The Story of Black Read online

  He did however produce elaborate didactic allegories, as we know from another composition, described by Lucian. Its subject was calumny, or slander, and we can, as it were, see a picture of this picture, since the Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (and others) attempted to reproduce it, working from Lucian’s description. Botticelli’s earlier painting of Venus hovering above the waves perhaps emulated the famous lost painting by Apelles of Aphrodite rising from the sea (not an easy subject to render in white, black, red and yellow). In The Calumny of Apelles a throned man with asses’ ears reaches towards the figure of Slander, described by Lucian as ‘a woman beautiful beyond measure’. Two other women, Ignorance and Suspicion, whisper into his ears, while Envy, represented by a wasted man, urges him to believe the lie (illus. 13).13

  It is, however, the two figures to the far left who receive Lucian’s climactic emphasis. They are

  13 Sandro Botticelli, The Calumny of Apelles, 1494, tempera on panel, detail.

  a woman dressed in deep mourning, with black clothes all in tatters – Repentance, I think her name was. At all events, she was turning back with tears in her eyes and casting a stealthy glance, full of shame, at Truth, who was approaching.

  Lucian does not say that Truth was naked, and in making her so – beautifully so, in a slender, chaste style – Botticelli draws on the tradition of ‘naked truth’. Here he may equal, or more than equal, Apelles. With the figure of Repentance, however, it may be that Botticelli falls short: she does clasp her hands ruefully, but also could be read as an ill-willed crone. Judging from Lucian, the Repentance painted by Apelles was a portrait of guilt that was at once eloquent and subtle. With tears in her eyes and stealth in her glance, filled with shame, she stands in the black mourning robes that she herself has torn.

  Though we may only imagine her, still, by way of Lucian, Repentance shows us certain things: for instance, that mourning clothes in Greece were indeed black (Lucian’s word is melaneimon, again from the melas root). She also shows that already in classical Greece, grief and repentance wore – and tore – the same robes. These things need to be said because in his book on black, Michel Pastoureau claims that black funeral processions began with the Romans, while penitential black was later and Christian.14 The black tatters that Repentance wears, and which Botticelli paints, hark back to a world where simply to wear black had a visual violence. The mourners at the start of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers tear their skin and their hair as well as their clothes. If one wore black, one might, in the public eye, rip it to shreds – true grief, or consuming sorrow for the harm one has done, could demand no less.

  Apelles was not an early Caravaggio, or an early Robert Motherwell. He was the great master of his age; also the first painter in history – and for many centuries the only painter – to be praised for the quality of his blacks.

  TO JUDGE FROM Pliny, the Roman civilization to which he belonged had no painter to rival Apelles. There were notable artists, such as Iaia of Cyzicus – ‘no one had a quicker hand than she in painting’. It seems she specialized in portraits – she was famous for a self-portrait – and portraiture was a field in which Roman art excelled. The portraits that have survived, protected by the burial wrappings of their embalmed subjects, are lively and convincing. They are in the white-black-red-yellow register that Pliny mentions, and use black strongly for hair, eyebrows, eyes and (to a degree) for shading.

  A more striking use of black, which still we can see, was in the frescoes painted on the walls of villas. Fortunately for us, some of these survive through a freak of history, preserved in the volcanic ash of Pompeii. In the time of the Emperor Augustus – in the tens of years BCE and CE – a style developed in which full-colour figures, rendered with some realism, were set before a flat field of saturated colour. This powerful background could be vermilion, but it also could be black. The solid blackness pushes space back, and against it the small figures take a poignancy: even more than on Greek vases, these figures seem set against a void. In the villa built at Boscotrecase near Vesuvius by a daughter of the Emperor Augustus and her husband, the walls of one room are solid black, except for a deep red panel at wainscot level (illus. 14). These walls, black as soot, are however crossed by a few yellow-to-gold lines, thin as pins or pencils, which just sketch in the bare frame of a house or temple. There is an extreme of elegant slenderness, at once frivolous and precarious, against a dead blackness which seems not so much empty as thick, like impenetrable smoke.

  The importance of black in Roman painting may be gauged from the fact that in his Ten Books of Architecture (written in the last decades BCE) Vitruvius devotes a chapter to the making of a good black for frescoes. The only colour to which he gives more space is vermilion, though he deplores the way his contemporaries splash it everywhere. For black, resin must be burned in a furnace, so its soot, passing through vents, sticks to the marble walls nearby. When the soot is scraped off, it is mixed with gum to make ink, or with size to make fresco-paint. Or, even better, if the lees of wine are roasted, then ground up with size,

  the result will be a colour even more delightful than ordinary black; and the better the wine of which it is made, the better imitation it will give, not only of the colour of ordinary black, but even of that of India ink.

  14 The Black Room in the Roman villa at Boscotrecase near Vesuvius, c. 10 BCE.

  For Vitruvius black was not bitter: his word, translated here as ‘delight’, is suavitas – the Roman word for sweetness in sound, taste and appearance.15

  Frescoes were not suitable for rooms used in winter, where decorations could be spoiled by smoke from the fire, ‘and the constant soot from the lamps’. Here Vitruvius recommends the use of black panels (with yellow ochre or vermilion accessories). In these rooms the floors might also be black, through the use of black marble, but he recommends especially the Greek form of flooring, which also provided for moisture absorption. I quote his details to give a fuller sense of Greek and Roman building practice, but it may be that his description would also have fitted the dining chamber in the villa of Alcibiades on the hill of Philopapou beside the Acropolis, where Socrates, Plato and their friends discussed politics, love and the nature of good.

  An excavation is made below the level of the dining room to a depth of about two feet, and, after the ground has been rammed down, the mass of broken stones or the pounded burnt brick is spread on, at such an inclination that it can find vents in the drain. Next, having filled in with charcoal compactly trodden down, a mortar mixed of gravel, lime, and ashes is spread to a depth of half a foot. The surface having been made true to rule and level, and smoothed off with whetstone, gives the look of a black pavement. Hence, at their dinner parties, whatever is poured out of the cups, or spurted from the mouth, no sooner falls than it dries up, and the servants who wait there do not catch cold from that kind of floor, although they may go barefoot.16

  The word for black in ‘black pavement’ is niger, the word most often used by the Romans for a satisfying or lustrous black; it was also the word they used to describe (without prejudice) the skin colour of Nubians and Ethiopians. For a more matt black they might use the word ater – the ancestor of our ‘atrocious’ – but ater too was not necessarily bitter, since it provided the name of the black paint which Vitruvius liked, atramentum.

  There were diverse black items in the Roman world. The mosaics on the floors might be richly coloured, in the bronze-red to blue-green range, but often also the mosaics were black and white. They might show skeletons and veiled figures, but not all the monochrome mosaics are sombre. A mosaic from Ostia, the port of Rome, shows two ships passing each other, and the lighthouse of the harbour (illus. 15). The design has a free rhythm but is exact in its nautical detail, with both ships clearly using the same offshore wind. The ship to the left has the projecting prow of a warship and is using both mainsail and foresail, while the trading ship to the right is using only its mainsail, though the foremasts show clearly. Neither has stacked rows of swe
ating oarsmen (which are shown, compressed into centipedes, in Cretan-Minoan murals). In the foreground a dolphin sports sinuously, while light streaks in the water suggest the ships are making good speed.

  15 Mosaic of two ships passing the lighthouse of Rome’s harbour at Ostia, c. 200 CE.

  16 Romano-British Whitby jet pendant with a design of cupids as artisans, perhaps making a pot or cup.

  In the Roman home, too, there were black objets d’art. Figures carved in black marble or ebony might stand in niches. The jewellery in a Roman matron’s casket might include jet from Whitby in Yorkshire, carved into beads, bracelets or hairpins. Jewellery was functional, since Roman clothes were held together more by brooches than stitches. The brooches were often of the black stone onyx, or black glass, or niello (a black mix of copper, silver and iron sulphide). The matron’s daughter might wear a jet pendant cut into a heart or, if betrothed, a pendant with cupids engaged on love’s work, perhaps making a loving cup (illus. 16). The matron’s father, her husband and her sons would each wear at least one ring, which might be set with onyx, niello or black glass, and cut so that it could stamp a seal. The less well-off men who worked in the household might also wear rings – perhaps of iron – which might be set with a cheaper black stone such as steatite.

  Promenading out of doors, the Roman family would pass some buildings faced with black marble, and some with columns of black granite. Meeting an acquaintance in a black or blackish toga – the toga pullus – they would offer their condolences, for the Romans continued the Greek practice of wearing black mourning, and wore it for longer. At some point, parents would take a young family to the Lapis Niger, the Black Stone, an ancient shrine set to one side of the Forum. The origins of the shrine had been forgotten, but it was thought to mark the grave of Romulus, the founder of Rome. We may imagine the Roman father explaining these uncertainties to a family contemplating, with solemn faces, the beginnings of their city. Doubtless he traced with his finger the ancient inscription that laid a curse on whoever should disturb this sacred place, the words reading alternately from left to right, then back again from right to left, as they do in the oldest Latin inscriptions.

  Whether, as they walked home, the Roman family would have seen other people wearing black not from grief, but for its smartness, we cannot be sure. Black wool was certainly valued for its softness and beauty. The colour which would have most impressed them, however, was not black, but purple. If the Roman father was in the Senate, his toga would have a purple stripe, as would the togas of his sons, and the toga of an acquaintance who had high standing as a priest.

  As to the general use of purple – purpura – only the Emperor could wear a toga entirely of that colour; he would do so on ceremonial occasions. In the late Empire the use of purple began to be policed, while the privilege of wearing more of it than usual was sometimes granted to influential groups. Public benefactors could wear purple for life, and the officials at athletic contests could wear purple cloaks. In this regard Roman purple had something of the status which the finest black velvet had in, say, the sixteenth century, and actually its colour may not have been so different. The colour of this hugely expensive purple dye, which was made from the crushed remnants of the Mediterranean sea snail Murex, could vary between deep red and the deepest violet-black. Vitruvius said that the purpura that was harvested in Pontus and Gaul was black (atrum). Mark Bradley has noted that the redder purples were sometimes worn by those with liberal politics, while the dark-to-black purples were conservatively inclined. The Emperor Augustus would joke that the luxurious Tyrian purple sold to him was so deeply dark that he needed to stand in the sun, on his roof, for people to see that it was not in fact black. But he wore it.17

  As to how close to black Roman clothes might sometimes be, there is the teasing evidence of those composite statues where the body is of white marble and the clothing of black. There is a more-than-life-size statue of Matidia, the sister-in-law of the Emperor Hadrian, where the revealing black marble gown she wears is clearly not a mourning robe. On display in the Hall of Statues at Antalya Museum in Turkey is a statue of a dancer sweeping forward, and her beautifully flowing and lifting dress is again, like her hair, of black marble – that is, of marble that once was black (illus. 17). How the originals of such dresses stood between the deepest black-purple and black is not certain, so it may be that we should not imagine that some Roman women appeared in black décolletée looking like Sargent’s Madame X.

  We can however note that when the poet Ovid advises Roman women on what they should wear, he says that a dress that is pulla suits a snow-white skin best. Pullus was the Roman colour of mourning and, though not necessarily black, it was perhaps of a deep grey like that we call ‘charcoal’. Ovid notes also that Briseis of Troy was in mourning for her family, killed by Achilles, when she was carried off. Ovid implies that she was especially attractive in her grey/black robes, in a way that helped Achilles to fall in love with her, as he promptly did.18

  Among the attractive colours worn by Roman women, Ovid includes Paphian myrtle. In her article on the colours of Roman textiles, Judith Lynn Sebesta suggests that this was dark green, since the leaves of the myrtle tree are a deeply dark green. However, she also notes that elsewhere Ovid calls the myrtle nigra – black – and that this tree can look black. The colour of Paphian myrtle would seem then to have been between a deep green-black and black. Sebesta notes too that the Romans could dye cloth black using iron salts with tannic acid from oak galls as the mordant. Some Roman fibres are described as niger, or even coracinus, raven-black.19

  Roman black-dyeing was principally used to provide mourning wear, especially the toga pullus. The death-black of the Roman funeral might also be elaborated into a theatre of the grotesque – as in the black feast mounted by the emperor Domitian to caution hostile patricians. As Dio Cassius records, Domitian

  17 A Hellenistic statue of a dancer in white and black marble, second half of the 2nd century CE.

  entertained the foremost men among the senators and knights in the following fashion. He prepared a room that was pitch black on every side, ceiling, walls and floor, and had made ready bare couches of the same colour resting on the uncovered floor; then he invited in his guests alone at night without their attendants. And first he set beside each of them a slab shaped like a gravestone, bearing the guest’s name and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet. After this all the things that are commonly offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits were likewise set before the guests, all of them black and in dishes of a similar colour. Consequently, every single one of the guests feared and trembled and was kept in constant expectation of having his throat cut the next moment, the more so as on the part of everybody but Domitian there was dead silence, as if they were already in the realms of the dead, and the emperor himself conversed only upon topics relating to death and slaughter.

  It was, however, a black comedy feast. Domitian’s primary purpose was intimidation, and after his guests were conveyed to their mansions in solitary terror, further messengers arrived, bringing to each a copy of his place-slab, and of the black dishes, made now in silver and other costly materials. ‘Last of all came that particular boy who had been each guest’s familiar spirit, now washed and adorned.’ By such means, it appears, Domitian restrained high-ranking opposition to the austerities of his regime. He gave the first black dinner party known to recorded history; others followed.20

  The Roman realm of the dead is also, if anything, more black than that of the Greeks: its blackness is mentioned more often and with more zest. The river Phlegethon issues black flames, Statius says, and Black Death sits on an eminence. The fact that the Romans had several words for black enables them to not seem repetitive. A distinction is often made between the attractive, lustrous black of niger and the matt, repellent black of ater, but in d
escribing the Underworld the two words seem interchangeable. In Statius the black river is niger and its black flames ater, while Death is atra (the feminine form of ater, since mors, ‘death’, is feminine). Ringing the black changes, Valerius Flaccus refers to a land of black night (Stygian, from the black Styx) and black dread (niger), where the Black One (‘Celaeneus’) sits dressed in black (ater). In Ovid the black Styx has black breath (halitus niger). The Roman queen of the dead, Proserpina (their Persephone), may be called ‘the Stygian Juno’.21

  Statius and Verius Flaccus are perhaps sensational in their blacks, for the underworld of Virgil is not so emphatically ‘Stygian’. It is Virgil, however, who, twice in the Aeneid, plays with the oxymoron of black flames – in passages which presumably encouraged Milton to say that the flames of hell, in his Paradise Lost, shed ‘darkness visible’. In a lightless cavern Hercules confronts the half-human Cacus, who belches out black fire (atri ignes). And when Dido accuses Aeneas of deceiving and deserting her, she promises to pursue him with black fires (atris ignibus), and in the next lines says that when icy death takes her, her ghost will surround him everwhere. The conjunction of blackness, flames and frost – of fire with its two opposites, dark and cold – conjures a supernatural fire, blazing black and freezing too, to wither Aeneas in his guilt.22

  In the poetry of Ovid the different blacks of Rome congregate and coordinate. Ovid, like Vitruvius, likes black. He tell us in his Art of Love that though he is easy prey for blondes he is glad to see a dusky Venus (in fusco grata colore Venus), while black hairs (capilli pulli) look good on a snowy neck (here pullus sounds more black than grey). Leda was famed for her black hair (nigra coma). His own hair, too, had once been black (nigras). He is alert too to black creatures, the black horses that draw the chariot of Pluto (the Roman Hades), who for Ovid is the Black God (nigri dei). In the Metamorphoses Aroe is transformed into a jackdaw with black feet and black wings (their blackness stressed in the Latin by alliteration and internal rhyming, nigra pedes, nigris . . . pennis). The hounds of Actaeon, who destroy him when he is transformed into a stag, include Black-foot (Melampus), black-haired Soot (‘villis Asbolus atris’), Harpalos with the white mark on his black head, and Black (Melaneus). At the kill, Black-hair (Melanchaetes) attacks his back while Killer and Climber bring him down. It is not clear whether Black-hair is the same dog as black-haired Soot, and of course it hardly matters as the part-black pack rip his flesh into fibres and he issues a cry no deer could make, while his hunting companions urge the dogs on, at the same time wondering where Actaeon can have got to. It may be because Actaeon was Greek that, in naming the pack, Ovid uses Latin words based on the Greek melas.23