The Black Death, aka bubonic plague, killed more than a third of medieval Europe’s population. In folklore, it’s unlucky for a black cat to cross your path, while witches who do evil are said to practice black magic. And you really don’t want to run into the creature from the Black Lagoon. The color black has strong negative connotations in Western culture, but it wasn’t always that way. Deep, dark black has a more colorful history than you might expect.
Black Isn’t Technically a Color
Picture a rainbow, which comprises the visible spectrum of light, and you’ll notice that black isn’t in it. Scientifically speaking, black is the absence of light, and because light is required for color, black contains no color. (Black’s opposite, white, is the total of all colors of the visible spectrum.)
However, people usually think of black as a color in an artistic sense: as a pigment that absorbs visible light and reflects almost none, approximating the absence of light. Thus, the “black” we see is really a reflection of a mix of very dark colors. Here’s another mind-bending fact: Nothing in nature can be pure, absence-of-light black except the inner reaches of a black hole.
Human Use of Black Goes Way Back
Black is one of the most frequently used colors in prehistoric art; the other is a rusty red derived from iron oxide. About 35,000 years ago, people combined charcoal with locally available manganese oxide to paint incredibly detailed tableaux of horses, cave lions, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age animals in the Chauvet Cave in present-day southern France. The same black pigment was used to draw impressive sequences of animals in the nearby Lascaux caves about 17,000 years ago. Around 700 BCE, Corinthian artists invented a new style of vase painting by covering unfinished clay vessels in a coating called slip, etching designs, and then firing the vessel in a kiln so the slip turned shiny black. By 200 BCE, Chinese artists had developed a solid black ink made of soot and animal collagen that is still used today.
The Color Black Is Linked to Evil
Before the Middle Ages in the West, the color black could symbolize positive notions of dignity and respect, as well as phenomena like evil, sin, disease, and death. But in the 12th century, a monastic dispute shifted black’s association firmly into negative territory. Benedictine monks wore black robes to signify humility and called out Cistercian monks, who wore white robes, for being prideful. The debate got so heated that St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercians’ leader, sent a letter to Benedictine abbot Peter the Venerable, arguing that black represented evil and hell and that white was the color of “purity, innocence and all the virtues.”
The Renaissance kicked that association between black and evil into high gear, with artists painting scenes of hell in shades of black and characterizing the devil as wearing a black coat. In the following centuries, Christian leaders identified the color black with witchcraft and magic. On the other hand, in India and Pakistan today, young children and brides wear black dots on their faces as protection against the evil eye.
Black Hasn’t Always Been the Color of Mourning
Wearing black at funerals is another trend that emerged in Europe. Around the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s lavish funeral in 1603, rich mourners wore black to symbolize their own wealth, since black clothing was expensive — it was time-consuming and difficult to dye from extracts of madder, woad, and various woods. Wearing black to mourn also reinforced social status, since sumptuary laws in England prohibited anyone but the nobility from wearing formal mourning attire. For many centuries, most common people wore wool or linen garments either bleached white or dyed brown. But as laws relaxed and clothing manufacture was industrialized in the 19th century, black cloth became cheaper and more accessible to other social classes.
A 19th-Century Manual Helped Define Black
For 19th-century naturalists, one of the biggest challenges was accurately translating the colors in nature. You could say a bird’s feather was black, but how would you describe the exact tone? Patrick Syme, a Scottish painter, attempted to standardize these hues with his 1814 manual, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, which built on an earlier work by the geologist A.G. Werner. In Syme’s system, he named swatches of 110 colors and compared each of them to a plant, an animal, and a mineral. For example, “greyish black” is the black of basalt and water ouzels, while “velvet black” is comparable to moles, obsidian, and the “black of red and black West-Indian peas.” This and later color charts gave scientists a new color vocabulary for defining the natural world.
Vantablack Is One of the Blackest Blacks Ever Created
It’s not the black of a black hole, but it’s pretty close. Vantablack, the brand name of a line of coatings created by Surrey NanoSystems, once held the Guinness World Record as the darkest human-made substance. It reflects only 1% of the light it absorbs. When applied to a surface, it looks like a limitless flat void, even when it’s painted on a three-dimensional object.
Vantablack’s lack of luster makes it useful for calibrating light-sensitive instruments, including those used in space. It lost its world record in 2015, however, when researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology created a black from gold nanoparticles, dubbed Primalight, that reflects less than 1% of all light wavelengths.