Gra w kolory. Rola barw w średniowiecznym systemie komunikacji społecznej

In the past, as today, colours were an important instrument of visual communication. In
modern western culture the individual has much freedom to create his or her personal chromatic
environment; in the past, however, the use of colours was strictly regulated by sets of rules.
This article is an attempt to defi ne these rules as they pertained in Latin Europe in the central
and later Middle Ages. This has become possible thanks to the development of research on the
‘social history of colours’ over the last decades – a dynamic but at the same time diffuse fi eld
of study, in which many disciplines and national scholarly traditions take part, some of which
are hardly known to Polish audiences. The rules for using colours as an instrument of visual
communication resulted from the complex interaction between their symbolism, evaluation,
and their distribution among social strata on the one hand, and purely technical possibilities
of their production on the other. This interaction produced principles underlying allowing (or
renouncing) colour, perception of colours on different chromatic planes, different attitudes
towards shiny and matt tints, and the colours’ aesthetic and moral valuation. Colours could be
perceived not only as pretty or ugly but also as good or bad. These principles were mirrored in
the practice of communicating by hues, e.g. by introducing chromatic contrast or isolation, or
by putting two or more colours on the same chromatic plane. In the late medieval chromatic
spectre not all tints had explicit positive or negative values (white and ‘Our Lady’s blue’ versus
yellow, aquamarine,violet and orange). The value of some of them (red, green, black) could
change from positive to negative and back, depending on the chromatic and situational context
in which they were placed. The enumeration of the principles of chromatic communication
inspires questions concerning practices of the use of colours and their awareness by medieval
men and women. Most scholars agree that colours served to identify individuals and groups as
members of national, religious and emotional communities, and also to designate their place
on the social ladder. Tints were elements in a system of visual signs used by late medieval‘emblematic’ society, giving, literally in the blink of an eye, not only information about who
is who, but also reinforcing the message of other instruments of visual communication such as
clothes, graphical signs, symbolic objects, or animals. The problem of the effi cacy of communicating
by colours, i.e. of chromatic ‘literacy’ (and of visual literacy generally) demands further
investigation. One may assume that familiarity with chromatic rules depended on the social
status and the education of the receivers of this kind of message. What educated clerics knew
about the theological symbolism of colours belonged to another register of knowledge than the
practical art of the dyers. So-called common people, experiencing contacts with colours often
in the sacral space of the church, may have been instructed about their meaning by their priests.
The main concern of a historian investigating communication by colours is: can we ‘decode’
them properly, knowing that the code formed by colours is subject to change and ambiguous?
Similar concerns have to do with other types of visual communication. Extracting information
from depicted colours, gestures and rituals can be problematic, as they were embedded in precise
situational contexts which may be diffi cult to reconstruct in the absence of written sources.