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Magistrates and government officials began to wear black robes, as a sign of the importance and seriousness of their positions. A third reason was the passage of sumptuary laws in some parts of Europe which prohibited the wearing of costly clothes and certain colors by anyone except members of the nobility. The famous bright scarlet cloaks from Venice and the peacock blue fabrics from Florence were restricted to the nobility. The wealthy bankers and merchants of northern Italy responded by changing to black robes and gowns, made with the most expensive fabrics.
The change to the more austere but elegant black was quickly picked up by the kings and nobility. It moved to England at the end of the reign of King Richard II — , where all the court began to wear black. In —20, black became the color of the powerful Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. European rulers saw it as the color of power, dignity, humility and temperance. By the end of the 16th century, it was the color worn by almost all the monarchs of Europe and their courts.
Philip the Good in about , by Rogier van der Weyden. Portrait of a Young Woman by Petrus Christus about Portrait of Philip II of Spain — While black was the color worn by the Catholic rulers of Europe, it was also the emblematic color of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Puritans in England and America.
John Calvin , Philip Melanchthon and other Protestant theologians denounced the richly colored and decorated interiors of Roman Catholic churches. They saw the color red, worn by the Pope and his Cardinals, as the color of luxury, sin, and human folly. In Protestant doctrine, clothing was required to be sober, simple and discreet.
Bright colors were banished and replaced by blacks, browns and grays; women and children were recommended to wear white. In the Protestant Netherlands, Rembrandt used this sober new palette of blacks and browns to create portraits whose faces emerged from the shadows expressing the deepest human emotions.
The Catholic painters of the Counter-Reformation, like Rubens , went in the opposite direction; they filled their paintings with bright and rich colors. The new Baroque churches of the Counter-Reformation were usually shining white inside and filled with statues, frescoes, marble, gold and colorful paintings, to appeal to the public. But European Catholics of all classes, like Protestants, eventually adopted a sober wardrobe that was mostly black, brown and gray. Swiss theologian John Calvin denounced the bright colors worn by Roman Catholic priests, and colorful decoration of churches.
Increase Mather , an American Puritan clergyman In the second part of the 17th century, Europe and America experienced an epidemic of fear of witchcraft. People widely believed that the devil appeared at midnight in a ceremony called a Black Mass or black sabbath, usually in the form of a black animal, often a goat, a dog, a wolf, a bear, a deer or a rooster, accompanied by their familiar spirits , black cats, serpents and other black creatures. This was the origin of the widespread superstition about black cats and other black animals. In medieval Flanders , in a ceremony called Kattenstoet, black cats were thrown from the belfry of the Cloth Hall of Ypres to ward off witchcraft.
Witch trials were common in both Europe and America during this period. During the notorious Salem witch trials in New England in —93, one of those on trial was accused of being able turn into a "black thing with a blue cap," and others of having familiars in the form of a black dog, a black cat and a black bird. An English manual on witch-hunting , showing a witch with her familiar spirits. Black cats have been accused for centuries of being the familiar spirits of witches or of bringing bad luck.
In the 18th century, during the European Age of Enlightenment , black receded as a fashion color. Paris became the fashion capital, and pastels, blues, greens, yellow and white became the colors of the nobility and upper classes. But after the French Revolution , black again became the dominant color. Black was the color of the industrial revolution , largely fueled by coal , and later by oil. Thanks to coal smoke , the buildings of the large cities of Europe and America gradually turned black. A different kind of black was an important part of the romantic movement in literature.
Black was the color of melancholy , the dominant theme of romanticism. The novels of the period were filled with castles, ruins, dungeons, storms, and meetings at midnight. The leading poets of the movement were usually portrayed dressed in black, usually with a white shirt and open collar, and a scarf carelessly over their shoulder, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron helped create the enduring stereotype of the romantic poet.
The invention of new, inexpensive synthetic black dyes and the industrialization of the textile industry meant that good-quality black clothes were available for the first time to the general population. In the 19th century gradually black became the most popular color of business dress of the upper and middle classes in England, the Continent, and America. Black dominated literature and fashion in the 19th century, and played a large role in painting. James McNeil Whistler made the color the subject of his most famous painting, Arrangement in grey and black number one , better known as Whistler's Mother.
Some 19th-century French painters had a low opinion of black: Nothing is black, nothing is gray. Manet's portrait of painter Berthe Morisot was a study in black which perfectly captured her spirit of independence. The black gave the painting power and immediacy; he even changed her eyes, which were green, to black to strengthen the effect. Pierre-Auguste Renoir used luminous blacks, especially in his portraits.
When someone told him that black was not a color, Renoir replied: Black is the queen of colors. I always detested Prussian blue. I tried to replace black with a mixture of red and blue, I tried using cobalt blue or ultramarine, but I always came back to ivory black. Vincent van Gogh used black lines to outline many of the objects in his paintings, such as the bed in the famous painting of his bedroom. His painting of black crows over a cornfield, painted shortly before he died, was particularly agitated and haunting. In the late 19th century, black also became the color of anarchism.
See the section political movements. Percy Bysshe Shelley in the black and white costume of the romantic poet The Theater Box by Pierre-Auguste Renoir , captured the luminosity of black fabric in the light. Wheat Field with Crows , one of the last paintings of Vincent van Gogh , captures his agitated state of mind. In the 20th century, black was the color of Italian and German fascism. In art, black regained some of the territory that it had lost during the 19th century. The Russian painter Kasimir Malevich , a member of the Suprematist movement, created the Black Square in , is widely considered the first purely abstract painting.
He wrote, "The painted work is no longer simply the imitation of reality, but is this very reality It is not a demonstration of ability, but the materialization of an idea. Black was also appreciated by Henri Matisse. I used black as ballast to simplify the construction Since the impressionists it seems to have made continuous progress, taking a more and more important part in color orchestration, comparable to that of the double bass as a solo instrument. In the s, black came to be a symbol of individuality and intellectual and social rebellion, the color of those who didn't accept established norms and values.
By the end of the 20th century, black was the emblematic color of the punk subculture punk fashion , and the goth subculture. Goth fashion, which emerged in England in the s, was inspired by Victorian era mourning dress. In men's fashion, black gradually ceded its dominance to navy blue, particularly in business suits. Black evening dress and formal dress in general were worn less and less. In , John F. Kennedy was the last American President to be inaugurated wearing formal dress; President Lyndon Johnson and all his successors were inaugurated wearing business suits.
Women's fashion was revolutionized and simplified in by the French designer Coco Chanel , who published a drawing of a simple black dress in Vogue magazine. She famously said, "A woman needs just three things; a black dress, a black sweater, and, on her arm, a man she loves. The Italian designer Gianni Versace said, "Black is the quintessence of simplicity and elegance," and French designer Yves Saint Laurent said, "black is the liaison which connects art and fashion. The American civil rights movement in the s was a struggle for the political equality of African Americans.
It developed into the Black Power movement in the late s and s, and popularized the slogan " Black is Beautiful ". In the s, the Black Standard became the banner of several Islamic extremist , jihadist groups. The goth fashion model Lady Amaranth. Goth fashion was inspired by British Victorian mourning costumes. Variants of the Black Standard flag are used by many militant Islamist groups that have adopted militant interpretations of jihad. In the visible spectrum , black is the absorption of all colors. Black can be defined as the visual impression experienced when no visible light reaches the eye.
Pigments or dyes that absorb light rather than reflect it back to the eye "look black". A black pigment can, however, result from a combination of several pigments that collectively absorb all colors. If appropriate proportions of three primary pigments are mixed, the result reflects so little light as to be called "black". This provides two superficially opposite but actually complementary descriptions of black. Black is the absorption of all colors of light, or an exhaustive combination of multiple colors of pigment.
See also primary colors. In physics , a black body is a perfect absorber of light, but, by a thermodynamic rule, it is also the best emitter. Thus, the best radiative cooling, out of sunlight, is by using black paint, though it is important that it be black a nearly perfect absorber in the infrared as well. In elementary science, far ultraviolet light is called " black light " because, while itself unseen, it causes many minerals and other substances to fluoresce.
On January 16, , researchers from Troy, New York 's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced the creation of the then darkest material on the planet. The material, which reflected only 0. A material is said to be black if most incoming light is absorbed equally in the material. Light electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum interacts with the atoms and molecules , which causes the energy of the light to be converted into other forms of energy, usually heat.
This means that black surfaces can act as thermal collectors, absorbing light and generating heat see Solar thermal collector. Absorption of light is contrasted by transmission , reflection and diffusion , where the light is only redirected, causing objects to appear transparent, reflective or white respectively.
Vantablack is made of carbon nanotubes [33] and is the blackest substance known, absorbing a maximum of The earliest pigments used by Neolithic man were charcoal , red ocher and yellow ocher. The black lines of cave art were drawn with the tips of burnt torches made of a wood with resin. Different charcoal pigments were made by burning different woods and animal products, each of which produced a different tone.
The charcoal would be ground and then mixed with animal fat to make the pigment. The 15th-century painter Cennino Cennini described how this pigment was made during the Renaissance in his famous handbook for artists: And these tendrils need to be burned. And when they have been burned, throw some water onto them and put them out and then mull them in the same way as the other black.
And this is a lean and black pigment and is one of the perfect pigments that we use. Cennini also noted that "There is another black which is made from burnt almond shells or peaches and this is a perfect, fine black. The powdered charcoal was then mixed with gum arabic or the yellow of an egg to make a paint. Different civilizations burned different plants to produce their charcoal pigments.
The Inuit of Alaska used wood charcoal mixed with the blood of seals to paint masks and wooden objects. The Polynesians burned coconuts to produce their pigment. Good-quality black dyes were not known until the middle of the 14th century. The most common early dyes were made from bark, roots or fruits of different trees; usually the walnut , chestnut , or certain oak trees. The blacks produced were often more gray, brown or bluish.
The cloth had to be dyed several times to darken the color. One solution used by dyers was add to the dye some iron filings, rich in iron oxide, which gave a deeper black. Another was to first dye the fabric dark blue, and then to dye it black. A much richer and deeper black dye was eventually found made from the Oak apple or gall-nut.
The gall-nut is a small round tumor which grows on oak and other varieties of trees. The gall-nuts which made the best dye came from Poland , eastern Europe, the near east and North Africa. Beginning in about the 14th century, dye from gall-nuts was used for clothes of the kings and princes of Europe. Another important source of natural black dyes from the 17th century onwards was the logwood tree , or Haematoxylum campechianum , which also produced reddish and bluish dyes.
It is a species of flowering tree in the legume family, Fabaceae , that is native to southern Mexico and northern Central America. Since the midth century, synthetic black dyes have largely replaced natural dyes. One of the important synthetic blacks is Nigrosin , a mixture of synthetic black dyes CI , Solvent black 5 made by heating a mixture of nitrobenzene , aniline and aniline hydrochloride in the presence of a copper or iron catalyst.
Its main industrial uses are as a colorant for lacquers and varnishes and in marker-pen inks. The first known inks were made by the Chinese, and date back to the 23rd century B. They used natural plant dyes and minerals such as graphite ground with water and applied with an ink brush. Early Chinese inks similar to the modern inkstick have been found dating to about BC at the end of the Warring States period. They were produced from soot , usually produced by burning pine wood, mixed with animal glue.
To make ink from an inkstick, the stick is continuously ground against an inkstone with a small quantity of water to produce a dark liquid which is then applied with an ink brush. Artists and calligraphists could vary the thickness of the resulting ink by reducing or increasing the intensity and time of ink grinding. These inks produced the delicate shading and subtle or dramatic effects of Chinese brush painting.
India ink or Indian ink in British English is a black ink once widely used for writing and printing and now more commonly used for drawing , especially when inking comic books and comic strips. The technique of making it probably came from China. India ink has been in use in India since at least the 4th century BC, where it was called masi. In India, the black color of the ink came from bone char , tar , pitch and other substances.
The Ancient Romans had a black writing ink they called atramentum librarium. This was the same root as the English word atrocious. It was usually made, like India ink, from soot , although one variety, called atramentum elephantinum , was made by burning the ivory of elephants. Gall-nuts were also used for making fine black writing ink. Iron gall ink also known as iron gall nut ink or oak gall ink was a purple-black or brown-black ink made from iron salts and tannic acids from gall nut. It was the standard writing and drawing ink in Europe , from about the 12th century to the 19th century, and remained in use well into the 20th century.
Sticks of vine charcoal and compressed charcoal. Charcoal, along with red and yellow ochre, was one of the first pigments used by Paleolithic man. A Chinese inkstick , in the form of lotus flowers and blossoms. Inksticks are used in Chinese calligraphy and brush painting. Ivory black or bone char , a natural black pigment made by burning animal bones. The logwood tree from Central America produced dyes beginning in the 17th century. The nation of Belize began as a British colony producing logwood. The oak apple or gall-nut, a tumor growing on oak trees, was the main source of black dye and black writing ink from the 14th century until the 19th century.
The industrial production of lamp black , made by producing, collecting and refining soot , in An illustration of Olbers' paradox see below.
The fact that outer space is black is sometimes called Olbers' paradox. In theory, because the universe is full of stars, and is believed to be infinitely large, it would be expected that the light of an infinite number of stars would be enough to brilliantly light the whole universe all the time. However, the background color of outer space is black.
This contradiction was first noted in by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers , who posed the question of why the night sky was black. The current accepted answer is that, although the universe is infinitely large, it is not infinitely old. It is thought to be about Light from stars farther away has not reached Earth, and cannot contribute to making the sky bright. Furthermore, as the universe is expanding, many stars are moving away from Earth. As they move, the wavelength of their light becomes longer, through the Doppler effect , and shifts toward red, or even becomes invisible.
As a result of these two phenomena, there is not enough starlight to make space anything but black. The daytime sky on Earth is blue because light from the Sun strikes molecules in Earth's atmosphere scattering light in all directions. Blue light is scattered more than other colors, and reaches the eye in greater quantities, making the daytime sky appear blue. This is known as Rayleigh scattering. The nighttime sky on Earth is black because the part of Earth experiencing night is facing away from the Sun, the light of the Sun is blocked by Earth itself, and there is no other bright nighttime source of light in the vicinity.
Thus, there is not enough light to undergo Rayleigh scattering and make the sky blue. On the Moon, on the other hand, because there is no atmosphere to scatter the light, the sky is black both day and night. This phenomenon also holds true for other locations without an atmosphere. The black mamba of Africa is one of the most venomous snakes, as well as the fastest-moving snake in the world.
The only black part of the snake is the inside of the mouth, which it exposes in a threat display when alarmed. The black widow spider, or lactrodectus , The females frequently eat their male partners after mating.
The female's venom is at least three times more potent than that of the males, making a male's self-defense bite ineffective. A black panther is actually a melanistic leopard or jaguar , the result of an excess of melanin in their skin caused by a recessive gene. The American crow is one of the most intelligent of all animals. In China, the color black is associated with water, one of the five fundamental elements believed to compose all things; and with winter, cold, and the direction north, usually symbolized by a black tortoise.
Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Thereafter the jacket became known as a tuxedo in the U. Many performers of both popular and European classical music , including French singers Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco , and violinist Joshua Bell have traditionally worn black on stage during performances. Morales performed extensive research into the time period, which he balanced with editorial suggestions. Black was also the Roman color of death and mourning. In the students began to carry a red, black and gold flag, which they believed incorrectly had been the colors of the Holy Roman Empire the imperial flag had actually been gold and black.
It is also associated with disorder, including the positive disorder which leads to change and new life. When the first Emperor of China Qin Shi Huang seized power from the Zhou Dynasty , he changed the Imperial color from red to black, saying that black extinguished red. Only when the Han Dynasty appeared in BC was red restored as the imperial color. The Chinese and Japanese character for black kuro in Japanese , can, depending upon the context, also mean dark or evil.
In Japan, black is associated with mystery, the night, the unknown, the supernatural, the invisible and death. Combined with white, it can symbolize intuition. In Japan in the 10th and 11th century, it was believed that wearing black could bring misfortune. It was worn at court by those who wanted to set themselves apart from the established powers or who had renounced material possessions. The black belt in martial arts symbolizes experience, while a white belt is worn by novices.
In Indonesia black is associated with depth, the subterranean world, demons, disaster, and the left hand. When black is combined with white, however, it symbolizes harmony and equilibrium. The first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huang , made black his imperial color, saying that black extinguished red, the old dynastic color. Anarchism is a political philosophy, most popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which holds that governments and capitalism are harmful and undesirable. The symbols of anarchism was usually either a black flag or a black letter A.
More recently it is usually represented with a bisected red and black flag, to emphasise the movement's socialist roots in the First International. There were also small but influential movements in the United States and Russia. In the latter, the movement initially allied itself with the Bolsheviks. The Black Army was a collection of anarchist military units which fought in the Russian Civil War , sometimes on the side of the Bolshevik Red Army , and sometimes for the opposing White Army.
It was officially known as the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine , and it was under the command of the famous anarchist Nestor Makhno. Inspired by the black uniforms of the Arditi , Italy's elite storm troops of World War I, the Fascist Blackshirts were organized by Benito Mussolini as the military tool of his political movement.
The emblem of the Italian fascists was a black flag with fasces , an axe in a bundle of sticks, an ancient Roman symbol of authority. Mussolini came to power in through his March on Rome with the blackshirts. Black was also adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. Red, white and black were the colors of the flag of the German Empire from to In Mein Kampf , Hitler explained that they were "revered colors expressive of our homage to the glorious past.
The Nazis used a black triangle to symbolize anti-social elements. The symbol originates from Nazi concentration camps , where every prisoner had to wear one of the Nazi concentration camp badges on their jacket, the color of which categorized them according to "their kind. The homeless were also included, as were alcoholics, the Romani people , the habitually "work-shy," prostitutes, draft dodgers and pacifists. In the students began to carry a red, black and gold flag, which they believed incorrectly had been the colors of the Holy Roman Empire the imperial flag had actually been gold and black.
In , this banner became the flag of the German confederation. In , Prussia unified Germany under its rule, and imposed the red, white and black of its own flag, which remained the colors of the German flag until the end of the Second World War. In the Federal Republic of Germany returned to the original flag and colors of the students and professors of , which is the flag of Germany today. It says, "Power begets parasites. Benito Mussolini and his blackshirt followers during his March on Rome in The banner of the Holy Roman Emperor — featured a black eagle, an old Roman emblem and a symbol of power.
One head represented the church, the other the state. Flag of Belgium The black came from the banner of the Duchy of Brabant , founded in the 12th century. The flag used the colors of the failed Brabant Revolution of —90 against the Habsburg Monarchy. Black was taken from the Black Standard of Muhammad.
The black in the modern flag of Germany dates back to the flag of the Holy Roman Empire , the 19th-century flag of the German Confederation , the flag of Prussia , and the flag of the Weimar Republic. Flag of Estonia Black was said to symbolize the dark time of occupation, and white the bright future of independence. Flag of Egypt Her undiminished love for Julien, his imperiously intellectual nature and romantic exhibitionism render Mathilde's prison visits to him a duty to endure and little more.
After he is guillotined, Mathilde de la Mole reenacts the cherished 16th-century French tale of Queen Margot , who visited her dead lover, Joseph Boniface de La Mole , to kiss the lips of his severed head. Mathilde then erects a shrine at Julien's tomb in the Italian fashion. Le Rouge et le Noir is set in the latter years of the Bourbon Restoration —30 and the days of the July Revolution that established the Kingdom of the French — Julien Sorel's worldly ambitions are motivated by the emotional tensions between his idealistic Republicanism and his nostalgic allegiance to Napoleon , and the realistic politics of counter-revolutionary conspiracy by Jesuit -supported legitimists , notably the Marquis de la Mole, whom Julien serves for personal gain.
Presuming a knowledgeable reader, Stendhal only alludes to the historical background of Le Rouge et le Noir —yet did subtitle the novel Chronique de "Chronicle of ". Stendhal repeatedly questions the possibility and the desirability of "sincerity," because most of the characters, especially Julien Sorel, are acutely aware of having to play a role to gain social approval. In that 19th-century context, the word "hypocrisy" denoted the affectation of high religious sentiment; in The Red and the Black it connotes the contradiction between thinking and feeling. Girard's proposition is that a person's desire for another is always mediated by a third party.
First Black Red: The Story of Chuck Harmon, the First African American to Play for the Cincinnati Reds [Marty Ford Pieratt] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on. Le Rouge et le Noir is a historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in The first chapter of each volume repeats the title Le Rouge et le Noir and the subtitle Chronique de The title refers to the contrasting.
This triangulation thus accounts for the perversity of the Mathilde—Julien relationship, which is most evident when Julien begins courting the widow Mme de Fervaques to pique Mathilde's jealousy, and also accounts for Julien's fascination with and membership in the high society he simultaneously desires and despises.
To help achieve a literary effect, Stendhal wrote most of the epigraphs —literary, poetic, historic quotations—that he attributed to others. In Stendhal's time, prose novels included dialogue and omniscient narrator descriptions; Stendhal's great contribution to literary technique was the describing of the psychologies feelings, thoughts, and interior monologues of the characters. As a result, he is considered the creator of the psychological novel. In Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les mains sales , the protagonist Hugo Barine suggests pseudonyms for himself, including "Julien Sorel", whom he resembles.
In the afterword to her novel, them , Joyce Carol Oates wrote that she had originally entitled the manuscript Love and Money as a nod to classic 19th-century novels, among them, The Red and the Black , "whose class-conscious hero Julien Sorel is less idealistic, greedier, and crueler than Jules Wendell but is clearly his spiritual kinsman. A passage describing Julien Sorel's sexual indifference is deployed as the epigraph to Paul Schrader's screenplay of American Gigolo , whose protagonist is also named Julien: Scott Moncrieff's versions have not really been superseded.
Adams for the Norton Critical Editions series is also highly regarded; it "is more colloquial; his edition includes an informative section on backgrounds and sources, and excerpts from critical studies. Burton Raffel's translation for the Modern Library generally earned positive reviews, with Salon.
His version has all but replaced the decorous text produced in the s by the Scottish-born writer-translator C. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see The Red and the Black disambiguation. Enciclopedia Garzanti della letteratura in Italian. Archived from the original on 19 November Retrieved 5 February Random House Publishing Group. Faber and Faber, , p. Stendhal 's The Red and the Black Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history.