Blue: The History of a Color

The ancient Greeks had almost no word for blue and largely considered it ugly and barbaric. Most people today, when asked their favourite colour, say blue. How did that happen?

Michel Pastoureau — the French medievalist who has devoted his career to the cultural history of colour — traces that transformation across two thousand years. The story moves from the near-absence of blue in prehistoric and ancient Western art, through the medieval moment when the Church began associating blue with the Virgin Mary and it became a dominant colour in cathedral glass and illuminated manuscripts, to its rise as a royal colour in the twelfth century and a revolutionary symbol in the eighteenth. By the time blue jeans arrived, it had become the colour of democracy, labour, and everyday life. And then — as seen from space — the colour of the Earth itself.

Pastoureau's central argument is that any history of colour is, above all, a social history. Colours do not simply exist in nature waiting to be perceived: they are produced, named, regulated, and fought over. What a colour means changes with the society that uses it.

Blue is beautifully illustrated and moves at the pace of its subject — slowly, accumulating meaning. For artists working with colour as material, symbol, or history, it is essential reading. His book on red is equally worth seeking out.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2001.