In this book, the acclaimed author of “Blue” now tells the fascinating social history of the color black in Europe.
For Michel Pastoureau, the history of any color must be a social history first because it is societies that give colors everything from their changing names to their changing meanings—and black is exemplary in this regard.
In dyes, fabrics, and clothing, and in painting and other art works, black has always been a forceful—and ambivalent—shaper of social, symbolic, and ideological meaning in European societies.
