The colors are one of the most expressive examples of social and personal construction of meanings. The diverse cultures have seen different colors in the rainbow, they have organized differently their sequence in it, but, overall, they have loaded them with different symbolic contents. Frequently, colors are markers of the social and political hierarchies and, therefore, “matter of law”. In the second half of the 18th Century, a disciple of Christian Thomasius summarizes, in a university disser…
Read moreThe colors are one of the most expressive examples of social and personal construction of meanings. The diverse cultures have seen different colors in the rainbow, they have organized differently their sequence in it, but, overall, they have loaded them with different symbolic contents. Frequently, colors are markers of the social and political hierarchies and, therefore, “matter of law”. In the second half of the 18th Century, a disciple of Christian Thomasius summarizes, in a university dissertation, the common legal prescriptions on the use of the colors. Old literal genealogies still stand, entangled with scientific opinions of the time. On the basis of this intertext, legal doctrine fixes and multiplies meanings over space and time, as a huge space of industrial symbolic production. In such a way that, in spite of the changes brought by romantic imagery and by the emergent industrial revolution in the techniques of coloring, we can still recognize some glimpses of the shattered world of colors of traditional Europe.
