by John Harvey
I think the world, and life generally, is such as to make it appropriate for us all to wear black . . . and for our intercourse with each other to be subdued and ceremonial, and mindful of death.
In visual art, on the other hand, both death and the accessories of death are often painted in the lustreless but glaring whiteness of shroud and bleached bones, while the recently dead themselves are regularly shown as white. In paintings of cemeteries, tombs of white limestone glimmer beneath cypress trees.2
Death, through The Seventh Seal, plays a game of chess with the Knight, played by a gaunt but relatively young Max von Sydow. If we compare cultures, we find various entities may choose now one and now the other side of the board. Priesthoods in the ancient world, from Rome to the Druid groves, wore mainly white, as Mormon elders do now in their temples, and Condomblé priests across Brazil. On the other hand, both Shi‘a Islam and Judaism in recent centuries have made a large use of black in their dress, as do some divisions of Buddhism, for instance in Japan, departing from the traditional saffron-to-red. In Christianity the widespread use of black is complemented by many uses of white, as in vestments such as the surplice and accessories like the chorister’s gown. In many representations, historically and today, Jesus wears white, as the Pope often does today on earth (sometimes beneath the red mantum of governance) and as the winged multitudes are said to in Heaven.
Returning to earth, both white and black have been the symbolic colours of an incumbent social class, like the Russian aristocratic ‘Whites’, who called the tsar the ‘White Tsar’.3 In chapter Two, on classical black, some comparison was made between the roles of senatorial and imperial purple in ancient Rome, and of patrician and royal black in later Europe. But, equally, if one is speaking of the dress of governing classes, one could contrast Europe’s nineteenth-century black, in a fine frock-coat of best black woollen broadcloth, with the Roman patrician toga of fine, white wool. It is true that while both men and women wore white in Rome, in the nineteenth century, in Western Europe especially, women often wore white while men very often wore black. But gender coding, too, may be reversed, and men and women in Saudi Arabia use the opposite colours: the men wear white, and women black. In the ninteenth-century’s Colonial era men used both colours: well-to-do American and European men wore black in their home countries, and white in their torrid dominions. White became, as it were, the black of the Tropics. In recent centuries in developed cities, the colour of professionalism has been black, but in laboratories, hospitals and kitchens, the white of hygiene and health. On stage, sad Pierrot wore white, and melancholy Hamlet black. In far-right politics, neo-Nazis took black as their colour, the Klu Klux Klan white. More frivolously, the ‘dandy’ of nineteenth-century Europe wore black – a colour stylish still – but there have also been white dandies. For his public appearances the novelist and satirist Tom Wolfe wears a white two- or three-piece suit, now with a dark and now with a white tie: there is an elusive, smart irony somewhere in the radiance. And in contemporary Brazil the malandro (‘bad boy’, hustler, spiv) struts the backstreets in a white suit, shirt and trilby hat, worn often with a red tie and sometimes with a shirt striped red and white.
Examples could be multiplied, which would show at once both the arbitrariness and the consistencies in the practices that fix and communicate values among cultures. The consistencies include the pre-eminence of the black/white contrast if a person wants to signal meanings using colours, as in voting systems which use black and white counters. I must stop short, however, of implying that black and white are simply interchangeable. Their uses and meanings may overlap, but their associations cluster around opposing centres. Thus we may speak of a deathly whiteness, but we do not speak of a ‘white despair’, nor – though both brides and bridegrooms have sometimes worn black – would we wish to speak of ‘wedding black’. Bedouin men, who wear black in the desert, wear white at their weddings – as the British know from T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, who chose for his daily wear the white, silk wedding robe he was given by Emir Faisal.4
Wedding white touches on a dimension of white that is antithetical to the dominant senses of black, for wedding white was once worn by everyone, as the colour of jubilation, and was only later confined to brides (while from the Middle East eastwards, brides often wear festive red). White, like black, is not only a colour. We in the West get serious when we wear black – about love, life, faith, ego, money, war – and in dressing in white we may consider ourselves clean, and confer on ourselves happiness too, and virtue, even sanctity. For white is the colour of blinding light. When Jesus was transfigured, his raiment was ‘white as the light’ (Matthew 17:2), ‘shining, exceeding white as snow’ (Mark 9:3), ‘white and glistening’ (Luke 9:29). And the angel who rolled back the stone from the tomb had a countenance ‘like lightning and his raiment white as snow’ (Matthew 28:3). For when white is transcendent, it is wool, snow and lightning, a blinding, electric flash that lingers. But black too has its charge, and in Christian cosmology God dwells both in dazzling light and in the heart of a sacred darkness.
REFERENCES
Introduction: How Black Is Black?
1 ‘Black is not a colour’, A Treatise on Painting, trans. J. F. Rigaud (London, 1802), chap. 235, p. 132. Leonardo also said that black, ‘like a broken vessel, is not able to contain anything’ (chap. 222). But though he noted that ‘black and white are not reckoned among colours’, and called black ‘the representative of darkness’, he stated that he would ‘not omit mentioning them, because there is nothing in painting more useful and necessary; since painting is but an effect produced by lights and shadows’ (chap. 226).
2 Matisse had much to say on black. His assertion that ‘le noir c’est une force: je mets mon lest en noir pour simplifier la construction’ is quoted in the first number of Derrière le miroir, December 1946. For further remarks by Matisse on black (for instance at the opening of the exhibition ‘Black is a Colour’ at the Galerie Maeght, Paris, in December 1946. see Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley, CA, 1995), p. 165ff; also Annie Mollard-Desfour, Le Noir (Paris, 2005), p. 20, n. 7 (which includes ‘Pissarro me disait . . . “Manet . . . fait de la lumière avec du noir”’). For the Renoir, see A. Vollard, Renoir: An Intimate Record, trans. H. L. Van Doren and R. T. Weaver [1925] (London, 1990), chap. 12, p. 52. On Tintoretto see for instance Eric Potter, ed., Painters on Painting (New York, 1971), pp. 53–4. On Aristotle and Goethe, see pp. 45, 227 below. On Beethoven and the black chord, see Michael C. Tusa, ‘Beethoven’s “C-Minor Mood”: Some Thoughts on the Structural Implications of Key Choice’, in Beethoven Forum, 2, ed. Christoph Reynolds (Lincoln, NE, 1993), p. 2, n. 3.
3 Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009), p. 194; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley, CA, 1978), p. 37e, section 156, p. 46e, section 215.
4 Thomas Young, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (London, 1807), p. 345.
5 Hermann von Helmholtz, Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, trans. J.P.C. Southall (Menasha, WI, 1924), vol. II, p. 131. The first sentence is sometimes quoted without the article, ‘Black is real sensation’, but the German reads ‘Das Schwarz ist eine wirkliche Empfindung’.
6 Hodgkin is quoted in W. D. Wright, ‘The Nature of Blackness in Art and Visual Perception’, Leonardo, XIV (1981), pp. 236–7. I am grateful to Dr David Tolhurst for an explanation of the biochemistry of sight.
7 ‘I conclude, then, that the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age’: William Ewart Gladstone, Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. III (Oxford, 1858), p. 488; on ‘flauus’ and other elusive classical colour-words see Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–12; on colour and historical etymology see R. W. Casson, ‘Colour Shift: Evolution of English Color Terms from Brightness to Hue’, in Colour Categories in Thought and Language, ed. C. L. Hardin and L. M
affi (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 224–39.
8 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Colour Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, CA, 1969); for an extended appraisal of many aspects of Basic Colour Terms see Hardin and Maffi, eds, Colour Categories in Thought and Language.
9 See Rudolf Steiner in Colour (Forest Row, East Sussex, 1992), p. 25. On the cultural associations of black see Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1967), especially chap. 3, ‘Color Classification in Ndembu Ritual’, pp. 59ff; C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. Weightman and D. Weightman (London, 1970); Umberto Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, in On Signs, ed. M. Blonsky (Baltimore, MD, 1985), pp. 157–75.
10 See Jeremy Coote, ‘“Marvels of Everyday Vision”: The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Cattle Keeping Nilotes’, in Anthropology and Aesthetics, ed. J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford, 1992), pp. 245–73; John Ryle is quoted on p. 251.
ONE: The Oldest Colour
1 The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson, trans. I. A. Blackwell (Copenhagen, 1906), p. 260.
2 Andrew Marvell, ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.’ (1654), ll. 341–2.
3 To go from petals to stems, it would have been in plants’ interest if their stems and leaves could have been black, since they would then absorb – and use – more light in their photosynthetic processes. And plants’ leaves could have been black since, in the waterborne stage of their evolution, they made use of various photosynthetic bacteria and the different pigments that derived from them (known as bacteriochlorophylls and carotenoids). As matters turned out, however, the plant lineage which made it onto dry land was committed to chlorophyll, which had evolved with a red-blue absorption to avoid competition with other bacteriochlorophylls. And once established on land, it would have been too demanding evolutionarily to start again in another colour. I am indebted to Dr Julian Hibbard for these points about plants and their pigments.
4 On all-black birds, black male birds and piebald creatures, see Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex [1871] (Princeton, NJ, 1981), Part II, chap. XVI, pp. 226–7. On the Gouldian finch see Jennifer J. Templeton, D. James Mountjoy, Sarah R. Pryke and Simon C. Griffith, ‘In the Eye of the Beholder: Visual Mate Choice Lateralization in a Polymorphic Songbird’, Biology Letters (3 October 2012), available at http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org. On the inherited avoidance of warning colours, see Leena Lindström, Rauno V. Alatalo and Johanna Mappes, ‘Reaction of Hand-reared and Wild-caught Predators towards Warningly Colored, Gregarious, and Conspicuous Prey’, Behavioural Ecology, X/3 (1999), pp. 317–22.
5 ‘H’ (possibly Dr Harley), ‘Mr Ruskin’s Illness Described by Himself’, British Medical Journal (27 January 1900), p. 225.
6 See G. Bass, ‘A Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun (Kas)’, American Journal of Archaeology, XC/3 (July 1986), pp. 269–96.
7 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XVI, 40.
8 Herodotus, Histories, I, 98–9.
9 Ibid., 1, 179.
10 The Book of the Dead, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, chap. 175, ‘The Chapter of Not Dying a Second Time’.
11 Plutarch, Moralia, V, 26, ‘On Isis and Osiris’, trans. F. C. Babbitt (London, 1936).
12 On Hindu beliefs see Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York, 2009). I have also drawn especially on H. Krishna Sastri, South Indian Images of Gods and Goddesses (Madras, 1916), and on Alain Daniélou, Mythes et dieux de l’Inde: Le Polythéisme hindou (Paris, 1994) – see, for instance, ‘La Couleur sombre’, pp. 242ff; also on conversations with Eric Auzoux, Anita Desai and Simeran Gell.
13 In another myth Shiva is married to the goddess Parvati, who is also called Kali (Black) because of her dark skin, but is later granted a golden body and sloughs off her dark outer sheath, which then becomes the goddess Kali. The goddess Draupadi, also called Krishna (Dark Woman), is associated with Kali, and like Kali is worshipped notably by lower castes, in South India especially. Kali too is said to live, in banishment, in the southern Vindhua mountains. Draupadi is born of fire, so there does seem a correlation in Indian myth between things burned black by fire and southern skin burned black by hard, humble outdoor work, though dark or black skin, and fire, may also be divine. See Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York, 2009), pp. 57–8, 301, 396–8.
14 Quoted from A. K. Ramanujan, ed., Speaking of Shiva (London, 1973).
TWO: Classical Black
1 All the early black items mentioned here are displayed and described in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. As to colour perception and colour theory in Greece and Rome, both the classical and the recent literature are summarized by John Gage in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993), pp. 11–38, and reviewed more fully by Mark Bradley in Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2009); see especially ‘Modern Literature’, pp. 12–30.
2 Vincent J. Bruno, Form and Colour in Greek Painting (London, 1977), p. 85.
3 For instance, when Strife stations herself beside Odysseus’ ‘black ship’ at the start of Iliad, XI, 5. Here as elsewhere ‘black’ is melaini, from the melas root. In different accounts emphasis is placed on the black keel, black prow and black hull of the ships. The association of maritime black with death is widespread and has continued, not only in the grand nautical funerals of heroic admirals like Nelson (see p. 250), but in the more local practice of, for instance, blackening the figurehead when the ship’s master died. In Greece some beautiful examples of this from more recent centuries may be seen in the maritime museum in the small port town of Galaxithi where, if the figurehead is female her black form may still have red lips, whites to her eyes and a gold crown.
4 Plutarch, Life of Theseus, XXII; see also Apollodorus, Epitome of the Library, E.I.7–10.
5 On quince and frog colours see Liza Cleland, ‘The Semiosis of Description’, in The Clothed Body in the Ancient World, ed. L. Cleland, M. Harlow and L. Llewellyn-Jones (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 90–93; the funeral procession, Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, trans. R. C. Trevelyan (Liverpool, 1922), ll. 11–12.
6 Pausanius, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones (London, 1918), VIII.34.3; Virgil, Aeneid, trans. C. Day-Lewis (New York, 1953), IV.469ff.
7 The darks and blacks of the classical Underworld, in Greek perception, are described in Homer’s Iliad, XV, 187ff, and Odyssey, X, 495ff; Hesiod’s Theogony, 736ff, and in the Orphic Hymn 18 to Hades.
8 Plato, Timaeus, 44d–47e; Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects, section I, part 2.
9 Democritus, On Colours; Plato, Laws, Book 4, Timaeus, 81e–86a; Aristotle, On Sense and Sensible Objects, section I, part 7.
10 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Books XXXII–XXXV.
11 Petronius, Satyricon, chap. 83.
12 On Turner, see Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (East Aurora, NY, 1886), pp. 47–8.
13 Lucian of Samosata, De Calumnia, 5. Botticelli was encouraged to the subject by his friend Leon Battista Alberti, who had celebrated Apelles’ painting in Book III of his Della Pitura of 1435, on the basis of his own paraphrase of Lucian. See also Rudolph Altrocchi, ‘The Calumny of Apelles in the Literature of the Quattrocento’, PMLA, XXXVI/3 (September 1921), pp. 454–91.
14 Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 35, 39.
15 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M. H. Morgan (Cambridge, MA, 1914), Book VII, chap. 10, section 4. On the use of black grounds in Roman frescoes, on the use of black to unify composition, and on the effect of black in creating an inviolable surface, see Roger Ling, Roman Painting (Cambridge, 1991), especially pp. 41–2, 66–7.
16 Vitruvius, Ten Books, Book VII, chap. 4, section 5.
17 See Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2009), chap. 7, ‘Purple’, pp. 189–211: on ‘black’ p
urples, pp. 192–3, 195–6; Augustus on his rooftop, pp. 200–11.
18 Ovid, Art of Love, III, ll. 189–90.
19 Judith Lynn Sebesta, ‘Tunica Ralla, Tunica Spissa: The Colours and Textiles of Roman Costume’, in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (Madison, WI, 1994), pp. 65–76.
20 Cassius Dio, Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary and Herbert B. Foster (London, 1924), LXVII.7.2ff. In 1668 a black dinner was mounted by Jesuits at Versailles for Louis XIV, and another, with an elaborate all-black menu, is imagined by Huysmans in À Rebours: see André Félibien, Relation de la Feste de Versailles (Paris, 1668); Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris, 1884), chap. 1. Huysmans’ menu, served on a black tablecloth on black-edged plates, includes black olives, caviar, bread, blood puddings, plum puddings, chocolate, coffee and stout.
21 For the features of the Underworld mentioned in context see Statius, Thebaid, IV, 520ff, VIII, 21ff; Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, III, 380ff; Ovid, Metamorphoses, V, 354ff, and Fasti, IV, 417ff; also Virgil, Georgics, IV, 471ff.
22 Cacus, Aeneid, VIII, ll. 198–9; Dido, Aeneid, VI, l. 384; cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, ‘from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible’, I, ll. 62–3.
23 ‘Dusky Venus’, Amores, II, ll. 40–41; Ovid’s own black hair, Tristia, IX, 8, 2; Aroe into jackdaw, Metamorphoses, VII, l. 466; Actaeon and his hounds, Metamorphoses, III, ll. 206–352.
24 Phoebus and the Python, I, ll. 438–72; the House of Sleep, XI, ll. 573–649.
25 The mutilation of Philomela, Metamorphoses, VI, ll. 549–70.
26 In a placatory play, the name was changed to ‘Pontos Euxeinos’, ‘Hospitable Sea’, a phrase which could be used with more or less irony as desired.
THREE: The Black of God
1 Strabo, Geography, trans. H. L. Jones (London, 1924), on Lusitania, III, 3, 7; on Iberian wool, III, 2, 6; on the Cassiterides, III, 5, 11
