In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed
author of "Blue" and "Black "presents a fascinating and revealing
history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric
times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art,
clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel
Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception
and meaning of the color over millennia--and how we misread
cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have
always signified what they do today.
Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, "Green"
shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck,
and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil.
Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce
and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been
associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood,
love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively
become the color of nature.
Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the
Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe
believed it was the color of the middle class, why some
nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks
couldn't see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky
and the Bauhaus.
More broadly, "Green "demonstrates""that the history of the
color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent,
ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and
soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the
mission to save the planet.
With its striking design and compelling text, "Green" will
delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion,
or media.
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