10 ms·

Colour in the Middle Ages

154 points by Pamar 2y ago

wongarsu 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    Presumably somewhere between "grey" and "beige"
- KineticLensman 2y 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.
  - grotorea 2y 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.
    - KineticLensman 2y ago
      Well when young she was known as the Crimplene Kid and has gone downhill since then. Clothes-wise, that is.
  - wongarsu 2y 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.
    - svachalek 2y ago
      I guess you can see this in Apple's product line. The more you pay for it, the less color it has.
  - wongarsu 2y 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.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      I wonder if this is a real preference or kind of an economic distortion. I often hear that people would like a bright colored car, but they worry it wouldn't sell as easily, while a black car is unobjectionable and inoffensive to any buyer. maybe we value color but not as strongly as the opportunity costs? or maybe it's just a temporary fashion change and we'll have a revival of bright pastel colors.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        I question how many people seriously worry about resale value. What I see (especially after listening to a podcast on color preferences in cars) is that there are a lot of color patterns that aren't exactly classically neutral but are neutral-ish with maybe a tint of something more colorful. My brother's newish house is mostly so neutral with the exception of some artwork. I probably overdid room-by-room color schemes when I moved into my house few decades ago but I certainly wouldn't have opted for basically pure-neutral throughout.
      - floxy 2y ago
        Or is it that cars are now so expensive that you don't want appear to be showing off and so choose white and black cars that don't turn heads? Anti-conspicuous consumption? >pastel colors https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax...
- sva_ 2y ago
  Similar to how spices in foods seemed to have been more popular when there was less of an abundance in western cuisine.
  - Tagbert 2y ago
    I see a lot more spices in food in the US over the last several decades.
- johncoltrane 2y 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 2y ago
    Do you have any photos of the result?
    - johncoltrane 2y ago
      No, sorry.
  - ninalanyon 2y 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-the-english-reformation-impact-the-construction-and-decoration https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/a-level/history/how-did-t...
    - johncoltrane 2y ago
      > 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 IIRC the project started in a very amateurish way. The area had been steadily declining for decades and at some point the locals created a bunch of non-profits to finance small projects like that one in the hope of making the place more attractive. All without much help from central authorities. The chapel restoration involved students, amateur artists, etc. with no particular knowledge of the subject. The Church wasn't involved either at the start because the building had been abandoned for over a century and no one cared. So the initial plan was to make it look like other chapels in the area: rustic, mineral, austere. The project went sideways when they discovered those pigment traces all over the place. Regional museums and universities got involved, local government took notice, and the Church weighted in as well. At that point, it became obvious to anyone that, indeed, those places had been brightly painted from the start. But the general art direction had taken a turn for the austere a long time ago and there were a lot of people who liked things that way because… that's what they were used to.
- mountainb 2y 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 2y ago
  In his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Kerr_(Japanologist) 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.
beardyw 2y 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.
- grotorea 2y ago
  Everything in a paint store is a colour!
- kanbara 2y 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.
  - gsich 2y ago
    >homer’s wine dark sea easily imaginable for the sea at sunset.
    - dumpsterdiver 2y ago
      It’s also pretty evocative language, which is probably why he’s the guy who wrote it. It’s something you can see in your mind, and when you see it you get a sense of its gravity.
- AlotOfReading 2y 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.
Telemakhos 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue
- sdenton4 2y 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.
  - AlotOfReading 2y 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".
    - FredPret 2y ago
      Blue does make a nice contrast to sand and sandstone
      - 2y ago
JackFr 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

154 points by Pamar 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Presumably somewhere between "grey" and "beige"
KineticLensman 2y 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.
- grotorea 2y 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.
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    Well when young she was known as the Crimplene Kid and has gone downhill since then. Clothes-wise, that is.
- wongarsu 2y 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.
  - svachalek 2y ago
    I guess you can see this in Apple's product line. The more you pay for it, the less color it has.
- wongarsu 2y 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.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    I wonder if this is a real preference or kind of an economic distortion. I often hear that people would like a bright colored car, but they worry it wouldn't sell as easily, while a black car is unobjectionable and inoffensive to any buyer. maybe we value color but not as strongly as the opportunity costs? or maybe it's just a temporary fashion change and we'll have a revival of bright pastel colors.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I question how many people seriously worry about resale value. What I see (especially after listening to a podcast on color preferences in cars) is that there are a lot of color patterns that aren't exactly classically neutral but are neutral-ish with maybe a tint of something more colorful. My brother's newish house is mostly so neutral with the exception of some artwork. I probably overdid room-by-room color schemes when I moved into my house few decades ago but I certainly wouldn't have opted for basically pure-neutral throughout.
    - floxy 2y ago
      Or is it that cars are now so expensive that you don't want appear to be showing off and so choose white and black cars that don't turn heads? Anti-conspicuous consumption? >pastel colors https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax...
sva_ 2y ago
Similar to how spices in foods seemed to have been more popular when there was less of an abundance in western cuisine.
- Tagbert 2y ago
  I see a lot more spices in food in the US over the last several decades.
johncoltrane 2y 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 2y ago
  Do you have any photos of the result?
  - johncoltrane 2y ago
    No, sorry.
- ninalanyon 2y 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-the-english-reformation-impact-the-construction-and-decoration https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/a-level/history/how-did-t...
  - johncoltrane 2y ago
    > 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 IIRC the project started in a very amateurish way. The area had been steadily declining for decades and at some point the locals created a bunch of non-profits to finance small projects like that one in the hope of making the place more attractive. All without much help from central authorities. The chapel restoration involved students, amateur artists, etc. with no particular knowledge of the subject. The Church wasn't involved either at the start because the building had been abandoned for over a century and no one cared. So the initial plan was to make it look like other chapels in the area: rustic, mineral, austere. The project went sideways when they discovered those pigment traces all over the place. Regional museums and universities got involved, local government took notice, and the Church weighted in as well. At that point, it became obvious to anyone that, indeed, those places had been brightly painted from the start. But the general art direction had taken a turn for the austere a long time ago and there were a lot of people who liked things that way because… that's what they were used to.
mountainb 2y 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 2y ago
In his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Kerr_(Japanologist) 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.

beardyw 2y 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.

grotorea 2y ago
Everything in a paint store is a colour!
kanbara 2y 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.
- gsich 2y ago
  >homer’s wine dark sea easily imaginable for the sea at sunset.
  - dumpsterdiver 2y ago
    It’s also pretty evocative language, which is probably why he’s the guy who wrote it. It’s something you can see in your mind, and when you see it you get a sense of its gravity.
AlotOfReading 2y 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.

Telemakhos 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue

sdenton4 2y 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.
- AlotOfReading 2y 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".
  - FredPret 2y ago
    Blue does make a nice contrast to sand and sandstone
    - 2y ago

JackFr 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.