Yellow: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau (review)

Yellow is Michel Pastoureau’s most recent addition to his series on the cultural history of color that to date includes books on Red (2017), Green (2014), Black (2009) and Blue (2001). It continues an interdisciplinary investigation into a history of color as a socially constructed concept whose vocabulary, codes and values have been determined by distinct and identifiable cultures. Pastoureau’s focus is that of European societies from Roman antiquity to the eighteenth century based on almost 40 years of seminars conducted at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France. It includes such topics as color etymology and taxonomy; minerals and pigments; prehistoric ochres; myth, lore and allegory; medieval heraldry; dyestuffs; color physiology; funerary traditions; iconographic conventions; robes and vestments; and medicinal functions. Lavishly illustrated, it is beautiful to behold.

Unlike the semiotic continuities of colors treated in Pastoureau’s previous volumes, in Yellow there is much disparity and, save for certain strains of medieval imagery, one can point to few threads of connection among the color’s connotations. This is due in part to the wide variability of associations attached to the color among disparate societies, epochs and uses, from cave paintings to Gauguin’s Yellow Christ. But it is also true that the luster of yellow often belies an assortment of denigrated meanings assigned over time that here receive some emphasis. One source of ambiguity, Pastoureau points out, owes to the color’s natural mineral identification with the precious metal gold. The yellow pigment in many cultures derived from orpiment, a highly toxic arsenic sulfide termed arsenikon in ancient Greece, zarnikh (as in zar for gold) in Persia. Pliny called it auripigmentum or gold paint, a term retained by medieval writers until it was later translated as orpigment or oropimente. Widely used in the East, where yellow was the exclusive color of the emperor, it was known in Britain as “King’s yellow.” The Latin adjective aureus continued to be identified with gold metal for its precious, reflective value and for its resemblance to the light of the sun, informing the cosmic symbolism of funerary art, religion and sovereignty. In matters more mundane, since at least the sixth century BCE gold coins stamped with heads of bulls or rams or lions—later kings or emperors—were used to pay the armies of antiquity. Pastoureau illustrates a stunning gold stater of Philip II of Macedon that bears the head of Apollo wreathed in laurel, held in the Cabinet des médailles in France’s Bibliotheque nationale.

Despite an abundant use of gold in mobiliary art, Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts and Byzantine mosaics, by the early Middle Ages yellow in its painted applications had fallen into disfavor in Western Christendom due to vernacular associations with treason, chicanery, and villainy as well as cowardice, folly, sickness (as in jaundice) and decline. Related to a medieval theory of humours, yellow was associated with jealousy, envy and hatred. Likened to gall in animals and a choleric temperament as violent and unstable, yellow was a color much despised. One persistent strain of association occurred in depictions of Judas wearing yellow robes as in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, where he is shown receiving payment for his betrayal. In the following century a manuscript from Prague depicts Jan Hus being burned alive for heresy in a yellow tunic. These and other notorious figures form part of wider categories of exclusion that for centuries perpetuated discrimination against Christian and non-Christian outcasts, extending to the yellow star worn by Jews during World War II and to derogatory terms for Asians.

But there are also amusing anecdotes about the color’s history. When Cicero’s personal enemy, Clodius (Publius Clodius Pulcher, 92–53 BCE) attempted to seduce the wife of Caesar, he disguised himself as a woman by wearing a long yellow dress dyed with saffron that Cicero considered...