Blue : a foothold to the most lyrical heights of the imagination

Blue is not just a color, it is the ultimate Greek color. The color of the sea, the color that prevails on the Greek island’s palette, on traditional houses and churches ... Blue is the color that is connected to the endless Greek summers and the color that symbolizes tranquility, clear thinking and inner harmony.

Blue, our planet’s elemental hue, nature’s color for water and sky, the color of heaven and authority, the most symphonic of the colors, recurs throughout our literature as something larger than a mere chromatic phenomenon:  a symbol, a state of being, a foothold to the most lyrical and transcendent heights of the imagination.

In his sixty-first year, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, by then Europe’s reigning intellect, published Theory of Colors were he wrote “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”

Exactly a century after Goethe, the great Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky examined the psychological and spiritual dimensions of art through the lens of form and color. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art , Kandinsky devotes an especially impassioned section to blue: “The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements  of retreat from the spectator,  of turning in upon its own centre. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper. Blue is the typical heavenly colour… The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest…”

Even if you haven’t read the Homeric epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, you must have heard his famous, and enigmatic, description of the “wine-red sea”. Wine-red? Has anybody ever seen the sea in anything even remotely resembling this color?

Could the famous blue of the Aegean Sea, where the Homeric events took place, ever be other than brilliant blue?

Literary scholars struggled mightily with this strange depiction. Some attempts were so convoluted as to be laughable, but none were persuasive. In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone, published a seminal 1700-page study of Homer’s epic poetry. He noticed that this wasn’t the only strange colour description. Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armour, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to colour are strange. Iron and sheep are violet, honey is green. So Gladstone decided to count the colour references in the book. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white around 100, other colours are rare.

It seemed the Greeks lived in murky and muddy world, devoid of colour, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow. Gladstone thought this was perhaps something unique to the Greeks, but a philologist named Lazarus Geiger followed up on his work and noticed this was true across cultures.

In that period of history there was no blue...