine blue pigment, one of the most frequent ways to refer to "blue" was as "the color of cyano-", i.e. with the adjective "cyaneo-" (in Ancient Greek, a frequent method of coining color names was by deriving adjectives ending in -eo- from noun stems ending in -o-, e.g. chryseo- = golden from chryso- = gold).

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

Yes, not only the Ancient Greeks and Romans perceived blue, but they also discussed blue and used blue pigments frequently.

Blue pigments and dyes were relatively expensive, and this was the only reason which limited their use in the ancient world.

Theophrastus (a student of Aristotle) discusses the 3 kinds of blue pigments whose use was widespread by his time (2300 years ago).

The most ancient pigment and also the most expensive was what is now called "ultramarine blue". This was very expensive, because it was imported from far away (from the present territory of Afghanistan).

The high cost of ultramarine blue has prompted the search for alternative blue pigments. The Egyptians had discovered several millennia before the time of Theophrastus how to make a synthetic blue pigment based on copper, which is now called "Egyptian blue". The Greeks had discovered in Cyprus abundant sources for another cheaper alternative to ultramarine blue, azurite, which is a natural pigment that is also based on copper.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans used frequently all these 3 blue pigments, all of which were known as "cyanos" (which was the original name of ultramarine blue).

Besides these 3 blue pigments, blue glass colored with cobalt oxide and dyes based on indigo (extracted from the indigo plant or from woad or from marine snails) were also used.

The people studying the ancient literature have been confused about the blue color mostly because they were ignorant about chemistry, mineralogy and biology, so they were unable to recognize most references to blue colors (and to many other colors).

The ancient Indo-European languages did not have a special name for the blue color (or for most colors except red, white and perhaps black).

So both in Ancient Greek and in Latin most colors were named in phrases or compound words meaning "the color of X", where "X" was some colored thing.

The color blue was most frequently referred to as either the color of the sky or as the color of "cyanos", in both Ancient Greek and Latin (there were also a few other words, e.g. Greek "glaucos", meaning light blue and used mostly for eyes).

Due to some stupid confusions, "cyan" began to be used in the modern European languages, already in the 19th century, as meaning "blue-green".

However in the ancient world "cyan" has never meant blue-green, but pure blue, the color of ultramarine blue. Blue-green was also mentioned by the ancient authors, but it was referred to either as the color of beryls, or as the color of turquoise, or as the color of the littoral sea (while green was referred to as the color of emeralds or the color of grass or the color of leaves).

JackFr• 2 years ago

My favorite fun fact about the colors monk's habits is that The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, a branch of the Franciscans are at the root of the words cappuccino and capuchin monkey.

torvenkat• 2 years ago

In Hinduism, since vedic period there are numerous references to blue. Krishna (Vishnu) is typically depicted in blue and one of his adornments is peacock feather, with shades of blue and green. Shiva's neck is blue as he swallowed poison to save his devotees and so called 'Neelakatnan' (neel-blue kanta-throat). There are also other references to blue in secular literature in Tamil and Sanskrit.

dghf• 2 years ago

Medieval scholars inherited the idea from ancient times that there were seven primary colours: white, yellow, red, green, blue, purple, and black.

These correspond to the classic tinctures of heraldry: the "metals" or and argent (silver and gold, conventionally depicted as white and yellow), and the "colours" gules (red), vert (green), azure (blue), purpure (purple), and sable (black).

However, iirc, purpure as a colour in its own right was a later addition, and was originally just considered a variant of gules (mediaeval heraldry lacking Pantone numbers or rgb/cmyk specs -- as long as the chosen paint or fabric was recognisably green or yellow or whatever, it counted).

Finally, yellow or gold knights were rare and blue knights nonexistent.

The nearest thing to a canonical version of the Arthurian romances in English is probably Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which may be too late (c. 1470) to count as strictly mediaeval, but which does include a single example of a blue knight:

So leave we Sir Gareth there with Sir Gringamore and his sisters, and turn we unto King Arthur, that at the next feast of Pentecost held his feast; and there came the Green Knight with fifty knights, and yielded them all unto King Arthur. And so there came the Red Knight his brother, and yielded him to King Arthur, and three score knights with him. Also there came the Blue Knight, brother to them, with an hundred knights, and yielded them unto King Arthur; and the Green Knight’s name was Pertolepe, and the Red Knight’s name was Perimones, and the Blue Knight’s name was Sir Persant of Inde[0].

-- Le Morte d'Arthur, book VII, chapter xxiii.

This same part of the Morte also features (briefly) a brown knight, a colour not discussed in the article.

[0] inde: dark blue; etymologically related to "indigo", both words being ultimately derived from the Latin indicum.

Colour in the Middle Ages

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