Colour as a manufactured appearance

This chapter is placed before the palette of dyes for a simple reason: before asking whether a cloth could be blue, red, yellow or violet, it is worth asking why a society dyed, bleached, washed, adorned or distinguished its cloths. Natural fibre was enough to cover the body, but it did not exhaust appearance.

Clothing is not only protective material. It is material turned into appearance. That is why a garment can keep warm, cover, mark decorum, indicate a trade, place a person within their group and, besides, make whoever wears it see themselves in a particular way. Colour belongs to that field: it is not a minor decorative addition, but a visible variable of manufactured appearance.

Before dye: intervening in appearance

Dyeing is not a first cause. It is an operation within a longer history: that of the body turned into a worked surface. Before we can speak of a dyed tunic, there already exists the human possibility of modifying appearance by means of pigment, adornment, hairstyle, cutting, cleaning, marks, jewellery or garments. In the anthropology of dress, «dressing» is not limited to covering the body with clothes; it includes visible bodily modifications and supplements.¹

Appearance is manufactured when something that belongs to the body can be partly separated from it, repeated, changed and read from outside. Age, skin or a scar are bodily facts; a painted mark, a hairstyle, a jewel, a stripe, a bleached cloth or a dyed colour are interventions. They can be put on, taken off, kept back, imitated, exaggerated or faked. That is where the wearable sign is born: not in the nakedness of the body, but in the possibility of working its surface and turning it into social presence. Colour enters that history as one of its most visible variables.

This perspective matters because it avoids too narrow a question. Human beings did not begin to signify with colour when they discovered the loom. Long before the surviving textiles, work with mineral pigments and with bodily adornments already shows that human appearance could be intervened in with added materials. In that sense, cloth inherited an older logic: making the body visible in a way that is legible, pleasing, correct, powerful or differentiated.²

So dyeing a cloth does not inaugurate the taste for colour. It moves it to a new support: spun and woven fibre.

Covering, signifying and feeling dressed

The sentence that puts the matter in order is this: natural colour was enough to cover oneself; it was not always enough to signify. But «signifying» should not be understood only as a public message. A person does not dress solely so that others can classify them. They also dress to recognise themselves, to feel proper, flattered, clean, discreet, festive, serious, dignified or attractive.

That plane is not material in the strict sense, but nor is it a modern fantasy. Between the imposed uniform and elite luxury there is a very broad zone of practical choice: preferring a tone, keeping a garment for a special occasion, adding a stripe, choosing a lighter or darker piece, mending with a visible cloth, washing one particular garment more carefully, keeping another for work. Taste does not float outside economy, custom or religion; it is born within them. Precisely for that reason it can also exist in a poor community.

For the biblical nativity scene this is important: if a peasant or craftsman’s family could not afford luxury purple, it does not follow that it had no relationship with colour. Poverty limits the repertoire; it does not eliminate appearance.

What colour could do

The oldest and most widespread motive is to ornament. Colour makes it visible that appearance has been worked on. It can beautify, brighten, single out or simply separate a cared-for garment from a raw one.

Different from ornamenting is signalling rank. Here colour does not only beautify: it ranks. In the most costly dyes, cost is not an accidental obstacle, but part of the message. Murex purple, at its upper extreme, communicated precisely through the material, the time, the technical knowledge and the economic capacity that it concentrated. A colour that is hard to obtain says, before anything else, that whoever wears it was able to obtain it.

It should be added that significant colour was not always added colour. Meaning was also made by subtraction or refinement: a very clean or almost perfect white could require washing, fulling, sun-bleaching or bleaching. It is not only a matter of adding dye, but of investing labour. The labour is read even if the result looks like an absence of colour. That is why white is studied separately in the corresponding chapter, not as «non-colour», but as a socially constructed colour.

Another, different order is the religious one. Some colours and textile materials became bound to the sacred, to worship or to images of dignity, purity, blood, sky or kingship. Priestly white, the blues and purples of the biblical vocabulary, the red of blood or the purple of rank belong to that field, although each case will have to be studied separately before it is transferred to a particular garment.

Then there is belonging. Colour can place a person within a social map: family, trade, village, district, religious group, marital status, mourning, feast or ritual function. It does not always speak of wealth or power. Sometimes it says «one of us», «at this moment», «for this occasion».

And, finally, there is value. A dyed piece, one bleached with much labour or adorned, could concentrate a considerable amount of material, time and technical knowledge. Ancient textiles were not easily thrown away: they were repaired, reused and could be turned to other uses when they no longer served as garments. The biblical texts also let us see the mantle as a good that could be pawned, and the accounts of the Passion show that garments could be shared out as booty. From there, it is reasonable to think that a cared-for garment could be kept, passed down or circulate as a valuable good. Rank and wealth usually coincide, but they are not the same thing: rank is what the colour declares; wealth is what the piece is worth.

The practical plane

There is also a practical plane that is worth recognising without exaggerating it. Clothing was not kept clean by daily washing as in a modern textile economy. Washing a garment demanded water, time, drying and, meanwhile, some form of substitute: another garment, another layer, an older piece or a temporary rearrangement of dress. That is why colour should not be understood only as adornment. A middle, brown, muted or uneven tone could live better with prolonged use than a very carefully kept white, which could moreover signify cleanliness, invested labour and distinction. This does not mean that it hid any stain whatever, but that it made the ordinary accumulation of dust, rubbing and wear less visible. A contrasting stain stood out just the same, depending on the fabric, the trade, the road, the season and the surroundings.

A different matter is the relationship between colour, light and the construction of the garment. With material, thickness and density equal, a dark surface absorbs more solar radiation than a light one, including part of the ultraviolet. But colour never acts alone. In real clothing it forms a system with the fibre, the spinning, the density of the weave, the thickness, the looseness, the length and the ventilation. A dark, loose and airy garment may be more bearable than a light but heavy or tight one; and a light but very open-weave cloth may protect less from the sun than a darker and denser one. Climate conditions the architecture of the garment; it does not automatically determine the dye.

The classic experiment by Amiram Shkolnik, C. Richard Taylor, Virginia Finch and Arieh Borut on Bedouin robes helps us not to oversimplify the matter.³ The study compared the thermal behaviour of a black Bedouin robe with that of light garments and showed that the black cloth absorbed more radiation, but that the heat that finally reached the body did not increase in the same proportion, because the loose garment dissipated part of that heat by ventilation. The useful conclusion for this Manual is not that all Bedouin clothing is black, nor that the ancient garments of Judaea worked in the same way, but that colour and pattern cannot be separated.

That is why the association between light tones and heat, or between dark tones and winter, has a physical and perceptual basis, but does not work as a universal rule. Light colours reflect more light; dark ones absorb more. At the same time, a light colour may feel cooler and a dark colour more forgiving in use. In a clothed society, those practical reasons mix with decorum, availability, custom, rank, rite and taste.

Undyed does not mean uniform

The error would be to turn historical prudence into a levelling image. That natural fibre was the basis of the wardrobe does not mean that everyone dressed in the same tone or the same pattern. Undyed wool could vary between dirty whites, creams, browns, greys and blackish tones. Linen could look more or less light according to fibre, preparation, washing, use and wear. A new undyed garment did not look the same as one that had been worn, mended, fulled, sun-bleached or carefully washed.

Nor was dye a binary alternative between extreme luxury and the total absence of colour. There were costly dyes and modest dyes, solid colours and muted colours, whole pieces and stripes, cords, trims, veils, inherited mantles or garments kept for occasions. The cost could lie in the raw material, in time, in technical knowledge or in household labour. When the dye required a rare material, a specialised workshop or long-distance trade, its use entered the field of high cost. By contrast, for more modest, partial or less saturated dyes, the possibility of humble, local operations repeated by family hands must be treated as an inference from context, not as direct proof for Nazareth, Bethlehem or Jerusalem.

For Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem in the period of the Nativity we cannot reconstruct the exact wardrobe of a particular woman nor assign sure colours to each figure. That is unknown. But it can be asserted that there is no historical need to imagine a visually uniform population, as if all the common people dressed alike and only Herod, the high priest, the priests and a few rich people stood out.

The prudent conclusion is a different one:

• Proven: natural fibres offer different visible ranges; washing, bleaching, use, mending and wear modify appearance; dyes existed in the ancient world and some are documented in the Levant.
• Inferred from context: the non-elite population could present visual variety through qualities of fibre, natural tones, cleanliness, ageing, inherited pieces, modest adornments and, in some cases, partial or complete dyed colour.
• Unknown: the exact frequency of each colour, the proportion of dyed garments in each village and the precise appearance of a woman of Bethlehem, Nazareth or Jerusalem around the turn of the era.

Criterion for the nativity scene

This chapter does not authorise a scene saturated with bright dyes. Nor does it authorise a scene reduced to a single range of beige, grey and brown. Its function is to open an intermediate criterion: variety without excess, colour without fantasy, prudence without uniformity.

The following chapters study which particular colours can be defended, with which materials, on which fibres, by which procedures and with what degree of closeness to the period and the region. First it is established why colour mattered; then the question is asked what colour can be painted.