Black

• 1. Introduction

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  Black is the absence of visible light, and yet it has filled human history with more meaning than almost any other color. In the Lascaux Cave in France, paleolithic artists painted bulls and other animals between 18,000 and 17,000 years ago using charcoal and later manganese oxide ground to a fine powder. Those marks on stone were among the very first acts of human visual expression. Since then, black has been the color of death and of elegance, of rebellion and of authority, of the deepest fears and the most refined tastes. How did a color defined by the absence of light come to carry so much weight? And why does the same shade that hung over the gallows at Salem in 1692 also hang in the wardrobes of the world's most fashionable designers today?

• 2. Etymology and Ancient Roots

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  The Old English word blæc meant both "black" and "ink", tracing back through Proto-Germanic blakkaz, meaning "burned", to a Proto-Indo-European root connected to burning, gleaming, and shining. That link to fire and light hiding inside the word for darkness is not accidental. The ancient Romans had two distinct words for black. Ater described a flat, dull black and was associated with cruelty and brutality; it gave English the words "atrocious" and "atrocity". Niger was a brilliant, saturated black, and while ater vanished from vocabulary, niger became the root for the country name Nigeria and for the word for black in most modern Romance languages, including the French noir, the Spanish negro, and the Italian nero.

  Old High German drew the same distinction: swartz for dull black and blach for a luminous one. Swartz survives today as the English word "swarthy", while blach became the modern English "black". In heraldry, black was called sable, named after the glossy fur of the sable, an animal whose dark coat would become one of Europe's most expensive luxury goods.

  For ancient Egyptians, black carried positive associations. It was the color of the fertile Nile soil and of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the underworld, who offered protection to the dead. Ancient Greeks saw black as the realm beneath the living world, separated from it by the river Acheron, whose water ran black. At the deepest level sat Tartarus, and at its center stood Hades upon a throne of black ebony.

• 3. Artists and the Pigment

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  In the 6th century BC, Greek artists developed an original technique for black-figure pottery. They painted figures onto red clay pots using a glossy clay slip; when fired, those figures turned black against a red background. Later they reversed the process, covering the spaces between figures with slip and allowing brilliant red figures to emerge against a glossy black ground.

  For painters working in later centuries, black pigment was a practical and philosophical matter. Vine black was produced in Roman times by burning cut grapevine branches; the historian Vitruvius observed that the finest wines produced a black with a bluish tinge resembling indigo. The 15th-century Florentine painter Cennino Cennini recorded detailed recipes in his handbook for artists, describing how lamp black was made by holding a lit oil lamp beneath a clean pan and collecting the smoke that gathered there. He also noted that burning almond shells or peach pits produced what he called "a perfect, fine black".

  Renaissance-era printer's ink was made from soot, turpentine, and walnut oil. That formulation allowed books and printed images to spread ideas to mass audiences for the first time, and the high contrast of black ink on white paper became the standard for printing that persists to the present day.

  In the 17th century, Rembrandt used a palette of blacks and browns to paint faces that seemed to emerge from shadow carrying the deepest human emotions. Two centuries later, Edouard Manet's use of black became legendary. Henri Matisse quoted the French impressionist Pissarro telling him directly: "Manet is stronger than us all. He made light with black." Manet's portrait of painter Berthe Morisot was a study in black; he even changed her green eyes to black to strengthen the painting's power. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was equally devoted: when told black was not a color, he replied, "What makes you think that? Black is the queen of colors."

  Vincent van Gogh used black outlines to make objects stand apart from their surroundings, and his painting of black crows over a cornfield, made shortly before he died, was described as particularly agitated and haunting. Then, in 1915, the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, a member of the Suprematist movement, created the Black Square, widely regarded as the first purely abstract painting. Malevich wrote: "The painted work is no longer simply the imitation of reality, but is this very reality."

• 4. Fashion, Power, and Mourning

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  In the early Middle Ages, princes and nobles dressed in bright scarlet cloaks from Italy. Black was rarely part of a noble wardrobe, with one exception: the fur of the sable, imported from Russia and Poland, was the finest and most expensive fur in Europe. Its glossy black surface was used to trim the robes and gowns of royalty.

  In the 14th century, something shifted. High-quality black dyes reached European markets for the first time. Magistrates and government officials adopted black robes to signal the seriousness of their positions. Then sumptuary laws in several parts of Europe restricted bright colors like the famous scarlet from Venice and the peacock blue from Florence to the nobility alone. Wealthy northern Italian merchants, blocked from those colors, responded by turning to the finest black fabrics money could buy.

  The shift moved upward quickly. The Duke of Milan, the Count of Savoy, and the rulers of Mantua, Ferrara, Rimini, and Urbino began wearing black. It spread to France, led by Louis I, Duke of Orleans, brother of King Charles VI. It reached England during the reign of King Richard II, who ruled from 1377 to 1399. Philip the Good, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, adopted it in 1419-20. By the end of the 16th century, almost every monarch in Europe wore black.

  Black formalized the relationship between dress and authority. Jurists and magistrates in France began wearing long black robes during the reign of Philip IV, who ruled from 1285 to 1314. In England the practice began from the time of Edward I. The custom spread to Italian cities between 1300 and 1320. Those robes resembled clerical dress, and they represented the law of the king just as the clergy's robes represented the authority of the church. In many countries that tradition continues today: judges and magistrates still wear black.

  Women's fashion was transformed by Coco Chanel in 1926, when she published a drawing of a simple black dress in Vogue magazine. She said, "A woman needs just three things; a black dress, a black sweater, and, on her arm, a man she loves." French designer Jean Patou followed with a black collection in 1929. Hubert de Givenchy's black dress, worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's, became one of the most famous black garments of the century. Italian designer Gianni Versace called black "the quintessence of simplicity and elegance", and Yves Saint Laurent described it as "the liaison which connects art and fashion".

• 5. Rebellion and Political Meaning

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  In the 1950s, black became the color of those who refused established norms. In Paris it was worn by Left-Bank intellectuals and performers such as Juliette Greco. In New York and San Francisco, members of the Beat Movement adopted it. Black leather jackets were worn by motorcycle gangs including the Hells Angels. The film The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, celebrated black as a color of rebellion. By the end of the 20th century it had become the emblematic color of punk fashion and the goth subculture, which emerged in England in the 1980s drawing on Victorian mourning dress.

  Anarchism, most popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Spain, France, Italy, Ukraine, and Argentina, adopted either a black flag or a black letter A as its symbol. The Blackshirts in Italy were the Fascist paramilitary groups that Benito Mussolini organized after World War I. They took their inspiration from the black uniforms of the Arditi, Italy's elite storm troops. Mussolini came to power in 1922 through his March on Rome with the blackshirts. Their emblem was a black flag bearing fasces, an axe bound in a bundle of sticks that was an ancient Roman symbol of authority.

  Adolf Hitler also drew on black. He wrote in Mein Kampf that red, white, and black were "revered colors expressive of our homage to the glorious past." Black became the color of the SS uniform, worn by officers of the Schutzstaffel from 1932 until the end of World War II. The Nazis also used a black triangle to mark prisoners they classified as anti-social elements, including the mentally disabled, the homeless, the Romani, and others. That symbol has since been adopted by lesbian culture and by disabled activists as a reclaimed emblem.

  A more unusual political story begins in 1813, when a volunteer German force called the Lützow Free Corps, composed of students and academics fighting Napoleon, could not afford to dye new uniforms. They chose black because it was the only color that could cover their civilian clothing without the original color showing through. In 1815 these students began carrying a red, black, and gold flag, which they believed had been the colors of the Holy Roman Empire. That flag became the banner of the German confederation in 1848. Prussia imposed its own red, white, and black after 1866, but in 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany returned to the students' flag, which remains the flag of Germany today.

• 6. Science of Darkness

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  Black in physics is defined as the absorption of all wavelengths of visible light. When pigments or dyes absorb nearly all incoming light, the eye perceives no reflected color and registers black. A mix of three primary pigments in appropriate proportions can achieve the same result by absorbing light collectively across the full visible spectrum.

  As of September 2019, the darkest material known was grown by engineers at MIT from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. It was reported to absorb 99.995 percent of any incoming light, surpassing the previous record held by Vantablack, which had a peak absorption rate of 99.965 percent in the visible spectrum.

  A black body in physics is a perfect absorber of light and, by a thermodynamic rule, also the best emitter of radiation. This means that black paint provides the best radiative cooling out of sunlight, so long as it also absorbs in the infrared range. Black holes take their name from the same principle: they absorb all light that crosses the event horizon, reflecting nothing. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime into a black hole. Supermassive black holes containing millions of solar masses are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies; though the black hole itself is invisible, the accretion disk of infalling material around it is among the brightest objects in the universe.

  The darkness of space itself was long a puzzle. German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers noted the paradox in 1823: if the universe is infinite and full of stars, why is the night sky not ablaze with light? The current accepted answer rests on two facts. The universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, so only light that has traveled 13.8 billion years can reach us. And as the universe expands, distant stars move away, shifting their light toward red through the Doppler effect until it becomes invisible. Between those two effects, there is not enough starlight to make space anything but black.

• 7. Symbolism Across Cultures

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  In China, black is associated with water, one of the five fundamental elements believed to compose all things, and with winter, cold, and the direction north, symbolized by a black tortoise. When the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, seized power from the Zhou dynasty, he changed the imperial color from red to black, declaring that black extinguished red. Red was not restored as the imperial color until the Han dynasty appeared in 206 BC.

  In Japan, black carries associations of mystery, the night, and the supernatural. In the 10th and 11th centuries, wearing black was believed to bring misfortune. It was worn at court by those who wanted to distance themselves from established power or who had given up material possessions. Black also symbolizes experience in Japan: the black belt in martial arts marks a practitioner with deep knowledge, while the white belt is worn by novices.

  In Christianity, black was the color of the universe before God created light. The devil is often called the prince of darkness, a phrase that appears in John Milton's Paradise Lost, published in 1667, and traces back to the Latin princeps tenebrarum in the Acts of Pilate from the fourth century. Monks of the Benedictine Order wear black as a sign of humility and penitence. In the 12th century, a theological dispute broke out between the Cistercians, who wore white, and the Benedictines over which color was appropriate. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercians, argued that black was the color of the devil, hell, and sin, while white represented purity.

  In Islam, black plays an important symbolic role alongside green. It is the color of the Black Standard, said to have been carried by the soldiers of Muhammad. In Hinduism, the goddess Kali, whose name means "the black one", is portrayed with black or dark blue skin; she is the goddess of time and change. In Paganism, black represents dignity, force, stability, and protection and is used to banish negative energies. The ceremonial blade called an athame, used in some forms of witchcraft, often has a black handle, a detail that points back to centuries of association between the color and the unseen world.