In very early Art we find colours used in a symbolical or mystic
sense, and, until the ancient principles and traditions were wholly
worn out of memory or set aside by the later painters, certain colours
were appropriate to certain subjects and personages, and could not
arbitrarily be applied or misapplied. In the old specimens of stained
glass we find these significations scrupulously attended to. Thus:—
WHITE, represented by the diamond or silver, was the emblem of light,
religious purity, innocence, virginity, faith, joy, and life. Our
Saviour wears white after his resurrection. In the judge it indicated
integrity; in the rich man humility; in the woman chastity. It was
the colour consecrated to the Virgin, who, however, never wears white
except in pictures of the Assumption.
RED, the ruby, signified fire, divine love, the Holy Spirit, heat, or
the creative power, and royalty. White and red roses expressed love and
innocence, or love and wisdom, as in the garland with which the angel
crowns St. Cecilia. In a bad sense, red signified blood, war, hatred,
and punishment. Red and black combined were the colours of purgatory
and the Devil.
BLUE, or the sapphire, expressed heaven, the firmament, truth,
constancy, fidelity. Christ and the Virgin wear the red tunic and
the blue mantle, as signifying heavenly love and heavenly truth.[12]
The same colours were given to St. John the evangelist, with this
difference,—that he wore the blue tunic and the red mantle; in later
pictures the colours are sometimes red and green.
YELLOW, or gold, was the symbol of the sun; of the goodness of God;
initiation, or marriage; faith, or fruitfulness. St. Joseph, the
husband of the Virgin, wears yellow. In pictures of the apostles, St.
Peter wears a yellow mantle over a blue tunic. In a bad sense, yellow
signifies inconstancy, jealousy, deceit; in this sense it is given to
the traitor Judas, who is generally habited in dirty yellow.
GREEN, the emerald, is the colour of spring; of hope, particularly
hope in immortality; and of victory, as the colour of the palm and the
laurel.
VIOLET, the amethyst, signified love and truth: or, passion and
suffering. Hence it is the colour often worn by the martyrs. In some
instances our Saviour, after his resurrection, is habited in a violet
instead of a blue mantle. The Virgin also wears violet after the
crucifixion. Mary Magdalene, who as patron saint wears the red robe, as
penitent wears violet and blue, the colours of sorrow and of constancy.
In the devotional representation of her by Timoteo della Vite,[13] she
wears red and green, the colours of love and hope.
GREY, the colour of ashes, signified mourning, humility, and innocence
accused; hence adopted as the dress of the Franciscans (the Grey
Friars); but it has since been changed for a dark rusty brown.
BLACK expressed the earth, darkness, mourning, wickedness, negation,
death; and was appropriate to the Prince of Darkness. In some old
illuminated MSS., Jesus, in the Temptation, wears a black robe.
White and black together signified purity of life, and mourning or
humiliation; hence adopted by the Dominicans and the Carmelites.
The mystical application of attributes and colours was more
particularly attended to in that class of subjects I have distinguished
as _devotional_. In the sacred historical pictures we find that the
attributes are usually omitted as superfluous, and characteristic
propriety of colour often sacrificed to the general effect.
These introductory observations and explanations will be found
illustrated in a variety of forms as we proceed; and readers will be
led to make comparisons and discover analogies and exceptions for
themselves. I must stop here;—yet one word more.
All the productions of Art, from the time it has been directed and
developed by Christian influences, may be regarded under three
different aspects. 1. The purely religious aspect, which belongs to
one mode of faith; 2. The poetical aspect, which belongs to all; 3.
The artistic, which is the individual point of view, and has reference
only to the action of the intellect on the means and material employed.
There is pleasure, intense pleasure, merely in the consideration of
Art as _Art_; in the faculties of comparison and nice discrimination,
brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the exercise of a cultivated
and refined taste on the productions of mind in any form whatever. But
a three-fold, or rather a thousand-fold, pleasure is theirs who to a
sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in Art, and
who combine with delicacy of perception, and technical knowledge, more
elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of
more excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that, in placing
before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume any such
superiority as is here implied. Like a child that has sprung on a
little way before its playmates, and caught a glimpse through an
opening portal of some varied Eden within, all gay with flowers, and
musical with birds, and haunted by divine shapes which beckon onward;
and, after one rapturous survey, runs back and catches its companions
by the hand and hurries them forwards to share the new-found pleasure,
the yet unexplored region of delight; even so it is with me:—I am on
the outside, not the inside, of the door I open.
[Illustration: 2 After Gaudenzio Ferrari, at Saronno]