The history of the color Blue is very absorbing due to both its late beginning and its difficulty to master though it was very present in the nature (sky, sea, some flowers and animals). Some early civilizations did not have a name for the color blue but for an association of colors, which was including the color blue, that emphasizes the modest place blue took during the first centuries in most of the civilizations. For instance, numbers of philologers wonders if the Greek and the Romans could see the color blue because they did not have a word for it, they did not qualify the sea or the sky as blue but as an association of other colors. Even Homeric poems did not mention the color blue Besides the sky was said to be white, black or red and furthermore the sea was believed to be green (it is a very new fact to believe that the sea is blue). Effectively the three primary colors in the ancient society were white, red and black (That could explain the late in!

The rising of blue during the twelfth and the thirteenth century does express itself not only with art and image but also with its symbolic representation. The whole social life was affected by these changes and surprisingly enough its rise could even be calculated thanks to the heraldic armories, which emerged in Europe at the time. For instance, M. Pastoureau in his Heraldic Treaty says that only 5 per cent of the armories contained blue in 1200 but this number grew to 25 per cent before1300 and 30 before 1400.This impressive rise mirrors how fast blue became trendy and the synonym of values. French armories adopted the blue very early. The sight of an armory was supposed to convey value such as respect, faith, freedom or even royalty given the fact that the French king had a blue armory (It was a gold Lily flower on blue background). From the thirteenth century on the progress realized toward the blue tinge creates new shades of blue, blue dresses became more trendy because blue is not a single color anymore, blue represented a few colors (sky blue, navy blue, dark blue, morning blue). Before the beginning of the fifteenth century the blue became the rival of the black (which was one of the main three primal colors). The main reason for this competition is double, first because the color black became more and more worked for paintings and for tinge, new pigments have been found and the limit between black and blue became thinner (some black looked alike blue and vice versa). It permits the blue to take sometimes the place of the black. The color “mourning blue” would be a good illustration to how blue take the place of black, the mourning color was believed black for a very long time in Occident although for “the Greek death was indicated by a deep blue, the color of the Attic sky, which extinguishes every other color and which like bad news, is not to be named” (M. Brusatin). Colors are associated with certain social classes, during the fifteenth century red and blue are the clothing’s color reserved for high social classes. Someone from a lower class was forbidden to dress with such color on his clothes, it was considered as an insult to the higher classes.

e, colors are becoming more accessible to the average population. At the beginning of the eighteenth century,

Some topics in this essay:
Heraldic Treaty, Black White, , Lapis Lazuli, Berlin Kay, Middle Age, Yves Klein, Maria Levi-Strauss, Greek Romans, Joan Miro, color blue, blue color, favorite color, blue blue, blue favorite color, thirteenth century, deep blue, twentieth century, blue favorite, eighteenth century, social classes, favorite color european, blue association colors, “a history colors”,