PINK

The meaning of an enigmatic shade.

Historian Pastoureau’s seventh book on the history of colors in European societies presents a lively, informative investigation of the social, lexical, artistic, and symbolic meanings of pink, one of the hues he calls “half colors,” which include orange, purple, gray, and brown. Seen in paintings in ancient Macedonia, pink became associated with nudity because of its appearance in Roman depictions of the skin of gods. Even throughout the Middle Ages, pink was not seen in attire, nor in liturgy or heraldry, where various shades of red were prominent. In the 14th century, when Florentine dyers offered diverse pink tones, the color increased in popularity in paintings and textiles, was found in clothing inventories, and became so fashionable throughout Europe that, from 1380 to 1390, a craze for the color swept the French court. Still, it did not carry the association with feminine that was attached to it later, nor did it have a name. Sometimes called incarnato, referring to flesh tone, after mid-18th-century horticulturalists developed new pale shades of roses, that term was replaced by the French word rose, meaning “a pretty pink tint.” Gradually, over the next hundred years, pink entered the aesthetic and literary lexicon as associated with female beauty, gentleness, and delicate feelings. From the mid-19th to mid-20th century, that association passed from young women to little girls and, with the creation of Barbie in 1959, to their older sisters. Besides tracing the trajectory of the color’s popularity, Pastoureau looks at many substances—plants, minerals, insects—used in dyes and paints to produce pink tones, as well as recipes for creating and applying pink pigments.

An entertaining, beautifully produced volume.