and What Each Color Confessed About Them

“Oh, what a marvel it appeared to me, when I beheld three faces on his head! The one in front, and that vermilion was … the right appeared between whitish and yellow; the left was such to look upon as those who come from where the Nile falls valleyward.” — after Dante, Inferno 34 (Longfellow translation, abridged)

An Archival Chronicle Prepared for the Discerning Collector

Compiled by the Archivist of the Unseen

Contents

I.  The Register of Pigments

II.  A Note on This Study and Its Companion Entry

III.  Field Study — The Angel on the Left

IV.  When Blue Was the Color of Barbarians

V.  The Black of the Void

VI.  The Rise of Blue

VII.  Field Study — Three Faces and a Blue Giant

VIII.  Green, the Color of Rot

IX.  Red: Dragon, Fire, and Blood

X.  The Gentleman in Red

XI.  Field Study — The Ledger of Colors

XII.  The Archivist’s Conclusion

Bibliography

I. The Register of Pigments

In the pigment room off the west stair at Faulkenmire, where the air smells of camphor and old leather and the rain has not stopped since noon, a ledger lies open on the long table. It is a nineteenth-century register of pigments, each entry a smear of color beside a name in brown ink: lamp black, vermilion, azure, verdigris. Across the page lies a pressed sheet of blue paper, set there like a bookmark by a hand no one saw.

In the lamplight the blue looks almost black. That, the Archivist decided, was the point.

What color is the Devil? Ask almost anyone today and the answer is red: a red-skinned figure with horns, a pointed beard, and a forked tail, more mascot than menace. But that answer is surprisingly recent. Across the long history of Christian art, the Devil has been painted blue, black, green, gray, and red, and the meaning of each color changed with the centuries.

This field study, prepared for the patient reader of old pigments, follows the Devil through his changing colors, and argues, as the companion entry did, that each color tells us more about the painters and their world than about the figure they were painting.

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II. A Note on This Study and Its Companion Entry

This field study accompanies Entry XI in the Journal of the Archivist of the Unseen, On the Colors of the Devil. That entry answered a question the Archivist had been asked in letters and in the margins of notes: why was the Devil once painted blue, and when did he turn red? It answered honestly that the history is less tidy than the question, and that the colors overlapped for centuries.

This study expands on each stage of the entry’s account and adds several witnesses it did not have room for: Dante’s three-faced Lucifer, the multicolored demons of the late Middle Ages, and the eighteenth-century blue devils of melancholy. Two of the entry’s details are refined. The panel by Michael Pacher, which the entry dates to the 1470s, is dated by the museum that holds it to around 1480. And the link between Gounod’s Faust and the red-clad Devil, while widely repeated, is a matter of theatrical tradition rather than a single documented costume, and is presented here with that caution.

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III. Field Study — The Angel on the Left

Ravenna

The basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna was built by Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, in the early sixth century. Its walls carry a celebrated series of mosaics, including small panels illustrating the life and teaching of Christ. One of them depicts the parable of the Last Judgment from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, in which the Son of Man separates the nations as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, setting the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.

Two Angels

In the mosaic, a youthful, beardless Christ sits enthroned in the center, dressed in purple. On his right, beside three sheep, stands an angel in red. On his left, beside three goats, stands an angel in blue, often described as blue-violet. The two angels are otherwise alike: winged, robed, haloed, calm.

Satan or Not?

Many art historians have identified the blue angel as Satan, or as an angel representing the forces of evil, which would make this panel one of the earliest surviving images of the Devil in Western art. Others are more cautious, and the companion entry rightly shares their caution. The figure is not labeled. He has no horns, no tail, no animal features, nothing of the monstrous imagery of later centuries. He is an angel on the wrong side of the throne, and the only sign that something is wrong is his color. If he is the Devil, he is a Devil not yet made hideous: still an angel, but fallen.

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IV. When Blue Was the Color of Barbarians

Why would a sixth-century artist give the Devil blue? To answer, we must set aside our own sense of the color.

A Neglected Color

Today blue is the favorite color of most people in the Western world, associated with the sky, calm, loyalty, and trust. The French historian Michel Pastoureau, in his history of the color, has shown that this was not always so. In the ancient Mediterranean, blue was a minor color. The Romans thought little of it. It was associated with barbarians: Julius Caesar recorded that the Britons dyed themselves with woad, giving them a blue appearance in battle. Blue eyes were considered unattractive in a woman and a sign of bad character in a man. Dark blue was associated with mourning and the night.

The Color of the Lower Air

Some scholars have offered a further explanation rooted in scripture and theology. The Epistle to the Ephesians calls Satan “the prince of the power of the air.” Early Christian writers placed the fallen angels in the dim, misty air below the heavens, between the bright realm of God and the earth. If the red angel in the Ravenna mosaic represents the light and fire of heaven, the blue-violet angel might represent that lower, darker air: a being of the dusk, fallen from the light but not yet into the pit.

The Absence of Light

In Byzantine artistic conventions, deep blue could also stand for darkness, the absence of light. On this reading, the blue angel is the angel of darkness beside the angel of light. As the companion entry concluded, it is impossible to say which of these meanings the mosaicists intended. Perhaps they intended all of them.

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V. The Black of the Void

Through most of the Middle Ages, the Devil’s characteristic color was neither blue nor red. It was black.

Darkness Chosen

Black was the color of the darkness the Devil had chosen when he rebelled against the light. It was the color of the smoke of hell, of the void, of light deliberately extinguished. Pastoureau’s history of black traces how, in the medieval Christian imagination, black became the color of sin, death, and the Devil, even as it was also the color of monastic humility and, later, of princely elegance.

The Shapes of Darkness

In the lives of the saints, from late antiquity onward, demons appeared as black animals, black birds, and black human figures. In the Life of Antony, the desert father’s biography written in the fourth century, the Devil appears to the saint in the form of a black boy. Such images recur throughout medieval literature and art.

The Familiar of Dame Alice

As the companion entry noted, this visual language appears in a case the Archive has studied before. In the accusations against Dame Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny in 1324, her alleged familiar, a demon called Robin, son of Art, was said to appear to her as a cat, as a shaggy black dog, or as a black man.

A Cruel Inheritance

The companion entry did not leave this observation without comment, and neither does this study. The habit of using dark skin as a sign of evil in religious imagery did real harm. As European societies came into contact with African peoples through trade, conquest, and the slave trade, the old symbolic association between darkness and evil was turned against real human beings, and helped to justify centuries of cruelty. The color symbolism of medieval painters was not innocent, and it should not be studied as though it were.

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VI. The Rise of Blue

While the Devil was black, blue was undergoing a transformation that would make it unsuitable for him.

A Revolution in Color

Pastoureau argues that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries blue rose from neglect to prestige in Western Europe. The abbot Suger rebuilt the abbey church of Saint-Denis near Paris with windows of glowing blue glass, and the cathedral of Chartres became famous for its blue windows. Painters gave blue to the mantle of the Virgin Mary, sometimes using ultramarine, the most costly of pigments, ground from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan. The kings of France adopted golden fleurs-de-lis on a blue field as their arms.

The Queen of Heaven’s Color

A color given to the Mother of God could hardly remain the color of the Devil. As blue became the color of the Virgin, of kings, and eventually of loyalty and calm, it largely left the Devil behind. But, as the companion entry observed, the old association lingered in places, and painters continued to use dark blues and grays for demons when it suited them.

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VII. Field Study — Three Faces and a Blue Giant

Giotto’s Satan

In the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted by Giotto around 1305, the great Last Judgment on the west wall includes a vision of hell. At its center sits an enormous Satan, dark and bluish in color, with serpents issuing from his ears, devouring the damned and expelling them. He is one of the most memorable images of the Devil in Western art, and his dark, cold color recalls the older association of blue with darkness.

Dante’s Lucifer

A few years later, Dante Alighieri completed the Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy. In its final canto, the poet reaches the center of hell, where Lucifer stands frozen in ice. He has three faces: the one in front is red, vermiglia; the one on the right is between white and yellow; the one on the left is black. Commentators have long debated the meaning of the three colors, which have been read as a parody of the Holy Trinity, and as representing hatred, impotence, and ignorance, or the three continents then known. Dante’s Lucifer shows that, around 1300, the Devil’s color was not fixed. He could wear red, pale, and black at once.

Hell in Many Colors

By the fifteenth century, artists were free to give demons almost any color that suggested corruption and monstrosity. In the frescoes of Luca Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto, painted around 1500, demons appear in an array of livid colors, green, violet, and the gray of dead flesh. In manuscript illuminations, demons may be black, gray, blue, green, or brown. No single rule governed them.

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VIII. Green, the Color of Rot

Pacher’s Devil

One of the most striking of all late medieval devils was painted by the Tyrolean artist Michael Pacher for the Altarpiece of the Church Fathers, made for the Augustinian monastery of Neustift near Brixen and now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. On the outside of one wing, the Devil presents Saint Augustine with the Book of Vices. The museum dates the panel to around 1480. The Devil is a grotesque green creature, with a second face on his hindquarters, a visual joke about the Devil’s backward, inverted nature.

Why Green?

In his history of green, Pastoureau explains that in the Middle Ages green was associated with instability, change, and chance, and also with poison, decay, and the serpent. Green was the color of things growing, but also of things rotting, of mold and corruption. A green Devil was a figure of moral rot and of the serpent of Eden. The companion entry captured this exactly: green meant the unstable, the poisonous, the rotting, and the serpent.

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IX. Red: Dragon, Fire, and Blood

Red had always been close to the Devil, and its claim was rooted in scripture.

The Red Dragon

The Book of Revelation, in its twelfth chapter, describes a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, identified as the Devil and Satan. Isaiah speaks of sins that are as scarlet. In medieval imagination, red was the color of hellfire, and medieval images of hell are often red and black together: fire and smoke, flame and darkness.

The Double Red

But red was a double-edged color. It was also the color of the blood of Christ and the martyrs, of the robes of cardinals, of divine love, and of the fire of Pentecost. A red Devil was therefore a parody of sacred red, as the companion entry put it: fire that burns without giving light, blood that is shed and not offered.

The Red of Treachery

Pastoureau has also shown that medieval artists gave red hair to Judas, Cain, and other figures marked as traitors, outsiders, or the deceitful. Red hair became a visual sign of treachery. Red, in this sense, was the color of the one who betrays from within, an apt color for a fallen angel.

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X. The Gentleman in Red

When did the Devil become, in the popular mind, the red figure of today? Later than most people imagine.

The Stage

Red demons appear in late medieval and early modern art, but the fully red Devil, a slim gentleman in red tights with a pointed beard, horns, and a cape, is largely a creation of the nineteenth century, and especially of the theater. Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, first performed in Paris in 1859, was one of the most popular operas of the century, and its Mephistopheles became a famous stage role. The red-clad Mephistopheles is widely associated with productions of Gounod’s opera and with the stage Faust generally. The Archive has not been able to trace the convention to a single first costume, and presents it, as the companion entry did, as the general shape of the evidence rather than a dated turning point. What is clear is that the stage Mephistopheles in red became one of the defining images of the Devil.

The Mascot

From the stage, the red Devil passed into cartoons, advertising, and commercial branding. The William Underwood Company of Boston registered a trademark for its deviled ham on November 29, 1870, and its little devil became one of the most familiar images in American advertising; the trademark is often described as the oldest food trademark in the United States still in use. By the twentieth century, the red Devil had become a figure of fun, a mascot for sports teams, spicy foods, and Halloween costumes.

The Blue Devils

One more trace of the Devil’s blue survives in the language. In the eighteenth century, the phrase blue devils came to mean melancholy and low spirits, and was also used of the hallucinations of delirium. From it, many dictionaries trace the expression the blues, for sadness, and through it the name of the musical tradition. The blue Devil of Ravenna survives, distantly, in a word for sorrow.

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XI. Field Study — The Ledger of Colors

Established

The blue-violet angel beside the goats in the sixth-century mosaic at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo; Pastoureau’s account of the low status of blue in antiquity and its rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; black as the dominant medieval color of the Devil and demons; the description of Dame Alice Kyteler’s familiar as a black dog and a black man; Giotto’s dark, bluish Satan in the Scrovegni Chapel; Dante’s three-faced Lucifer; Pacher’s green Devil, around 1480; the red dragon of Revelation; the registration of the Underwood trademark in 1870.

Interpretation

Whether the Ravenna blue angel is Satan; the meanings of his blue, as darkness, the lower air, or barbarism; the meanings of Dante’s three colors.

Tradition Rather Than Document

That Gounod’s Faust established the red-costumed Devil; the precise point at which red became the Devil’s dominant popular color.

Caution

The symbolic association of darkness with evil, and its harmful application to real people.

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XII. The Archivist’s Conclusion

The Devil has no color of his own. He has been painted in the blue of barbarians and the lower air, the black of the void, the gray of dead flesh, the green of rot and the serpent, and the red of fire, blood, treachery, and finally the theater and the grocery shelf. Each color was a judgment, and, as the companion entry observed, every judgment said more about the painters than about him.

The history of the Devil’s colors is a history of what each age feared and despised. The late Roman world despised blue and made it the color of the angel on the wrong side. The medieval world feared darkness and painted its demons black, with consequences that fell on real people for centuries. The late Gothic world feared corruption and painted its fiends green. The modern world, no longer afraid, dressed the Devil in red and made him sell ham.

In the pigment room at Faulkenmire, the Archivist lifted away the blue sheet before closing the ledger. Beneath it, against the entry for azure, someone had pressed a single strand of black ribbon. The colors, it seems, are not finished with each other yet.

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This field study is preserved as one vestige among many within the haunted archive of Wicked Dual, an artisan boutique devoted to the reclamation of history’s clandestine and silenced corners. It is filed as the companion to Entry XI of the Journal of the Archivist, On the Colors of the Devil, beside the register of pigments where the blue looked almost black.

Read the written chronicles on the blog, the Wicked Archive: www.wickeddualblog.com

Secure the physical artifacts drawn from these histories at the Wicked Dual boutique: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Wickeddual

We invite you to enter the haunted archive and secure a piece for your private collection; it is a necessary addition for those who curate the darker corners of human history.

— The Archivist of the Unseen

Bibliography

Devil in art, Dante in a public-domain translation, and the contemporary account of the Kyteler case; readers pursuing formal citation are advised to verify editions and pagination against a library catalog.

Dante Alighieri. (1867). The divine comedy: Inferno (H. W. Longfellow, Trans.). Ticknor and Fields.

Link, L. (1995). The devil: A mask without a face. Reaktion Books.

Pastoureau, M. (2001). Blue: The history of a color (M. I. Cruse, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Pastoureau, M. (2009). Black: The history of a color (J. Gladding, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Pastoureau, M. (2014). Green: The history of a color (J. Gladding, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Pastoureau, M. (2017). Red: The history of a color (J. Gladding, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Russell, J. B. (1984). Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press.

Wright, T. (Ed.). (1843). A contemporary narrative of the proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler, prosecuted for sorcery in 1324, by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory. Camden Society.

Related Chronicles in the Archive

Journal of the Archivist, Entry XI — On the Colors of the Devil

Field Study No. XI — The Woman Who Was Never Burned: Dame Alice Kyteler

Field Study No. XXVI — The Lord of the Storm: Baal

Field Study No. XLV — The Renamed God: Ekwensu