Red: The History of a Color

Red is the oldest colour in human use. The first pigment our ancestors ground for painting and dyeing, it was for much of history not just one colour among many but the colour — in some languages the word for red and the word for colour were the same. Pastoureau opens there, and from that starting point traces red across four thousand years of Western culture.

In antiquity, red meant war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period it held both sacred and secular weight simultaneously: the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell on one side; love, glory, and beauty on the other. Red was the prestige colour, the one worthy of ceremony and rank. Then came the Protestant Reformation, which turned against red as the colour of Catholic excess and moral indulgence, and its status collapsed almost overnight. It took the French Revolution to rehabilitate it — now as the colour of radical politics and the left, a meaning it has largely carried ever since.

Pastoureau builds the history through images: cave paintings at Lascaux, Renaissance masters, Rothko, Josef Albers. Each chapter earns its argument visually as well as historically.

This is the companion to Blue, and the two books reward reading together — the same method, two completely different trajectories. Pastoureau has also written volumes on black, green, and yellow, each following the same approach. Any one of them is a way into the series; Red and Blue are the strongest starting points.

Published by Princeton University Press, 2017.