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Black : the history of a color / Michel Pastoureau.

by Pastoureau, Michel, 1947-

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Princeton University Press, c2009.

155.91145 P293bl

Color -- Psychological aspects -- History.

Color -- Social aspects -- History.

Symbolism of colors -- History.

9780691139302 (hc.)

Noir. English English

210 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-210).

In the Beginning Was Black: From the Beginning to the Year 1000 19 -- Mythologies of Darkness -- From Darkness to Colors -- From Palette to Lexicon -- Death and Its Color -- Black Bird -- Black, White, Red -- In the Devil's Palette: Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries -- Devil and His Images -- Devil and His Colors -- Disturbing Bestiary -- To Dispel the Darkness -- Monks' Quarrel: White versus Black -- New Color Order: The Coat of Arms -- Who Was the Black Knight? -- Fashionable Color: Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries -- Colors of the Skin -- Christianization of Dark Skin -- Jesus with the Dyer -- Dyeing in Black -- Color's Moral Code -- Luxury of Princes -- Gray of Hope -- Birth of the World in Black and White: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries -- Ink and Paper -- Color in Black and White -- Hachures and Guillochures -- Color War -- Protestant Dress Code -- Very Somber Century -- Return of the Devil -- New Speculations, New Classifications -- New Order of Colors -- All the Colors of Black: Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries -- Triumph of Color -- Age of Enlightenment -- Poetics of Melancholy -- Age of Coal and Factories -- Regarding Images -- Modern Color -- Dangerous Color?

"In the beginning was black, Michael Pastoureau tells us. The archetypal color of darkness and death, black was associated in the early Christian period with hell and the devil but also with monastic virtue. In the medieval era, black became the habit of courtiers and a hallmark of royal luxury. Black took on new meanings for early modern Europeans as they began to print words and images in black and white, and to absorb Isaac Newton's announcement that black was no color after all. During the romantic period, black was melancholy's friend, while in the twentieth century black (and white) came to dominate art, print, photography, and film, and was finally restored to the status of a true color." "For Pastoureau, the history of any color must be a social history first because it is societies that give colors everything from their changing names to their changing meanings - and black is exemplary in this regard. In dyes, fabrics, and clothing, and in painting and other art works, black has always been a forceful - and ambivalent - shaper of social, symbolic, and ideological meaning in European societies."--Jacket.

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