A beautiful, revealing history of the colour Green, from pre-historic times to today. Examines the evolving place of Green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science & everyday life. Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception & meaning of the colour.
Filled with entertaining, enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the colour has been ambivalent, a symbol of life, serenity, luck & hope. Only in the Romantic period did Green definitively become the colour of nature. Pastoureau explains why the colour was connected with the Roman Emperor Nero, how it became the colour of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the colour of the middle class, why some 19th century scholars speculated that ancient Greeks couldn’t see green, how the colour was denigrated by Kandinsky. Green has a ubiquitous, soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes & our mission to save the planet. Fascinating.
