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  • On Blue Note

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    Belle Ling
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    Blue has historically held significant symbolic meanings. In medieval times, blue represented divinity and was often used as the color of the Virgin Mary. It was an expensive pigment available only to royalty and the religious elite. By the 13th century, improvements to dyeing techniques made bright blue more widely available. Sumptuary laws regulated who could wear certain colors. The Reformation era saw blue backgrounds used to represent heaven. Newton's color theory in the 17th century helped establish blue as a primary color. Blue has inspired much literature, appearing in works by Goethe, Woolf, Crane, Mitchell, Dickinson and others as a symbol of sorrow, spirituality and transcendence.

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    On Blue Note

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    Blue has historically held significant symbolic meanings. In medieval times, blue represented divinity and was often used as the color of the Virgin Mary. It was an expensive pigment available only to royalty and the religious elite. By the 13th century, improvements to dyeing techniques made bright blue more widely available. Sumptuary laws regulated who could wear certain colors. The Reformation era saw blue backgrounds used to represent heaven. Newton's color theory in the 17th century helped establish blue as a primary color. Blue has inspired much literature, appearing in works by Goethe, Woolf, Crane, Mitchell, Dickinson and others as a symbol of sorrow, spirituality and transcendence.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    8 views2 pages

    On Blue Note

    Uploaded by

    Belle Ling
    Blue has historically held significant symbolic meanings. In medieval times, blue represented divinity and was often used as the color of the Virgin Mary. It was an expensive pigment available only to royalty and the religious elite. By the 13th century, improvements to dyeing techniques made bright blue more widely available. Sumptuary laws regulated who could wear certain colors. The Reformation era saw blue backgrounds used to represent heaven. Newton's color theory in the 17th century helped establish blue as a primary color. Blue has inspired much literature, appearing in works by Goethe, Woolf, Crane, Mitchell, Dickinson and others as a symbol of sorrow, spirituality and transcendence.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    History:

    -Prehistory to 12th C: Blue is an uncommon colour, marginal colour


    -11th-14th C: Blue as a new colour (esp. starting in the 13th C) (chromatic revolution, a
    new colour order, before 10thC: blue is an absence, then 11th-12th: blue is used in
    heavy/dark tone, in 13thC: blue became a clear, luminous, divine colour, a colour of
    sanctity and divinity) // colour of Virgin
    -12th century: blue alone evoke the virgins mourning // In medieval times, blue was
    an expensive pigment
    -12th 13th centuries: The rise of blue in aesthetic, social and economic spheres:
    divinity, royalty, heraldry
    -13th: Progress in dyeing techniques permitted the production of stable bright blue,
    cultivation of woad
    - The struggles of the blueman of the 13th and 14th centuries
    -Before late 14th C: three quarters of the dyeing recipes are devoted to producing red
    -15th C: Dyeing recipes for producing blue are of greater frequency
    -14th-15thC: Sumptuary laws and dress codes
    -15thC: Dominated by black
    -14-15th C: Early Reformation [colour is luxury, artifice, and illusion, HB 107]
    -16th C: Reformation [Usually their dark portraits are placed against bright blue
    backgrounds that evoke the heavens to which they aspired HB 110]
    -1666 / mid 17th C: Newtonian theory of optics, three basic colours, blue and green at
    the centre of the spectrum
    -Late 17th C: witnessed an explosion in chromatic scales, charts, samples that declared
    the numbers, laws, and norms defining colours nature. From a scientific point of
    view, colour from then on seemed more or less mastered; as a result, it lost much of
    its mystery; Colour could be mastered and measured [HB 119]
    -Early 18th C: Jakob Christoph Le Blon invented colour graving
    -In 1957, Yves Klein proclaimed the advent of Blue Epoch, sending out invitations
    to two Paris exhibitions with an original timbre bleu (Blue Mythologies)
    -Blueprints (Cyanotype discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and Anna Atkins
    brought the science into photography
    ***
    Blue in Literature
    -Novalis
    -The Sorrows of Young Werther, first novel by Goethe
    -Virginia Woolfs Green and Blue
    -Steven Crane, The Blue Hotel
    -Joni Mitchells poem Blue [BM]
    -Modern French poet, Cocteau, The ink that I use is the blue blood of the swan
    [BM]
    -Emily Dickinsons I Heard a Fly Buzz [BM]
    -Louis Antwi, Blue and Saliva, 2005 (poem) [BM]
    -Nursery rhyme: Roses are red, / violets are blue[BM]
    -Prose romance Perceforest, completed in 1344, was the first indicator of the changes
    in the heraldic code of colours, there knights dressed in blue are courageous, loyal and
    faithful characters [HB]
    -Jean Froissart, Dit du bleu chevalier, 1361-1367 (poem) [HB]

    ***
    Others:
    -Dyeing VS Church in Medieval times
    -Colour VS Church

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