Le bleu n’existait pas dans l’Antiquité

Colors serve to classify, identify, distinguish, and oppose objects, surfaces, animals, and people by observing their appearance.

• Colors participate in how a human group represents itself and the outside world • Their meaning can be political, religious, artistic, or economic • Michel Pastoureau, a historian specializing in colors, emphasizes their importance in societal identity

Color meanings change across places and time periods. For example, black has represented mourning since Catherine de Medici in the 16th century, whereas it was yellow before that.

Color symbolism remained relatively stable in Europe for more than two millennia, between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as a direct legacy of the Greeks and Romans.

• White represents painlessness and purity • Black embodies filth • Red is the great reference color, evoking fire and blood

In Latin, the word 'coloratus' means both 'colored' and 'red', proving that Roman imagination was highly polarized on red as the basic reference.

The most common Latin term is 'caeruleum', a vague word that does not well define the shade. It probably comes from 'caelum' (the sky), but the sky changes tint depending on weather.

Blue was not integrated into Greek and Roman intellectual and artistic practice, unlike other colors such as green, yellow, and purple.

Ancient Greeks did not distinguish between blue, gray, and green. They used two words: 'kyanos' (which became 'cyan') and 'glaucos' (which became 'glaucous').

Blue is a 'silent' color with no particularly positive value. Its usefulness is strictly limited, for example, to represent the sky on a ceiling.

Blue is sometimes discredited because it is associated with Celtic and Germanic barbarians, reputed to smear their chests and faces with pigments of this color.

Greek physician Polemon claims that light eyes signify a temperament prone to crime, treachery, stupidity, and weakness. Blue eyes are mocked as a sign of ill repute.

In the Middle Ages, Latin diversified at the lexical level and introduced nuance in designating colors.

The word 'azurium' appears and gives in French 'azur', a shade of blue referring to the color of the sky. It comes from Greek 'azurion', from Arabic 'azul-azar', from Persian 'azwarde'.

The word 'bleu' comes from Germanic 'blaue', showing that medieval Westerners had to abandon Greco-Roman antiquity and borrow from Persian and Germanic cultural areas.

Persians had the same visual abilities as Romans but gave blue a place in their vocabulary and culture, unlike the Greco-Romans.

The Hebrews had their own color code with blue at the top, unlike the Greco-Romans who prioritized red.

• Tekhelet is a special color used for the sacred tent following Moses and his people • Three colors compose the tent: tekhelet, purple, and scarlet • These same colors wrap the objects of worship throughout the Sinai peninsula

• The Ark of the Covenant is covered only with tekhelet fabric • According to the Book of Numbers, all Israelites must sew a tekhelet thread on their garments to remember divine authority • In the Book of Ezekiel, God reigns seated on a sapphire throne

Some Christian theologians describe a tint ranging from sea blue to that of the heavens, encompassing all of Creation. Sapphire and tekhelet are definitively associated with God and his power in nature.

Late texts allude to a tint between violet and indigo without precision. Some rabbis suggest it might be a deep blue.

In the Septuagint, the Bible translated into Greek and then into other Western languages, tekhelet becomes in French a hyacinth blue, from Latin 'hyacinthus' (the blue iris flower).

The Talit is a large wool shawl worn for prayer featuring 4 tsitsit (tassels) at each corner with blue thread.

The valued presence of blue among the Hebrews shows that blue existed in Antiquity, particularly outside the Greco-Roman world.

In pharaonic Egypt, blue had a special status: it was believed to bring good fortune in the afterlife, explaining its presence in many tombs and the Valley of the Kings.

The Egyptians invented the first artificial pigment in human history, composed of silica, limestone, and copper that, once melted into glass then reduced to powder, took on a blue tint.

• Traces of use are found at the Saqqara site with the stele of Mery dating from the 3rd millennium BCE • Some theories suggest the formula could go back 3,500 years BCE • The Egyptians made blue before the fabrication of cement, iron tools, the domestication of horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep

The goal was to copy the color of lapis lazuli, a rare and expensive precious stone. Egyptian hieroglyphs literally called it 'manufactured lapis lazuli'.

• The pigment is used in powder form to make paint • Dissolved in mortar to make mosaic • In raw form to directly make objects

After Alexander the Great's conquest, Greek intellectuals like Theophrastus in his 'Treatise on Stones' discuss the blue pigment. Roman authors Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder relay the information.

Despite their initial disdain for blue, the Romans quickly grasped the enormous economic potential of the melted pigment and extended its production to Greece and Italy.

In the 4th and 5th centuries, production slowed and prices fell until the 9th century. Traces persist until the 13th century or even early 14th, after which other processes prevail and the technique falls into oblivion.

In the 11th century, societies finally truly appropriate blue: the Church associates it with the Virgin Mary.

As God is increasingly associated with light, blue is integrated into this idea of clarity and divinity, becoming so popular that it appears on many feudal coats of arms.

Blue, called azure, appears on the coats of arms of French kings of the Valois dynasty from the 12th century, with the idea of a gold fleur-de-lis on blue background representing celestial solar stars.

Blue shifts from a despised color in Antiquity to a valued color associated with the divine and protection, marking a major cultural turning point.

The advent of the printing press and Newton's discovery of the light spectrum reorganize colors around a primary triptych: red, yellow, and blue become the primary colors.

From the 17th to 19th centuries, the 'war of blue' opposes Western pastel and colonial indigo, with dye frauds and philosophical debates multiplying blue shades.

• In the 20th century, blue appears on uniforms, flags, and everyday clothing • The 'blues' wins spirits then ears • It is the favorite color of one in two Europeans

Blue represents urban spaces, conformism, stability, and discretion. It appears on the ties of communicators, the flags of the European Union, UNICEF, UNESCO, and the UN.

Michel Pastoureau states: 'It is society that makes color. Vocabulary, clothing, emblems, practices: all of this is a matter of social history.'

Blue went from a color with no clear vocabulary in ancient Europe to the dominant color of our time, constituting an extraordinary comeback.

The expression 'avoir les bleus' or 'avoir le blues' means to be sad and melancholic, showing how language translates a community's local concerns and values.

The meaning of colors depends entirely on geographic and temporal context. What is true for one culture can be completely different elsewhere and at another time.