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Green : the history of a color / Michel Pastoureau, translated by Jody Gladding.

by Pastoureau, Michel, 1947- author.

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Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2014]

Color -- Psychological aspects -- History.

Color -- Social aspects -- History.

Symbolism of colors -- History.

239 pages : color illustrations ; 25 cm

An uncertain color (from the beginning to the year 1000): -- Did the Greeks see green? -- Green among the Romans -- The emerald and the leek -- Hippodrome green -- The silences of the Bible and the church fathers -- A middle color - Islamic green -- A courtly color (11th-14th centuries): -- The beauty of green -- A place for green: the orchard -- A time for green: the spring -- Youth, love, and hope -- A chivalrous color -- A green hero: Tristan -- A dangerous color (14th-16th centuries): -- Satan's green bestiary -- From green to greenish -- The green knight -- The dyer's vats -- "Gay green" and "lost green" -- Heraldic green -- The colors of the poet -- A secondary color (16th-19th centuries): -- Protestant morals -- The green of painters - New knowledge, new classifications -- Alceste's ribbons and the green of the theater -- Superstitions and fairy tales -- Green in the age of enlightenment - A romantic color? -- A soothing color (19th-21st centuries): -- A fashionable color -- Return to the palette -- Chevreul and the scientists did not like green -- Neither did Kandinsky or the Bauhaus -- Green in everyday life -- Nature in the heart of the cities -- Green today.

In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue and Black presents a fascinating and revealing history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception and meaning of the color over millennia - and how we misread cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have always signified what they do today.

Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood, love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively become the color of nature. Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the color of the middle class, why some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks couldn't see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky and the Bauhaus. More broadly, Green demonstrates that the history of the color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent, ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the mission to save the planet.

With its striking design and compelling text, Green will delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion, media, or design. (Publisher)

Text an English translation from French.

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