From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, colour-ideas often referred back to Greek colour archetypes and to the four colours of the classical tetrachrome palette. For example, the second-century writer Hermas visualised the monster Leviathan as having four colours on its head: black, ‘fiery bloody’ (red), then golden and white.(1) Many later poets took from a treasury of classical and Eastern colour lore brought to light in a rich collection of manuscripts belonging to, and being translated by, the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino. These included Neo-Platonic and Gnostic writings, some of their cosmic colour concepts ultimately stemming from an idea in Plato’s Timaeus, and others from some Greek magical papyrus such as An Invitation to Hermes as the Spiritual Light, in which the Mind guides the Soul to the light of Gnosis through, for example, the mystic rite of the coloured flame.(2)

The poet Dante saw his three rainbow circles of Paradise as each becoming more beautiful until the third circle flamed with colours. Though Dante’s colours are un-named, they are likely to have been those of Aristotle’s rainbow hues, red, green and purple (later known as the additive primary colours of light). Dante’s verses show that the Italian mind of his time was still Gnostic in its appreciation of the colours of the body, which could glow like red fire or be as cold and transparent as green alabaster. Three nymphs in his Paradiso, for example, are described as:

The one so ruddy, that her form had scarce
Been known within a furnace of clear flame;
The next did look as if the flesh and bones
Were emerald; snow new fallen seemed the third . (3)

In another verse, Dante’s use of green and ‘flame’ as symbols of love refer back not only to the fertility green of Persephone, Greek goddess of the generation of crops, but also to the Gnostics who saw Mind itself as the ‘Great Green’ and the Heaven Space or Celestial Nile.(4) Later, green could also be seen in Christian art in the haloes of those saints who had enjoyed married lives, and in the robe of the Virgin of the ‘Miraculous Fertility’, or more gracefully, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. Dante wrote:

A virgin in my view appear’d, beneath
Green mantle, robed in hue of living flame;
Power of ancient love was strong within me .(5)

As against this, Dante clothed his Cardinal Virtues in purple, whilst the Gnostics saw purple, streaming with white and other tinged colours flowing into the Cup or Monad of Oneness. Thirsting for the Fountain of Life, the eleventh-century poet St Peter Damiani unfolded a vision of paradise like a garden city of flames and jewels; and he played on the ambiguity of the Latin word for gem, gemma, which means both a precious stone and a bud.(6)

A century later the mystic poetess Hildegard of Bingen saw the Holy Spirit as being of ‘most noble greenness’ possessing a cosmic force through which the earth floods with viriditas, which is to say greenness. In the beginning, she said:

All creation was full of greenness, flowers to blossom in the midst of it .(7)

She continued, saying the Virgin Mary is the ‘greenest branch’, which when it flowers in Christ makes all things appear in full greenness. It is left unsaid that the Holy Spirit is green, as the inseminator of the Virgin.

Poets in Gothic France were thinking along the same lines in their symbolic meaning of green as the ‘fertility’ colour, but it became more specifically the colour of ‘love’; and blue, the erstwhile religious colour-symbol of heaven, became the token of ‘fidelity in love’. When the musician Guillaume de Machault met his beloved for the first time he was delighted to see her with a sky-blue hood brocaded with parrots: green for love, and blue for faithfulness. Shakespeare’s love-symbol too was green:

Green, indeed, is the colour of lovers,(8)

and:

I knew of your purpose, turned my daughter into green .(9)

Whilst Shakespeare could visualise green as a nubile colour he could also see another green as immature like the Italian writer on colour, Simon Porzio, and attributed it to Cleopatra:

My salad days, when I was green in judgement.(10)

He also saw green as the life force that could be cut off by murder, as in:

Yon green boy shall have no sun to ripe
The bloom that promiseth a mighty fruit.(11)

Another English poet saw green as the sign of promiscuous love, while blue was the colour of true love. Chaucer wrote, for instance:

To newe thing your lust is ever kene;
In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene.(12)

John Lydgate stressed green but also used subdued qualities of colour, a weak blue and a watery yellow to describe an ‘inconstant’ lover, who also wore many other hues but especially green:

Her habyte was of manyfolde colours,
Watchet-blew of fayned stedfastnesse
Her golde allayed like son in watry showres,
Meynt with grene, for chaunge and doublenesse. (13)

The mistrust of the ‘doubleness’ of green, which painters often mixed from two colours, yellow and blue, but was also a colour that could stand for what was thought doubly nubile, namely the alchemical green hermaphrodite, a name coming from Hermes and Aphrodite, and assuming the potency of both. The unluckiness of green is partly attributable to its long tradition as a fairy colour – originally the colour of the garments of dispossessed tribes. In the fairy-lore of the anonymous poem about Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, of the early 1400s, a magical vision of enchantment is conjured up by the spectacle of the Green Knight on a green horse, clothed entirely in green cloth, embroidered with green stones mounted in green metal.

On the other hand, a beautiful face was traditionally described as a mixture of red and white. In an Irish epic of the ninth century, the beloved Étaίn is as ‘white as snow’ with

clear lovely cheeks as red as the foxglove(14)

Poets usually followed one of two ancient traditions. They could take two humoural colours, the red of blood, for example, and the white of milk (or more traditionally correct, phlegm). Alternatively a poet could refer to the fiery redness of Christ’s Passion and the luminescent whiteness of His radiant holiness. Edmund Spenser in his Shephearde’s Calendar used this ‘fire’ idea:

The red-rose melted with the white yfere,
In either cheek depeincten lively cheere

Similarly in his Hymn to Beauty, Spenser asks:

Hath white and red in it such wondrous power,
That it can pierce through the eyes into the heart…?

Otherwise Shakespeare saw red as a sign of shame, and white as fear. This goes back to a classic remark of Diogenes who, seeing a youth blushing, said, ‘Courage, my boy! That is the complexion of virtue’.(15) Naturalistic observations of skin colour tended to spring from the glorification of Nature, as by St Francis of Assissi. An early example of this is the York Mystery Play in which a man is depicted as cyanosed, that is to say, all blue after being flogged: ‘he blisshes al bloo’.(16)

Humanists were soon to reject the attribution of different meanings to the same colours by various poets and writers. Rabelais ridiculed the ‘Blazon’ book described by Jehan d’ Enghien, and colour books like it that imposed punctilious codes of courtly colour etiquette, as neither reasonable nor based on valid authority, so he thought, as well as being open to contrary interpretation.

But this was to misunderstand that every set of colours that is claimed to work as a symbolic system, as a ‘language’ of colours, needs to be pragmatic, and work only within the scenario for which it was devised. It also has to have a syntax that makes each colour comprehensible in relation to other colours, that is to say, to have rules, as emblazonment does in heraldry, or liturgy in ecclesiastical colouring. D’Enghien’s livery colours worked superbly in Aragon and Naples for over fifty years; it was not devised to suit the whole of Europe for centuries thereafter. Neither should one expect the colour-symbols of the Renaissance poets to apply to anyone apart from themselves. If one looks at a variety of sets of colour symbolisms made, for example, by a representative number of Renaissance poets, the divergences are of special interest in providing real information about the lives and minds of the poets, and also give evidence in each of an archetypal content. Under each of the colours below, the different words and phrases used by the Renaisance poets are in some ways closely allied. The following colours are, for example, used by (1) d’Enghien, (2) Serafino, (3) Alciato, (4) Morato, and (5) Occolto respectively:

RED words and expressions tend to have an emotively assertive tone: (1) audacity and ancient judgement, (2) vendetta, (3) men of war (4) insecurity, (5) anger and boldness.

The RED-PURPLES, on the other hand, carry a more restrained emotion of an out-of-this-world experience, the ‘sacra’ nature of the sacred or accursed, or yet again the supernatural passion of love: (1) nobility and grace of God, (2) secrecy or diplomacy, (3) dying from neglected love, (4) constant desire in love, and (5) love’s passion.

The BLUES suggest thoughtful and reflective conditions often directed towards a longed-for goal: (1) deep religious conviction, (2) jealousy, (3) sadness, (4) high aspirations, and (5) loyalty.

The GREENS relate to the essence of life, its persistence, and hopeful expectations, but sometimes the reverse: (1) youth and marriage, (2) hope or love, (3) hope, (4) hopelessness and reduction to nothing, and (5) hope for life (light green) or death (dark green).

YELLOW has a stimulating impact whilst lacking gold’s depth or the sun’s intensity: (1) adolescence, (2) intense experience now ‘burnt out’, (3) fulfilment of desire, covetous love and cupidity, (4) rising expectations, and (5) deceived expectations.

Colour Emblem	Archetypal Meaning	1 d'ENGHIEN c.1450	2 SERAFINO 1510	3 ALCIATO 1531	4 MORATO 1535	5 OCCOLTO 1568
Red	Assertion	Audacity	Vendetta	Men of War	Insecurity	Anger and Boldness
Red Purple	Supernatural 'Sacra'	Nobility and Grace of God	Secrecy, Diplomatic	Dying from Love's neglect	Constant Desire in Love	Love's Passion
Blue	Imaginative Reflection	Deep Religious Conviction	Jealousy	Sadness	High Aspiration	Loyalty
Light	Life Essence	Youth and Marriage	Hope, Love	Hope	-	Life, Hope
Green
Dark	Death	-	-	-	Hopelessness, Reduction to zero	Death Wish
Yellow	Stimulation	Adolescence	Burnt out	Desire and Fulfilment. Cupidity	Rising Expectations	Deception

Table of Renaissance poets’ variations in the meanings of the colours in their poems

When some of the Renaissance poets’ concepts are grouped together in this way one begins to see here and there signs of the original colour archetypes shining through the colour-word clusters – the Promethean power of the red archetype of fire andpassion, the vegetal and biologic life essence of Proserpine’s greenness of fertility, the soul-calming blues of Zeus’ heavens from the daytime skies to twilight, and the stimulating excitement of the pale-yellow sheen of the the aurora and morning sun and the golden glory of Phoebus Apollo at midday. Through their colours, the humanist poets show highly individual attitudes to life and to the age they live in, but also, behind their individuality, they reveal the stance they take towards more or less consistent supra-personal archetypes.

The ‘Emblems’ poet Alciato was a dedicated jurist and scholar. For him, green signified evergreen hope, no doubt for the success of his legal ventures. Deep yellow reminded him of having been scorched by the fires of love. Violet hues reflected the patience one had to suffer, for example, in the endless vicissitudes involved in litigation. The obsequious courtier Serafino thought of blue as a colour charged with jealousy. Such an attribution was so out of keeping with the other poets’ reactions to blue, that it suggests that he himself was envious of the successes of his peers, and his special feelings about red-purple suggests that he may himself have been involved in the practice of secret diplomacy. The obscurantist poet Morato can by contrast be shown to have been paranoid, suffering from real and imaginary persecution. His verse takes green as signifying one’s reduction to nothing, just as he said in his book on the significance of colours (in the Green chapter) that certain green candles seem to burn themselves out leaving nothing behind. On the other hand, variegated colours struck one’s brain as bizarre, he thought, and he saw madness in the darkness of black.

Coronato Occolto, however, was a lucid scholar with balanced views of life and heartfelt sensibilities. His symbolisms corresponded well with the general consensus, and he included as many of the subdued colours as any of the other poets of the Renaissance: violet for neglect and frigid indifference, ‘dried-rose’ for abandoned love, tan for the firm and ardent heart, gold for attested faith, golden-straw for bounty, broken colours for doubtfulness, white for the humility of the pure in heart; pallid colours were for fear, and ashen colours for death, but silver for high esteem as well as for playfulness; lampblack was for eternal constancy, but jet black for self-concealment and discord.

Jehan d’Enghien was the brilliant, lively minded herald to King Alfonso V. His permutations of colours in blasons and sets of symbolisms were appropriate for every occasion at the court of Aragon during the Spanish golden age of the fifteenth century. In his book on Blazon he illustrated scrolls and circles of actual colours in watercolour. These covered liveries and heraldic tinctures as well as zodiacal colours and many other different systems of colour symbolism: colours according to virtue (loyalty, pride, purity, and so on), temperament (sanguine, phlegmatic, and the others), metals (gold, silver, lead, copper, &c), seasons (summer, autumn, &c), the planets (Sun, Moon, Mars, &c.). It is, no doubt, significant that a fellow courtier at the Aragon Court was the alchemist Lazarelli.

Such was the sophistication in the use of colour during the Renaissance that new scenarios had come about. There were livery colours for costumes with sumptuary laws as to who could wear them, rules controlling the blazoning of heraldic tinctures, and arcane alchemical colour sequences deriving from the Gnostic Greeks, zodiacal colours which were thought to influence peoples’ lives. Above all, there were liturgical colour-practices laid down by the Christian Church. Sometimes it was possible to see many systems of colour at work in one single masterpiece, as for example, in the Glorification of Wisdom in Florence in Sta Maria Novella.

Endnotes