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> 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 i
by 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 agoThanks 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 agoEgyptians 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 2y agoPerhaps 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.
- nemomarx 2y agoif 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?
- skirmish 2y agoEven today, Russians distinguish light blue from dark blue as completely different colors (голубой vs синий). Culturally different color understanding is not rare at all. For me, personally, English-speakers are being weird when they distinguish pink and red as colors; they are obviously just lightness shades!
- nemomarx 2y agosee I think some shades of pink are more of a weird red purple? like fuchsia and magenta have a different tone. I believe what we call "bright pink" is kinda weird wavelength wise anyway though, I remember old YouTube essays about it.
- knome 2y agobrown is just dark orange, but is treated as separate culturally.
- franciscop 2y agoIn 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_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
- gsich 2y agoSimmilar concepts exist for English (and other languages too). Take "white wine" which is not white as milk.
- philipov 2y agoIt 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/Basic_Color_Terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Colour_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Colour_t... https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/1797 https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/1797 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660766 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660766
- Filligree 2y agoAlthough Japanese does in fact have a word for green, which matches the traffic lights, but still calls them blue. Blue includes green, so they’re not wrong.
- philipov 2y agoYeah, and in English, people constantly confuse Pink (light red) with Magenta (red+blue). Our notion of Blue isn't so pure either, since it's considered acceptable to call Cyan a type of blue, yet no one would ever make the mistake of calling Red and Orange by the same name. That's already halfway to thinking that Green is also a type of blue.
- irrational 2y agoIs 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 2y agoYes, 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!
- throwup238 2y agoThe funny thing is we've now drifted to the other extreme. A bunch of RGB colors were named after pigments like vermillion or international klein blue that fall outside of the RGB/CMYK color spaces rendered by monitors and print (humans can see significantly more shades than either can reproduce), so now common parlance has compressed the world of color into the narrow band supported by modern technology.
- cafeinux 2y agoFunnily, 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.
- Filligree 2y agoBright brown.
- dimensional_dan 2y agoSometimes 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.
- crazygringo 2y agoYeah, 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.
- dumpsterdiver 2y agoYeah, our vision is calibrated around blue and yellow - knowledge about the color blue is in our DNA.
- xxr 2y agoHow do you figure “blue and yellow” instead of “blue and red and green” or “magenta and green” or “red and cyan”?
- crazygringo 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process#Neurological_basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process#Neurological_... It's a well-known color model that evidence shows describes the actual color processing in our brain.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThis theory is wrong, because there is no magenta light on the real light spectrum. The colour spectrum is perceived as a wheel/circle in our minds, but it is a straight line in physical reality. Thus, these opposites are imaginary and not real.
- wrp 2y agoA 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 2y agoYou could perceive the difference, but then you go home with a swatch of the color instead of just remembering what color it was.
- jacobolus 2y agoSomeone with a bit of practice with the Munsell system can remember the difference between, say, 2.5 BG 4/8 and 5 BG 6/6 (the latter is slightly more blue, a bit lighter, and not as saturated), and can both accurately judge the color coordinates on sight and imagine what color some coordinates will represent. But both are just going to be called "teal" or "blue–green" if you have to reduce it to a single category (or maybe even just "green"). Unfortunately paint companies and others don't just tell consumers meaningful, easy to learn, and easy to compare coordinates like this, but instead make up thousands of arbitrary names so you need to describe this color to the paint store as "faded peacock" or some similar nonsense, and there's no way to tell without looking at the swatch book what the relation might be between "faded peacock", "cracked robin egg", "Aztec turquoise", and "vibrant iceberg".
- KevinMS 2y 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_b 2y agoNo, 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_b 2y agoYes, 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).