Michel Pastoureau

In this entertaining history, the renowned medievalist Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearances in prehistoric art to its international ubiquity today in blue jeans and Gauloises cigarette packs. 100 color plates.

The History of a Color

Blue

Jody Gladding

The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in the Western world. For many cultures, red was not just one color of many but rather the only color worthy enough to be used for social purposes. In some languages, the word for red was the same as the word for color. The first color developed for painting and dying, red became associated in antiquity with war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period, red held both religious significance, as the color of the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell, and secular meaning, as a symbol of love, glory, and beauty. Yet during the Protestant Reformation, red began to decline in status. Viewed as indecent and immoral and linked to luxury and the excesses of the Catholic Church, red fell out of favor. After the French Revolution, red gained new respect as the color of progressive movements and radical left-wing politics. In this beautifully illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, the acclaimed author of Blue, Black, and Green, now masterfully navigates centuries of symbolism and complex meanings to present the fascinating and sometimes controversial history of the color red. Pastoureau illuminates red's evolution through a diverse selection of captivating images, including the cave paintings of Lascaux, the works of Renaissance masters, and the modern paintings and stained glass of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers.

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, or media.

Green

the history of a color

Black

"Illuminated with a wide variety of images, this book traces the long history of yellow around the world. In antiquity, yellow was considered a sacred color, a symbol of light, warmth, wealth, and prosperity. But in medieval Europe, it became highly ambivalent: greenish yellow came to signify demonic sulfur and bile, the color of forgers, felon knights, traitors, Judas, and Lucifer-while warm yellow recalled honey and gold, serving as a sign of joy, pleasure and abundance. The yellow stars of the Holocaust were seared into the color's negative tradition. In Europe today, yellow has diminished to a discreet color. Greenish yellow can still be seen as dangerous, sickly, or poisonous, and golden yellow remains positive, but the color is absent in much of everyday life and is lacking in symbolism. In Asia, however, yellow pigments like ocher and orpiment and dyes like saffron, curcuma, and gaude are abundant. Painting and dyeing in this color has been easier than in Europe, offering a richer and more varied palette of yellows that has granted the color a more positive meaning. In ancient China, for example, yellow clothing was reserved for the emperor. In India, the color is seen as a source of happiness: wearing a little yellow is believed to keep evil away. And importantly, it is the color of Buddhism, whose temple doors are marked with the color. Yellow continues to have different meanings in different cultural traditions, but in most, the color remains associated with light and sun, something that can be seen from afar and that seems warm and always in motion"--

Yellow

Dominique Simonnet

Ce n'est pas un hasard si nous voyons rouge, rions jaune, devenons verts de peur, bleus de colère ou blancs comme un linge. Les couleurs ne sont pas anodines. Elles véhiculent des tabous, des préjugés auxquels nous obéissons sans le savoir, elles possèdent des sens cachés qui influencent notre environnement, nos comportements, notre langage, notre imaginaire. Les couleurs ont une histoire mouvementée qui raconte l'évolution des mentalités. L'art, la peinture, la décoration, l'architecture, la publicité, nos produits de consommation, nos vêtements, nos voitures, tout est régi par ce code non écrit. Apprenez à penser en couleurs et vous verrez la réalité autrement !

Le petit livre des couleurs

George Holoch

From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear's centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends. Michel Pastoureau considers how this once venerated creature was deposed by Christianity and continued to sink lower in the symbolic bestiary before rising again in Pyrrhic triumph as the teddy bear.

History of a Fallen King

The Bear

A French scholar and author of Blue: The History of a Color presents a witty cultural and social history of stripes, from the medieval prejudice against stripes to the present day, looking at the frequently negative attitude and connotations of stripes. Reprint.

A History of Stripes

The Devil's Cloth

Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Age occidental

Eine schillernde Kulturgeschichte

Alle unsere Farben

Histoire d'une couleur

Jaune. Histoire d'une couleur

Blu. Storia di un colore

Les couleurs de nos souvenirs

Azul - História de uma Cor

história de uma cor

Preto

Siyah

Ce n'est pas un hasard si nous voyons rouge, rions jaune, devenons verts de peur, bleus de colère ou blancs comme un linge. Les couleurs ne sont pas anodines. Elles véhiculent des tabous, des préjugés auxquels nous obéissons sans le savoir, elles possèdent des sens cachés qui influencent notre environnement, nos comportements, notre langage, notre imaginaire. Les couleurs ont une histoire mouvementée qui raconte l'évolution des mentalités. L'art, la peinture, la décoration, l'architecture, la publicité, nos produits de consommation, nos vêtements, nos voitures, tout est régi par ce code non écrit.

Les couleurs expliquées en images

Noir. Couleur des ténèbres, de la mort et de l'enfer, le noir n'a pas toujours été une couleur négative. Au fil de sa longue histoire, il a aussi été associé à la fertilité, à la tempérance, à la dignité, à l'autorité. Et depuis quelques décennies, il incarne surtout l'élégance et la modernité. Du noir des moines et des pirates au noir des peintres et des couturiers, Michel Pastoureau retrace la destinée européenne et la symbolique ambivalente de cette couleur pas comme les autres. Avec clarté et précision, il s'attache à cerner sa place dans les faits de langue, les pratiques sociales (teintures, vêtements, vie quotidienne), la création artistique et le monde des symboles. Couleur à part entière jusqu'à ce que l'invention de l'imprimerie puis les découvertes de Newton lui donnent un statut particulier, au point de devenir une non-couleur, le noir dévoile ici une histoire culturelle extrêmement riche, depuis les mythologies des origines jusqu'à son triomphe, dans tous les domaines, au XXe siècle.

histoire d'une couleur

Noir

História de uma cor

Azul

What remains of the colors of our childhoods? What colors do we associate with our adult life? Does memory transform colors? Why? To try to answer these questions, Michel Pastoureau proposes a journey that covers more than the last half century and even leads us to the remote past.

Michel Pastoureau

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