Blue: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau's Blue, The History of a Color, published by Princeton University Press in 2001, is a scholarly cultural history of the color blue in Western art, religion and society, including its rise as the color of the Virgin Mary's mantle and ultramarine's costly, prestige status as a pigment. Pastoureau is a leading medieval historian specializing in the history of colors and symbols, and the book rests on standard university press peer review and his extensive archival work in medieval and early modern sources. Its limit is that it is a history of Western cultural meaning rather than a history of pigment chemistry or of color symbolism outside the European tradition it covers.