2023/177: The Secret Lives of Colour — Kassia St Clair

2023/177: The Secret Lives of Colour — Kassia St Clair

Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream. [loc. 272]

Seventy-five short essays about the cultural, social and scientific history of 75 colours, from gamboge to heliotrope. St Clair weaves in a vast array of facts, some of which surprised me: 'There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colours'; 'Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant [fuchsia] that now bears his name'; 'French dyers could not touch [indigo], on pain of death, until 1737'. (Copious footnotes and a bibliography support each assertion.)( Read more... )