Customer Reviews

Black: The History of a Color

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Black: The History of a Color looks remarkably like a coffee table book--large format hardcover; gorgeous color reproductions of paintings, sculptures, engravings; nice layouts--but don't be fooled. The text is not just for flipping through. Michel Pastoureau, who previously wrote Blue: The History of a Color, explains at the beginning that he is not intending to continue a franchise through all the major colors, partly because the history of each color is too interconnected with all the others.That interconnected history is apparent throughout Black, which, while focusing on black, can't tell most of its story without reference to red, green, blue, yellow, and especially white and gray.

Pastoureau begins in ancient times with the use of black among Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. In Pharaonic Egypt black was a color of fertility--like the silt of the Nile--and Germans thought the crow, the blackest of all animals, was "simultaneously divine, warlike, and omniscient" as well as a source of food before Christianity declared it unclean. He traces the social and cultural history of the color through the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Church, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance.

Pastoureau's most interesting discussion is of black's place in the larger scheme of the color spectrum, which changes over time. At first black was considered truly a color, on a par with red or yellow in the public consciousness. Eventually, though, the position of black--and its new partner white (they weren't always so closely associated)--changes to something of a noncolor. One reason for this is the rise of printing; black print on white paper created a new black-and-white world, in opposition to the color one around us. People even began to think that color could be represented in black and white. And while printing was separating black and white out of the realm of "color," advances in the study of optics were doing the same. Black and white had always been a part of the spectrum, but with Isaac Newton's new analysis of the rainbow and the nature of white light that would change.

The story continues through the present day, the fortunes of black--and the other colors--changing with political, economic, cultural, and artistic developments. Pastoureau has made this a fascinating history of aesthetics, culture, society, and religion, illustrated with dozens of examples of paintings, miniatures, and other documents. Information is drawn from coats of arms, paintings and other works of art, treatises on art and science, and records of household possessions. There are a few stylistic or translation issues (hard to tell which, but the phrase "par excellence" certainly appears more often than normal), but none of the historical detail is dry or inaccessible. An extremely attractive book with fascinating stories to tell about how Western civilization has interacted with the spectrum for the past two thousand years.

This book sparked my interest because I wear black everyday. It's more than what I hoped for. It's really a great book both in aesthetics & intellectual content. Worth the price if you think black is beautiful.