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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

> 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

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.

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...

That was basically the same situation, at a much smaller scale.

I think there are some missing words or phrases here. Was this the restoration of a mural in an old chapel?

It was the restoration of the whole chapel, which had been in ruins for a long time. Plastering, sculptures, murals, etc. they restored the whole thing. As it turned out, _everything_ used to be painted in wild colors: the whole roof was painted in a vibrant blue, with stars and all, the statues of the saints were painted with pink for the skin, etc.

    :s/roof/ceiling

Do you have any photos of the result?

No, sorry.

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.

> 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.

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.

I guess you can see this in Apple's product line. The more you pay for it, the less color it has.

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.

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.

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.

Or is it that cars are now so expensive that you don't want appear to be showing off and so choose white and black cars that don't turn heads? Anti-conspicuous consumption?

>pastel colors

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=honda+diffused+sky+blue&iax...

I don't know how old your sister-in-law is, but children are probably the biggest exception to "discrete colours" in modern culture.

Well when young she was known as the Crimplene Kid and has gone downhill since then. Clothes-wise, that is.

I love the modern term of "greige" for the grey home decor we see in a lot of homes for sale of late.

Presumably somewhere between "grey" and "beige"

Similar to how spices in foods seemed to have been more popular when there was less of an abundance in western cuisine.

I see a lot more spices in food in the US over the last several decades.

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.

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