THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COLOUR

A CULTURAL HISTORY

JAMES FOX

Allen Lane, 320pp, £25 The Elgin Marbles once showed tantalising traces of the vivid colours in which they had originally been painted. Then, in the 1930s, they were given a too-thorough clean by over-diligent curators using wire brushes and copper chisels. The colour was scrubbed off forever, leaving what an art historian called ‘lumps of stone … robbed of life, dead as casts’.

In her review of art historian and broadcaster James Fox’s book in the

TLS, Kassia St Clair used this sad episode to illustrate a ‘stew of prejudices and assumptions about European identity. For Western European intellectuals, a marked preference for form and line over hue was a hallmark of the rational and civilised.’ Chris Allnutt took up the theme in the Financial Times, noting that ‘with more than 40,000 dyes and pigments available today, we live in an age of unprecedented vibrancy and Fox’s histories remind us that it has not always been so’.

In the Literary Review, Adrian Tinniswood enjoyed Fox’s range. The book ‘is all about context and the meanings that colours have acquired in different eras and different civilisations (though in his introduction Fox also provides a straightforward – and admirably brief – account of the physics). Taking seven colours – black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green – he devotes a chapter to each, offering a wide-ranging and often intriguing series of meditations on their changing significance.’ In the

Times, Laura Freeman loved it – ‘a brilliant cultural history in undeservedly drab covers. Dreary hardback, sparkling text. Fox paints a great rainbow of natural history, philosophy, religion, art, optics, myth and the occult.’