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Black : the history of a color / Michel Pastoureau.

by Pastoureau, Michel, 1947-

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Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2008]

Color -- Psychological aspects -- History.

Color -- Social aspects -- History.

Symbolism of colors -- History.

210 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

English language edition.

In the beginning was black (From the beginning to the year 1000): -- Mythologies of darkness -- From darkness to colors -- From palette to lexicon -- Death and its color -- The black bird -- Black, white, red -- In the devil's palette (Tenth to thirteenth centuries): -- The devil and his images -- The devil and his colors -- A disturbing bestiary -- To dispel the darkness -- The monk's quarrel: white versus black -- A new color order: the coat of arms -- Who was the black knight? -- A fashionable color (Fourteenth to sixteenth centuries): -- The colors of the skin -- The Christianization of dark skin -- Jesus with the dyer -- Dyeing in black -- The color's moral code -- The luxury of princes -- The gray of hope -- The birth of the world in black and white (Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries): -- Ink and paper -- Color in black and white -- Hachures and guillochures -- The color war -- The Protestant dress code -- A very somber century -- The return of the devil -- New speculations, new classifications -- A new order of colors -- All the colors of black (Eighteenth to twenty-first centuries): -- The triumph of color -- The age of enlightenment -- The poetics of melancholy -- The age of coal and factories -- Regarding images -- A modern color -- A dangerous color?

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. (Publisher)

Translated from the French, Noir.

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