Contents

• In the beginning was black : from the beginning to the year 1000
• Mythologies of darkness
• From darkness to colors
• From palette to lexicon
• Death and its color - - The black bird
• Black, white, red
• In the devil’s palette : tenth to thirteenth centuries
• The devil and his images
• The devil and his colors
• A disturbing bestiary
• To dispel the darkness
• The monk’s quarrel: white versus black
• A new color order: the coat of arms
• Who was the black knight?
• A fashionable color : Fourteenth to sixteenth centuries
• The colors of the skin
• The Christianization of dark skin
• Jesus with the dyer
• Dyeing in black
• The color’s moral code
• The luxury of princes
• The gray of hope
• The birth of the world in black and white : sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
• Ink and paper
• Color in black and white
• Hachures and guillochures
• The color war
• The Protestant dress code
• A very somber century
• The return of the devil
• New speculations, new classifications
• A new order of colors
• All the colors of black : eighteenth to twenty-first centuries
• The triumph of color
• The age of enlightenment
• The poetics of melancholy
• The age of coal and factories
• Regarding images
• A modern color
• A dangerous color?