Colour in the Middle Ages
medievalists.net
medievalists.net
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).
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.
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Colour_t...
Blue includes green, so they’re not wrong.
In other words, that the colour that is commonly called "pink" and occurs in nature has always somewhat bluish tint, while the "neutral pink" you refer to is somewhat rare in the nature.
In computer terms, named colour `pink` is
rgb(100% 75% 80%)
rgb(100% 89% 88%)
Look at how yellowish the "darkened mistyrose" rgb(100% 77% 77%) appears compared to "pink"
<p style="background: pink">
<p style="background: rgb(100% 75% 80%)">
<p style="background: rgb(100% 77% 77%)">
<p style="background: rgb(100%, 89%, 88%)">
<p style="background: mistyrose">
The article talks about the specification and it's more... specific than that: > “In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature,” Allan Richarz writes for Atlas Obscura
It's roughly the color of the HN title bar.
This looks uncannily like the first line of a lost Walt Whitman poem.
Thank you! Then the long-ago time spent in my American Lit classes was not wasted.
https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/33117530568/why-dont-we...
[1] https://www.taste.com.au/food-news/we-just-found-out-arnotts...
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.
I believe what we call "bright pink" is kinda weird wavelength wise anyway though, I remember old YouTube essays about it.
If you think about it, the sky (and its colors) are one of the few things that most humans throughout history could readily point at and say, “That is that.”
Not many other things explain themselves so readily as the sky above our heads.
The myth about the Ancient Greeks and Romans not distinguishing various colors has arisen in the 19th century, because those who knew well enough Ancient Greek or Latin to be able to read the ancient literature were ignorant in chemistry, mineralogy and biology, so they were not able to recognize the chemical substances, minerals, plants or animals described in the ancient literature, so they were unable to recognize which were their colors.
Ancient Greek and Latin and also most old languages had very few words that were just color names. Most colors were referred to as "the color of X", where "X" was some well known colored thing. Even for the very few words that were just color names, like "red", a phrase like "the color of X" was preferred for naming precise hues. For instance, "red" could mean either pure red or purple, so when precision was needed the former was referred as "the color of coccos", while the latter was referred as "the color of purple", where "coccos" was a red dye extracted from certain beetles and "purple" was the purple dye extracted from marine snails.
When those reading the ancient literature could not identify "X", they could not identify the color that was named there. At the end, after ignoring most colors mentioned in a text, their (wrong ) conclusion was that the text did not contain color references, except perhaps to red, white, black or gray.
So it is not a fact that the Ancients did not discuss about many colors, but the modern scholars with a not wide enough knowledge were those who could not understand the ancient phrases used to name colors like blue, blue-green, green, brown and others.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The whole idea that the Ancient Greeks were maybe colour blind came up due to Homer's epics containing descriptions such as "the wine-dark sea" while never really using a specific term for blue (that would be found in later Greek). Nowadays we understand this to mean that colour description in Homeric times was more focused on light vs. dark than on exact hues.
There have been at least some studies showing measurable, though small, effects of this on processing speed, e.g. Russians being slightly faster at distinguishing different shades of blue than English speakers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
In my opinion this is consistent with the general idea that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk, but some weak effects of language patterns influencing habitual thought can be found.
When you write
> But claims like that are made as part of the everything-is-relative-and-culturally-determined movement.
it sounds like you're trying to engage in some cultural war thing that I will stay out of, but in general it's probably better to look at the actual data instead of dealing in sweeping generalisations.
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
But also, English has a word for "pink". That doesn't mean pink isn't a a red hue, as is conceptually clear to everyone, regardless of linguistics. In everday speech we'll say "I want the pink shade, not the red one", but we still all know pink belongs to the hue of red.
I find it hard to believe you don't consider there to be an equivalent innate concept, called blue in English, that you understand to encompass both light blue and medium blue? That includes the sky?
And that you probably encountered this concept well before learning English, just when playing with mixing blue and white finger paints as a child?
The whole point here is this is about fundamental color concepts that stand independent of any particular language's labeling system.
> The whole point here is this is about fundamental color concepts
No, the whole point is that no such thing exists. We divide visible light into arbitrary buckets with very blury borders between them and historically these buckets have been very different between different cultures. Nowadays they tend to converge because of globalisation, but they just converge to some common understanding, not "the fundamental" one.
They are the same hue. That is scientific. It doesn't matter what words you use to divide them -- I am sure you conceptually understand they are the same hue. I even found a comment from a Russian saying [1]:
> I would say that they are two colours that are sufficiently distinct, but I also wouldn't argue against a statement that голубой is a lighter shade of синий.
Again, just like my example with red and pink.
Any Russian painter, for example, would have a very clear idea of a unified "blue" hue, because they have to mix paints. Surely you can't deny that?
You are confusing two things, words and perceptions. The "arbitrary buckets" you describe refer to words. But they don't change our underlying perceptual qualia. We perceive lots of things we don't bother to give names to in order to distinguish them. Our concepts vastly outnumber our words.
And regarding blue specifically -- the brain interprets colors based on the opponent process [2], which includes blue as a one of four fundamental hues. Which argues that it is one of the four most likely colors to have an instinctive perceptual concept for, regardless of whether you give it a word or not.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/75kaij/comment/do6...
And white, gray and black have no hue at all. They're not the same color -- they have no color at all. The hue is indeterminate. (Even if we call them "colors" colloquially.)
It's a well-known color model that evidence shows describes the actual color processing in our brain.
We perceive colors, not wavelengths.
Or if colours are perceived opposite as in that theory, then why not double inverted or ten times inverted between the eye and the brain?
Cyan is perceived when both red-green and yellow-blue channels exhibit about the same negative response. It should be clear from the article linked above and the chart I gave you.
"There is some overlap in the wavelengths of light to which the three types of cones (L for long-wave, M for medium-wave, and S for short-wave light) respond, so it is more efficient for the visual system (from a perspective of dynamic range) to record differences between the responses of cones, rather than each type of cone's individual response."
That's a ridiculous argument.
"That is, either red or green is perceived and never greenish-red: Even though yellow is a mixture of red and green in the RGB color theory, the eye does not perceive it as such."
Say what? Yellow is both a real physical wavelength, or a perception of red and green light mixed.
"In 1970, Solomon and Corbit expanded Hurvich and Jameson's general neurological opponent process model to explain emotion, drug addiction, and work motivation."
Bullshit detector bell ringing...
"A 2023 opinion essay of Conway, Malik-Moraleda, and Gibson claimed to "review the psychological and physiological evidence for Opponent-Colors Theory" and bluntly stated "the theory is wrong"."
Finally some sensible people. Their article is pretty good: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10527909/
The part we're talking about is a biological fact - you just have to keep in mind that words "blue", "green", "red" and "yellow" in this context are actually referring to complex spectral responses of LMS space (where "red" includes parts of "blue" etc.).
It’s fascinating how ancient humans (that’ll be us one day) got so many things “basically right”. Futuristic instruments have a way of making old hypothesis look silly and “made up” (wink).
All that to say my original comment (way up there) was indeed referring to the basic biological outcome which was apparent before modern research attempted to explain it.
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).
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.
"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...
IIRC the project started in a very amateurish way. The area had been steadily declining for decades and at some point the locals created a bunch of non-profits to finance small projects like that one in the hope of making the place more attractive. All without much help from central authorities.
The chapel restoration involved students, amateur artists, etc. with no particular knowledge of the subject. The Church wasn't involved either at the start because the building had been abandoned for over a century and no one cared.
So the initial plan was to make it look like other chapels in the area: rustic, mineral, austere.
The project went sideways when they discovered those pigment traces all over the place. Regional museums and universities got involved, local government took notice, and the Church weighted in as well. At that point, it became obvious to anyone that, indeed, those places had been brightly painted from the start. But the general art direction had taken a turn for the austere a long time ago and there were a lot of people who liked things that way because… that's what they were used to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_of_the_Sistine_C...
:s/roof/ceilingIn 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.
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.
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.
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.
or maybe it's just a temporary fashion change and we'll have a revival of bright pastel colors.
>pastel colors
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax...
These correspond to the classic tinctures of heraldry: the "metals" or and argent (silver and gold, conventionally depicted as white and yellow), and the "colours" gules (red), vert (green), azure (blue), purpure (purple), and sable (black).
However, iirc, purpure as a colour in its own right was a later addition, and was originally just considered a variant of gules (mediaeval heraldry lacking Pantone numbers or rgb/cmyk specs -- as long as the chosen paint or fabric was recognisably green or yellow or whatever, it counted).
> Finally, yellow or gold knights were rare and blue knights nonexistent.
The nearest thing to a canonical version of the Arthurian romances in English is probably Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which may be too late (c. 1470) to count as strictly mediaeval, but which does include a single example of a blue knight:
> So leave we Sir Gareth there with Sir Gringamore and his sisters, and turn we unto King Arthur, that at the next feast of Pentecost held his feast; and there came the Green Knight with fifty knights, and yielded them all unto King Arthur. And so there came the Red Knight his brother, and yielded him to King Arthur, and three score knights with him. Also there came the Blue Knight, brother to them, with an hundred knights, and yielded them unto King Arthur; and the Green Knight’s name was Pertolepe, and the Red Knight’s name was Perimones, and the Blue Knight’s name was Sir Persant of Inde[0].
-- Le Morte d'Arthur, book VII, chapter xxiii.
This same part of the Morte also features (briefly) a brown knight, a colour not discussed in the article.
[0] inde: dark blue; etymologically related to "indigo", both words being ultimately derived from the Latin indicum.
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.
The folks examining fine art do a full spectral analysis of paint to verify it's authenticity. Something the human eye can't do.
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
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.
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.
easily imaginable for the sea at sunset.
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%.