Green: A History

A young Jane Fonda stares at you from the cover of Michel Pastoureau’s latest, Green: The History of a Color. She wears a dull brown-and-green tartan dress and leans back against the arm of a green sofa, large green-covered books discarded to one side. She’s smoking, but she’s taken a break to fix her green eyes on the camera.

Green, you may have noticed, is the theme.

From the cover to the last page, where the Fonda photo is repeated, Green is sumptuous, to the eye and to the mind. In deft summaries, Pastoureau picks out the technical, artistic, literary, political, aesthetic aspects of the color’s history.

He asks whether the Greeks were capable of seeing greens and blues; he discusses the teams of the Roman hippodrome, identified by their “loud, garish, and vulgar” colors (35); he notes that the color green is rare in the Bible and hence rare in the church fathers.

Green was elevated during the twelfth century when Cardinal Lothar, the future Innocent III, declared green to be the color of eternal life and a “middle color between white, red and black” (quoted, 42). After that, “green became de facto the color most often called upon throughout the liturgical year” (42).

During the later middle ages, green became associated (naturally enough) with youth and springtime, with love, and with the youthful vices of “impatience of the flesh, and inconstancy of heart. It was very often a changeable color, fickle and frivolous, in the image of youth itself” (71). Associated with dragons and with Satan, it took on more threatening hues. Pastoureau spends a chapter talking about green knights, especially the Greek Knight, whom he links with “the goddess Fortune, often represented in late medieval images wearing a green or striped dress. By accepting the challenge proposed by the Green Knight, Gawain wagers not only his reputation but also his life. It is probably the green of fate that is presented here, a risky and capricious green that can reverse any individual’s destiny for better or for worse” (105).

Green declined in popularity in the later middle ages, and was scoured from the churches during what Pastoureau calls the Reformation’s “chromoclasm” (138). Protestant suspicion about green had an mpact for centuries. Green remained a subordinate color during the Enlightenment, and Pastoureau argues that the Protestant roots of those who launched the earliest mass products limited the palette of everyday good: “it was as if the palette of vivid colors, perfectly authorized by the chemical industry, was forbidden by the civic moral code” (206). 

Inevitably a book that covers everything from Homer’s blindness to Jane Fonda’s green eyes sometimes verges on an annotated list. Pastoureau makes even his lists absorbing, and when you get tired of reading there are beautiful pictures to look at.