“For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry. He wanted both out of the republic. He called painters “mixers and grinders of multi-coloured drugs,” and colour itself a form of pharmakon. The religious zealots of the Reformation felt similarly: they smashed the stained glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate.”
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets (via thebluesthour)
Tag: color
The world of [bright, loud] colors is opposed to the world of values, and the ‘chic’ invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favor of being: black, white, grey — whatever registers zero on the color scale — is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing.
Jean Baudrillard
Quoted in McMansion, USA by Kate Wagner
In Greek, whose color lexicon did not stabilize for many centuries, the words most commonly used for blue are glaukos and kyaneos. The latter probably referred originally to a mineral or a metal; it has a foreign root and its meaning often shifted. During the Homeric period it denoted both the bright blue of the iris and the black of funeral garments, but never the blue of the sky or sea. An analysis of Homer’s poetry shows that out of sixty adjectives describing elements and landscapes in the Iliad and Odyssey, only three are color terms, while those evoking light effects are quite numerous. During the classical era, kyaneos meant a dark color: deep blue, violet, brown, and black. In fact, it evokes more the “feeling” of the color than its actual hue. The term glaukos, which existed in the Archaic period and was much used by Homer, can refer to gray, blue, and sometimes even yellow or brown. Rather than denoting a particular color, it expresses the idea of a color’s feebleness or weak concentration. For this reason it is used to describe the color of water, eyes, leaves, or honey.
Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (via timemarauder)
secretive dreams 