Blue: the History of a Color

About 10 years ago, my mother give me a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble for my birthday. At the time, I was fresh out of school, and so many of my book purchases up to that point had been purely functional (and mostly involved learning how to program computers at that point in my life). I decided to use the gift card on something purely fun.

As anyone who knows me very well at all knows, blue is my favorite color. Both cars I've owned are blue, I painted my room blue in high school, I'm a fan of the Duke Blue Devils... you get the point. I ran across a book called Blue: the History of a Color, by Michel Pastoureau, which intrigued me, so I bought. And then I let it sit on the shelf for a decade.

About a year ago I decided I needed something to read before I went to bed each night. It needed to be something rather light, that I could read in small chunks. I rediscovered this book and read it each night, a page or two at a time, over the course of about a year. The book delves into a subject not too many people have examined, and that's the use of a color of the course of time.

The author starts out talking about the color blue in ancient, even biblical times. He brings up an interesting fact, which is that the Hebrew and Greek for particular words in the Bible might denote "dirty" or "pale"; however, when translated into the Latin vulgate they might be translated as niger or virdis, which when translated into English become "black" or "green". The author's point is that applying a word the indicates a definite color might not be a completely accurate understanding of color used in the Bible. (This has made me really wonder whether the tabernacle in the desert was really the same red, blue, and purple colors the way I have imagined it.)

Much of the book focuses on clothing, since that has been one of the enduring expressions of color throughout the course of humanity. According to the author, up until the Roman era (in the West), the only color used to dye fabric was red, because "madder" was the dye which was used. Because madder created a rich, deep color which resisted fading through washing and sunlight, red became a predominant color. Interestingly, in ancient times, perhaps because of this, white had two opposites: black and red. Until the middle ages, in fact, most color schemes revolved around black, white, and red. Although blue was clearly present in the ancient world as it is now, it didn't have the same socially symbolic meaning that these other colors were infused with.

In the middle ages, when goods were produced by various guilds, there were the people who made fabric, and those who dyed the fabric. If the people who made the fabric also tried to dye it, they got into serious trouble with the other guilds. Cities even had laws regarding who was allowed to do what. At another time in the middle ages, those who dyed clothing red were losing profits because of a new craze among the population of wearing blue. As a result, some merchants paid stained glass window makers to use blue in relationship with diabolical symbolism (such as the "blue devil") in an effort to get people to associate blue with evil. (It didn't work, though, and the fashion continued!)

Colored clothing apparently has had symbolic meaning over time. Apparently, there were some cities in medieval times which had "sumptory laws" which included laws about which colors people were allowed to wear. In Puritan times, navy blue became a "moral" color in the sense that it represented a sedate and orderly color, not a profligate and "loose" color like bright greens or yellows. In many cases, dark blue was seen as synonymous with black. In fact, it's probably based on this fashion statement that business men still wear navy suits; it's seen as respectable and not too flashy. Once indigo was discovered in the New World, it pretty much decimated that woad industry in Europe. From then on, "blue jeans" and such have been staples of not just American, but world culture.

These are just some of the interesting tidbits I learned about the use of the color blue (and other colors) over time. I went into the book wondering what one could possibly say about the color blue, but after reading it, I realized that the role of color in history has been much more interesting and nuanced than I ever would have imagined!