Historian Michel Pastoureau: ‘If a Roman arrived in 2024, he would be surprised to see so much navy blue’

The historian Michel Pastoureau was a special child. “I had colorful whims,” he says. Once, his parents bought him a jacket to go to a wedding. He wanted a dark navy blue one. His mother decided on a lighter shade. It was a bad experience. “At the wedding I had the impression that everyone was looking at me because my blue jacket wasn’t dark enough.” Another time, his father was going to buy him an adult bicycle, but it was yellow, and he had always had green bicycles. Yellow? Impossible. It had to be green. Result? “I was left without a bicycle.”

He remembers it in the living room of his apartment overlooking the slopes of Roland Garros. In the bookstore he found the novel Invahoe, by Walter Scott, between volumes of medieval history. He read it at age eight after seeing Richard Thorpe’s Technicolor film and being fascinated by it. Therein lies the origin of his obsession with the Middle Ages, and specifically in the second half of the 12th century. Pastoureau, who grew up in a family of intellectuals and artists (his father was a friend of André Breton, the father of surrealism), was a child who preferred to play at being knights rather than cowboys.

Historians who discover an unexplored — or little explored — land until they create a new discipline are rare. In his case, it is the history of colors, which he arrived at from heraldry. For him, the Middle Ages — and always the 12th century in particular — is a decisive moment, but his books cover all of Western history. He has already published volumes on blue, black, green, red, yellow, and white in both French and English. Now he is working on pink and orange.

Question. You have recently had cornea surgery. Do you see the colors well?

Answer. Yes, although they’re a little denatured. The white, yellow, red, and pink are not quite there as they should be.

Q. Have you ever had color perception problems before?

A. It’s linked to age too, I guess. But I have read that people who were blind from birth reach adulthood with more or less the same culture of colors as the sighted, and this invites us to reflect.

Q. How can you imagine red if you have never seen red?

A. Because we live in society and conversations with others end up offering us a notion of color. A blind person knows a certain number of things about animals, fabrics, and food. And if they are told that “this is red,” they will compare it with other things they know by touch or hearing, and the notion of this color will eventually appear.

Q. Viewed this way, color has nothing to do with our usual concept of it.

A. It is absolutely impossible to say what color is. There are multiple definitions. The same happens with the terms that apply to colors. Saying what yellow is, for instance, is extremely difficult. You can name yellow objects or say that yellow is the color of a lemon. It’s not false, but it’s not a true definition either.

Q. You write that color is matter, light, and feeling.

A. And a concept, an abstract notion. Over the centuries Europe moved from color-matter to color-abstraction. In Latin, color terms are always adjectives. A Roman would never say: I like red. He will say: I like red flowers, red togas. Or: I don’t like the blue dresses of the Germans. Color always refers to something. But little by little, the terms become nouns. Red appears as absolute, and this is how we say: I like green, I don’t like violet. A Greek or Roman would never say that. It’s too abstract.

Q. When does the change occur?

A. Towards the end of the Middle Ages or the beginning of the modern era. This is where the symbolism of colors is born, and it is possible to link different ideas to the same color. Red is strength, love, violence, celebration, glory. In the Middle Ages, the main colors went from three (white, red, and black) to six (white, red, black, green, yellow, blue). It won’t change after that.

Q. Let’s talk about blue. You explain that for the Romans it was not an important color. What about today?

A. The Greeks and Romans had barely any words to express this color. Now blue is the favorite color of most Europeans, far ahead of the others. Look at us [Pastoureau, the photographer Manuel Braun, and the interviewer]. The three of us are wearing blue. And we hadn’t agreed beforehand!

Q. Why does the change occur in the Middle Ages?

A. It is a theological question at first. God begins to be made a God of light. The divine light must be separated from the terrestrial light. In Latin there are two words for light. Lumen is the material and terrestrial light, and lux is the divine light. In the images, both lights must be distinguished, and then blue becomes the color of the sky and divine light, and the terrestrial light is white, yellow, or something between the two. It is a way to distinguish both lights. And that is when the sky progressively becomes blue in the images, while in Antiquity the sky is not blue, neither in the images nor in the descriptions, but gold, black, gray, green, and sometimes blue too.

Q. So, the sky turns blue.

A. These mutations take place in the 12th century. The sky turns blue and the people who live in the sky, including the Virgin Mary, are dressed in blue. The kings want to imitate them, especially the king of France, who symbolically marries the Virgin and adopts two of the Virgin’s attributes: the blue and the fleur-de-lys, which becomes the coat of arms of the kings of France.

Q. That is, if we wear blue and if it is the favorite color now, even though we live in very secularized societies, does this have a religious origin?

A. We could say that if French athletes play in a blue shirt, it is due to Mary the Virgin and the kings of France. It is interesting that this color — the Virgin, the king, and the monarchy’s color — has become the color of the state and the nation.

Q. Why was red dominant for centuries?

A. The decline of red begins with the Renaissance and with the morality of colors. There is religious morality and social morality. The idea begins to develop that we must avoid colors that are too bright, especially in clothing.

It starts with Protestants, who distinguish between honest and dishonest colors like red, yellow, and green. From that moment on, men are no longer seen dressed entirely in red, yellow, or green, while in the Middle Ages it was common. The Catholic Counter-Reformation progressively took up these values and later social morality — with what we call bourgeois values — adopted the same ideas. Hence you see all these men dressed in black or dark colors. Today it is navy blue. The idea is the same. It is a long-lasting phenomenon that begins in the Renaissance.

Q. If we look at the present, in 2024 what is the color of our time in history?

A. Our time is gray. The future is gloomy, the state of the world is quite disturbing, and society is not very happy. Symbolically, we can associate all this with the color gray. It’s been like this for years. In the 1970s or 1990s we would not have said the same.

Q. What color do you associate in your memory with the 1970s?

A. Apple green, something quite light, and I associate it with orange. In France, orange was seen in kitchens and apartments. There were orange trains. There was even an orange card created for the metro. All this was supposed to brighten life. I was a little naive. To give life to disadvantaged neighborhoods, architects and urban planners imagined painting the walls with bright colors. Or think of the Pompidou Center in Paris with all the colored tubes. After a while, the public could not stand such bright colors, and asked for gray and white again.

Q. Is there a color of the future?

A. A change is happening, but very slowly. I can assure you that in 10 or 20 years, blue will still be the color of choice. In two or three centuries there will surely be changes.

Q. Will there be new colors in the future?

A. No. There will be new nuances in colors, linked to new lights, new textiles, and new materials. It will be possible to make blue or red speak differently to our successors. But, as colors are abstract categories, it is quite difficult to create a new abstract category. What is possible is that what are now shades could acquire the status of true color.

Q. Can you give an example?

A. If one color is promoted to the status of a true color, it will be beige. It has an important role in clothing, objects, and furniture. But beige does not represent the same thing for everyone. You and I must have a different idea of beige. On the other hand, if you said blue or red, everyone understands it.

Q. Are the colors infinite? Isn’t it arbitrary that a shade ends up becoming a color? Doesn’t it depend on where the cut is made?

A. Yes, but it is not nature that makes the cut, it is society. Nature offers thousands of colorations and societies group them into categories. They are not the same in different societies. In Europe, we distinguish 11 colors. In Japan, it is a little different. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it is important to know if a color is wet or dry, or to know if it is smooth or rough. In Central Asia, colors can be soft or hard. In these areas, materiality plays an important role.

Q. Your favorite color is green, right?

A. Yes. Since I was three or four years old I have liked green, especially dark green. I can’t say why. The word vert (green) is beautiful. Beige, as a word, is hideous.

Q. Imagine that we traveled back to the Middle Ages in a time machine. Would the colors surprise us?

A. We would see churches painted inside and outside. We would see variegated colors, with contrasts that would seem violent to us but that would not to be to contemporaries. They would put green next to red, for example. We would also see a contrast between places and times in which color is present and even violent, such as holidays or sacred places, and everyday life, which is less colorful. We would see that color is expensive and that dyes, like paint, have a price, while today a five-year-old child can buy a box of markers in 30 different formats for a ridiculous sum.

Q. Now imagine an ancient Roman who arrived in 2024. What would he see?

A. They would find it strange to see so much navy blue, so much black, and this green, which was practically unknown in daily life in Rome. Where is the white? they might ask. In Rome white is everywhere. Perhaps it would seem barbaric, because we know from testimonies how the Romans saw the Germans, and one of the first things the authors highlight are the differences in colors. The Germans are better dyers than the Romans and have a more varied palette. They make associations that the Romans did not make. The Romans did not wear green or blue, but the Germans did, and they put them with yellows, violets, and whites. Even then it shocked the Romans. In 2024 it would also shock them.

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