[HN Gopher] Colour in the Middle Ages
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Colour in the Middle Ages
Author : Pamar
Score : 92 points
Date : 2024-12-10 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.medievalists.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.medievalists.net)
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Presumably somewhere between "grey" and "beige"
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Well when young she was known as the Crimplene Kid and has
| gone downhill since then. Clothes-wise, that is.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess you can see this in Apple's product line. The more
| you pay for it, the less color it has.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sva_ wrote:
| Similar to how spices in foods seemed to have been more popular
| when there was less of an abundance in western cuisine.
| johncoltrane wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you have any photos of the result?
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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-t...
| Isamu wrote:
| The restoration of the Sistine Chapel also attracted a lot of
| criticism because people liked the dark and mysterious muted
| images, and when cleaned it was revealed that Michelangelo
| used vibrant color.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_of_the_Sistine_C.
| ..
| mountainb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Japan
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Everything in a paint store is a colour!
| kanbara wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >homer's wine dark sea
|
| easily imaginable for the sea at sunset.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The obvious follow-up questions: Is magenta a color, despite
| requiring two wavelengths? Is brown a color despite being just
| dark orange? Is metallic gray different from gray (i.e. does
| light scattering matter)? What about subsurface light
| scattering, like in skin or translucent plastic?
|
| Color is a bit like our classification of continents: it's
| useful, but only makes sense if you don't look too hard. And
| maybe it's fine if webdesign and miniature painting have
| different opinions on what makes a color a color.
| nzach wrote:
| For context, Technology Connections did an entire video on
| the brown color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
| beardyw wrote:
| All colours (pretty much) are a wide spectrum with varying
| amounts of every wavelength. Our eyes do a pretty poor job,
| compared to sound to our ears, of separating out the
| wavelengths, just boiling them down to a single hue.
|
| The folks examining fine art do a full spectral analysis of
| paint to verify it's authenticity. Something the human eye
| can't do.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Yeah, that's another giant can of worms. Light with a
| wavelength of 600nm is orange, but there is a combination
| of red and yellow light that is indistinguishable from
| 600nm light to us. Worse, there is an infinite number of
| combinations of two or more different wavelengths that look
| indistinguishable from 600nm light to us. Yet any other
| species would disagree that they look the same. Or a human
| with slightly shifted sensitivity spectrums of their rods
| or cones.
|
| One the one hand it's great because it makes full-color
| print and screens so easy. On the other hand there is so
| much information in light that is simplified away by our
| eyes
| steveBK123 wrote:
| This would be an overcomplication in every day vernacular.
|
| What color shirts do you have? Oh we have green, blue, red and
| none.
|
| How many types of none? Oh we have bright illumination, dark
| illumination, and 50%.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > 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 kuanous, the Latin caeruleus (but of the eyes, caesius).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Egyptians in particular went bonkers for blue. Everything and
| anything they could make out of faience tended to use
| shockingly bright blue hues to mimic Lapis, much as modern
| products come in gold to appear "premium".
| FredPret wrote:
| Blue does make a nice contrast to sand and sandstone
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Teal and orange, old school.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Perhaps 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 wrote:
| if 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 wrote:
| Even today, Russians distinguish light blue from dark blue
| as completely different colors (goluboi vs sinii).
| 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 wrote:
| see 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.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue%E2%80%93g
| r...
| franciscop wrote:
| In 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...
| gsich wrote:
| Simmilar concepts exist for English (and other languages
| too). Take "white wine" which is not white as milk.
| philipov wrote:
| It 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/Linguistic_relativity#Colour_t.
| ..
|
| https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/1797
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660766
| qup wrote:
| In America I will go outside with my beard, and if you ask
| they'll look straight at my face and say "it's red."
|
| It's roughly the color of the HN title bar.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > In America I will go outside with my beard
|
| This looks uncannily like the first line of a lost Walt
| Whitman poem.
| irrational wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Funnily, 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah, 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 wrote:
| Yeah, our vision is calibrated around blue and yellow -
| knowledge about the color blue is in our DNA.
| xxr wrote:
| How do you figure "blue and yellow" instead of "blue and
| red and green" or "magenta and green" or "red and cyan"?
| usrnm wrote:
| > the sky is blue
|
| Not everywhere. For example, Russian has a separate word for
| that kind of light blue colour that you can see in the sky on
| a sunny day. For me, as a native Russian speaker, the sky is
| _not_ blue
| JackFr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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