The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  7 A 19th-century Tibetan painting of the dharmapala (‘defender of the law’) Mahakala. Although benevolent, dharmapalas are represented as hideous and ferocious in order to instill terror in evil spirits.

  8 Popular print of Kali on the battlefield, striding over a recumbent Shiva, 1890s, coloured lithograph.

  9 Lingam and yoni, 18th-century Indian miniature, gouache on paper.

  10 Achilles and Ajax playing a board game, Attic black-figure amphora by Exekias, c. 530 BCE.

  TWO

  Classical Black

  WE ASSOCIATE THE classical world of Greece and Rome with whiteness and light – with the high-grade limestone we call marble and with the radiance of Phoebus and of Apollo, gods of sunlight and civilization. And no ancient Greek would have sought to set a style by sauntering in the agora in a gleaming black tunic. But it was also in the classical world that black artefacts became common in daily use, that the colour black became a primary colour of art, and that blackness in the sense of death and the terrible found full recognition as a part of life. This is not to say that the classical world had the abstract, unitary sense of blackness that we do in the West, but the principal words for black (melas in Greek, niger and ater in Latin) had a wide and prominent currency.

  However far we go back in the prehistory of Greece, we find some black goods. Around 7500 BCE, in the early Mesolithic period, the island of Melos was a source of obsidian. This black volcanic glass cannot be carved, but it can be chipped, like flint, into small blades for hunting. Other black stones, such as steatite and serpentinite, were hammered and split into tools, adzes and axeheads. During the Neolithic period, from 6000 to 4000 BCE, Greek expertise in pottery matured. In the ‘Larisa style’ the entire pot is stained black and is smoothed and burnished to a lustre. The Cycladic period, from 3000 to 1000 BCE, produced the curiously named ‘frying pan’ vessels – flat dishes with handles, again in the black-burnished style. It seems they were not used for frying but as mirrors, when a little water was poured into them and allowed to grow still over the blackened surface.1

  In the Minoan civilization, which developed through the Cycladic period in Crete, black steatite and haematite were cut and polished into jewellery, small vases and seal-stones. Carbon black was used to decorate pots, and in the spacious pillared palaces – like that at Knossos – carbon-black was laid on the plaster of walls as an undercoat to set off the strong ochres, whites and blues of murals. These show banquets, galleys at sea, athletic youths bull-dancing. A swaying woman, seen in profile, will be strongly outlined in black, with black eyes and eyebrows, and curling, thick black hair.

  When the Minoan civilization collapsed, quite probably influenced by the catastrophic volcanic explosion of nearby Santorini, elements of the Minoan style were continued by the Mycenaeans on the mainland. A recurring motif was the octopus, whose black, sinuous tentacles may be woven round a vase or dish in a beautiful winding dance.

  The Mycenaeans thrived between 1600 and 1200 BCE. As we finally approach the period of the great city-states – Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Argos – the black patterns on pottery take on human shapes. In the seventh century BCE the black-figure style developed. Against the yellow-ochre background, bony people in black silhouette, with long noses and staring eyes, go to war or occupy their leisure. The designs can have a beautiful clarity, balancing perfectly the fine black figures against the negative bright space round them (illus. 10). Black heroes defeat black minotaurs, black ladies resist black satyrs, black athletes compete: much of their ancient world lives on in the strong black and ochre of the pots. Then, around 500 BCE, the darks and lights reverse, in the red-figure style (illus. 11). Now, against a lustrous, jet-black background, elegant, lightly red-brown people wrestle, dance or simply sit. They seem to think more, or may just relax gracefully. A fine tracery of lines suggests a supple musculature, or delineates with a lovely care the sensitive limbs of animals – as in the illustration shown, where the fawn of Apollo shrinks from the club of Herakles as he struggles with the god Apollo for possession of the sacred tripod of the Oracle of Delphi.

  Behind these civilized individuals the black background is absolute. Vincent J. Bruno gives an apt description: ‘in red-figured vases the uncompromising flatness of the black glaze around the figures, “its absolute insistence on a void”, seems to magnify both the sense of the life and the formal strength of the figures’.2 Perhaps the reference to ‘a void’ has an existential vibration that belongs more to our perspective than to that of ancient Greece. But it is true that black had a double role in Greek society, and away from the jewels and the murals and pots, black was the colour of despair, defeat, shame and death.

  11 Red-figure calyx-krater vase attributed to Myson, c. 490–460 BCE, showing Herakles and Apollo fighting over the tripod of the Oracle at Delphi.

  In the legend of the Minotaur, as retold by Plutarch, the ship which bore the tribute of young people to Crete – to be eaten by the Minotaur – had black sails, since they were heading to ‘certain destruction’. Ancient ships were in any case largely black, because their seams were caulked with pitch and their timbers coated with tar: in the Iliad Homer refers regularly to ‘the black ships’ of the Greeks.3 Sails were not usually black, however: they were the colour of the hemp or the flax from which they were made.

  When Theseus boasted that he would kill the Minotaur, his father Aegeus gave the pilot white sails, to be hoisted if Theseus survived, and black ones to be used if he died. And Theseus did kill the Minotaur, with the help of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos. But, preoccupied perhaps with Ariadne, he forgot to change the sails when he returned to Athens. When Aegeus, on a vantage point, saw the black sails, he threw himself down to be killed on the rocks.4

  Black goods need not be deathly. Most pottery in daily use was black-glazed, and the Spartans drank black broth (melas zomos). But clothes were not normally black: surviving records describe them as white, blue-grey, saffron, purple; quince-coloured or frog-coloured; or the colour of natural fibre. They can sound modern, since some carried gold lettering. But stark black was kept for death. We can still see a Greek funeral in a good theatre, for at the start of his Libation Bearers Aeschylus brings a funeral procession on stage. Orestes exclaims, ‘What’s this crowd of women coming here / All wearing black?’ The text has melanchimois prepousa, from the ancient Greek root for black, melas (which also gives us ‘melanin’, the black pigment in our hair and skin). The black mourners are the chorus, and we presently learn from them that black is also the colour of wrong-doing. When a man violates a virgin’s bed – they chant – no river can cleanse his hand of ‘the black blood which defiles him’. The play has a black symmetry, for when the Furies enter at the end to hound Orestes for killing his mother, they too come in dusky or dark-to-black robes.5

  The text does not have the melas root here; nor do we see the Furies, since only Orestes sees them. But in the next play, The Eumenides, the Furies in turn are the chorus, and at once we see them, sprawled asleep outside the temple of Apollo, dusky or dark-to-black in their looks and in their dress. There clearly was a tradition, even apart from Aeschylus, that the Furies who pursued Orestes wore – or were – black. Pausanias, writing four or five centuries later, records that ‘when the Furies were about to put Orestes out of his mind, they appeared to him black, but when he had bitten off his finger they seemed to him again to be white and he recovered his senses’. Virgil, in the Aeneid, refers to other stagings of the story, where Orestes’ mother, Clytemnestra, ‘pursues with torches and black snakes’.6

  Aeschylus clearly had an eye for the effect black could have on stage. In The Suppliant Women the chorus consists of the many daughters of Danaus, fleeing the many sons of King Aegyptos of Egypt. The daughters’ robes are called both luxurious and barbaric, and they themselves are compared to Libyans, Egyptians, Indians and Ethiopians – that is, they are black, or near-black. The pursuing Egyptians are also said to be black, in contrast to their snow-white clothes.<
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  The sumptuous dark spectacle of Danaus and his daughters closes with the granting of sanctuary, not death. But death-black contributed to the spectacle of Greek theatre. In Euripides’ Alcestis Death enters in person and bickers with Apollo: as to his appearance, Death is described by Herakles, later in the play, as the black-robed Lord of the Dead. Queen Alcestis, who gives her own life to spare her husband, King Admetus, is described as wearing black in preparing for death, and during the play Admetus changes his own royal robes for the black drapes of mourning, which are also adopted by his court. It should be said that the play, however black, has elements of comedy, and at the end Herakles lies in wait for Death, to wrestle with him. Being Herakles, he wins, and brings back Alcestis.

  Within the poetry of the tragedies, references to black slide between the literal and the metaphorical. Black steeds must be black, but black shipwrecks may be black because of the death toll, rather than because the ships were tarred. To go to a central horrific incident, the gore that pours from Oedipus’ eye sockets when he blinds himself with brooch-pins is described as black (melas). The new mask he wore when he came on stage blinded would presumably have been marked with black, though the blackness he speaks of must refer also to his extreme physical agony, to the horror and pollution of his father-killing and incest, and to the darkness of his blindness.

  There is a strong sense in Greek tragedy that death, blackness and evil events are inescapable in human life. And behind the plays, and the Furies, and black Death in person, there was – in the Greek understanding of the universe – the actual dark place where the dead went. The ‘Underworld’ was literally that. It lay at no great distance beneath our feet, and we could climb down to it if we found the right cave. The gates to this realm were black, and black poplars grew there; the place itself was dark as night, though not completely lightless. The rivers that run there – the Styx, Lethe, Acheron – are dark and often described as black. The ruling god, Hades, is merciless but just. He may be called the dark one, or the black one, though at other times he is described as pale: he sometimes has black hair. His throne is sometimes of gold, at other times of the black wood ebony. He is attended by Death, and also by deaths – the individual deaths that will visit each of us in turn. When he rides out his chariot is pulled by jet-black horses, and when mortals make offerings to him they sacrifice black animals, especially black sheep or black oxen. He has his own herd of jet-black cattle, managed by the demon herdsman Menoetes. He dispatches black-winged dreams to disturb the sleep of men. He has a daughter, Melinoe, whose limbs are partly black – from her father – and partly white, from her mother, Persephone. For in the grim-wonderful hell of the Greeks, though he is dark, his queen is bright. She is Spring, and each year she rises from the winter of death to clothe the earth with flowers and fruit. She is bright again in the painting by Jan ‘Velvet’ Bruegel, the son of the great Pieter Bruegel, which shows Orpheus playing his harp to her and to a not very dark King Hades (illus. 12). Hades the domain, however, is made of blacks, and clearly shows the continuity between the Greek, the Roman and the Christian underworlds.7

  12 Jan Bruegel the Elder, Orpheus in the Underworld, 1594, oil on copper.

  Both the primary importance of black as a colour, and the negative character it often had, are reflected in Greek theories of sight. When Plato explained how we see things, he described sight as a ray projected from the eye. We see things because our sight springs to meet them, and, subjectively, sight feels like that. We see white, he argued, when the ray of vision is at its widest, and black when it is at its narrowest contraction. His junior, Aristotle, thought this could not be right, since if sight was a ray that came out of the eye, we would be able to see in the dark. Actually this argument did not confute Plato, because he also spoke of a fire of visibility springing from objects, and in addition described the general ambient luminosity as a further subtle fire without which vision would fail.8

  This theory involved many fires, and Aristotle gave a plainer account that also makes better sense to us: he argued that sunlight is reflected by objects into the eye. He did however agree with Plato that the primary colours were white and black, and that other colours could be made by mixing these in different ratios. Since it is thought that Plato had painted when young, and since Aristotle was a committed experimentalist, we may wonder whether there were impurities in their black and white pigments, which meant that the grey they mixed tilted now towards the red, now the green, now the blue.

  Not that we should think of ancient colours and tones as being purely optical qualities. Democritus had called white smooth and black rough, and Plato compared blackness to an astringent or bitter taste in the mouth. For Aristotle white was an extreme of sweetness, and black an extreme of acrid bitterness. This is not to say that colour was literally identified with flavour, for bitterness, like blackness, is an idea unwilling to rest in its literal sense. Failure, betrayal, humiliation and ingratitude all have a bitter taste, just as misery is black, or the heart is black, or death is black, however bright the light. Aristotle gave his comparison force when he compared the sight of blackness to ashes and burned food in the mouth; but probably he did not find figs or peaches bitter when he ate them from gleaming, black-glazed dishes.9

  The philosophers’ remarks about the bitterness of black may be helpful when one thinks of the double role black had in Greek culture. For the beauty of black, and its sad bitterness, may not be wholly disconnected. Just as an appetizing dish may need to include a bitter herb, so the smart luxury of black may have a hidden tincture from the dark side of black. That element may be sunken, and yet give black artefacts, as it were, a serious value. The occluded, bitter side of black may give distinction to black designs. If then we return to the red-figure pots, in which dense black surrounds everyone, we might say that this decision for black contributes to our sense of a sophisticated culture. Even vases can grow serious. It is also possible that their blackness echoes the blackness that silver takes if it is not polished regularly.

  Greek art had beauty, but severity too; and not only in its tragedies, but in its paintings. This may seem a strange thing to say, when almost no painting by ancient Greek hands survives. But the most famous Greek painter of all, Apelles, was praised for his austeritas. Pliny the Elder valued the grace of his figures, but especially he praised Apelles for the extreme, the absolute exactness, of his outlines, and for the minute verisimilitude of the portraits that he drew.10

  Pliny also said that Apelles, and other Greek masters, used only four colours: white, black, red and yellow. It may be that Pliny exaggerates, for it is hard to see why Greek painters should not have used a blue pigment when the artists who painted the frescoes in Crete a thousand years earlier used a strong, beautiful blue both for the sea and for the plump, curving forms of dolphins. It is true, on the other hand, that the surviving Greek murals in the tomb complex at Vergina associated with Philip II of Macedon do seem to use only Pliny’s four colours (which allow both vigour, and delicate tones of rose and grey). They are sophisticated works by an artist or artists who could paint a chariot and figures from a three-quarters angle, and the brush-work is – by modern standards – bold and expressive. It is perhaps only because they are not thought sufficiently brilliant that they are not attributed to Apelles, for he was alive at the time (he would have been 50) and was the court painter of Macedon. In any event, it does seem clear that Greek painters demonstrated their virtuosity partly through their handling of a deliberately restricted palette, and by giving their figures weight and substance with shading. In Petronius’ Satyricon, when Encolpius enters the picture gallery, he tells us he was especially impressed ‘when I stood before the work of Apelles, the kind which the Greeks call “Monochromatic”’. He praises the subtlety of touch in the outlines, but his words make clear that the works were painted, not drawn.11

  Black certainly was important in the palette of Greek painters. An earlier artist was known as Apollodorus Skiagraphos (Apo
llodorus Shadow-Drawer) from his fame as the inventor of what we call chiaroscuro, the modelling of form by light-to-dark shading. Apelles himself was said by Pliny to have invented a new way of making atramentum (the Latin name for black pigment) by burning ivory where other artists had used calcined grape husks. Apelles was not in fact the first painter to use what we call ‘ivory black’, but burned ivory can yield an intense and also warm black which would have complemented the rose-to-crimson and the yellow-to-bronze registers of his other colours.

  Pliny also praises Apelles for coating his paintings, when finished, with a thin (tenuis) layer of atramentum: it was this that gave his works their austeritas. In commentaries this final coat may be described as ‘a dark varnish’, but the Latin does not mention varnish, only black paint (atramentum). Presumably this coating had some protective ingredient, possibly gum arabic, but austeritas does not suggest the lustre, or the depth of hue, which varnish adds to paint. Many centuries later, the painter Turner temporarily toned down a dazzling canvas by adding a thin coating of lamp-black, and one may wonder whether – as a final touch – Apelles laid on a thin, dark wash which disciplined the stronger hues and left the surface matt.12

  Not that Apelles’ subjects were always sombre, at least as described by Pliny. Like gifted painters in other periods, he painted the great and the good of his day in a manner that pleased them. He painted Alexander the Great – from life – many times, sometimes with thunderbolts in his grasp. Also, Pliny says, he painted Alexander’s concubine Pancaste so lovingly that Alexander gave her to him; he cannot have been too austere.