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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.