The sky isn’t blue and the galaxy smells like raspberries (and rum)

By Hannah Louise Ruskin

If I tell you to imagine the colour blue, what do you see? I can almost definitively say we won’t be picturing the same thing, although we will have very similar definitions of the word. In almost every circumstance, you’ll conjure up slightly different images or maybe multiple at once – will you see an object or an idea? What is the texture like? Is it still or moving? How about the shade? It suddenly becomes absurd that all these attributes can be contained within a single adjective.

From the very little reference to colour within ancient Greek text, it’s not certain whether colour to them was simply an underappreciated by-product of a substance or just perceived differently. One study into the works of Homer disregards colour as simply an aesthetic dimension to the natural world, but an experience of movement described only through ambiguous meaning. Careful dissection of his literary work reveals a notable absence of a word describing what we know as blue today. If blue wasn’t just blue, then what was meant by the ‘wine-dark sea’? Having made its appearance five times in The Iliad and twelve times in The Odyssey, the phrase’s recurrence suggests a more common theme. He goes on to describe oxen in the fields as red, perhaps a direct consequence of the sky, also referred to as ‘The Bronze’, suggesting that Ancient Greece was composed of an entirely different colour palette. But Homer’s epithets are somewhat murky territory and it’s clear that they place importance less on the visual and more on sensations instead. A similarly confusing epithet is that attributed to Athena who Homer describes as glaukópis (γλαυκω̑πις) – thought to have denoted the blue grey of her eyes – where glaukós carries a range of meanings, one traditionally being grey. Many translations seem to be at odds; some concur with ‘grey-eyed’ whilst others notice a similar verb used to describe the eyes of a lion and lean closer toward ‘gleaming-eyed’ or ‘silvery-eyed’.

‘If the eye were not Sun-like, it could never see the Sun.’ –
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In those days, the term Chroma (Χρώμα) served to describe the effects of shadow and light rather than the shade of the thing itself. Translating Chroma is like trying to piece together a puzzle using an entirely different reference picture and with half the pieces missing. We need a different plan. So, how did the Greeks view their natural world? Maybe they simply didn’t assign the same importance to colour as we do today. Or perhaps colour theory was still too much in its elementary phase. It’s unlikely, despite the textual absence of green, yellow, and blue, that some colours weren’t yet perceived. Yet the Greeks didn’t seem interested in defining different hues as we do today. They believed all colours to stem from the mixture of black and white - two primary colours in the ancient Greek colour lexicon. In contrast, our colour theory today evolved through experiments performed by Newton shedding light, well, on light. This more scientific understanding of colour might be equally as confusing, viewing white light as colourless whilst paradoxically being formed from a mixture of seven.

In 1898, American artist Albert Henry Munsell devised the Colour Sphere method. According to this model, any colour can be described by three attributes: hue, value (or lightness) and chroma. Whilst it’s very easy to confuse the terms, by definition, hue is the gradation of a colour, otherwise its dominant position on the spectrum. A common mistake is to use the terms hue and colour interchangeably, colour itself being a more general term to describe tint, tone or shade together with hue itself. Adding the concept of saliency, the capacity of colour to capture visual attention might provide a reason for the absence of green and blue being not just selective colour blindness, but a consequence of the hue and saliency proportionality relationship. You see, red (ερυθρός) is the most salient colour and the first to be defined in terms of hue in any culture. Blue and green lie on the opposite end of the saliency see-saw, perceived instead on a pale to dark scale. Knowing this, we begin to understand the meaning of Chloros (χλωρός) and Leukos (λευκός). The former, which we would ascribe to the colour green today, was back then, more associated with the idea of freshness. The latter, we know as white, was used to describe the luminous quality of a thing. The association of the two words evokes the way these colours capture our attention instead of merely indicating a coordinate on the colour wheel. However, blue has no direct translation. Now, that does not mean the Greeks shunned the existence of blue. They were perfectly able to perceive it but were simply not interested in describing the blue tone of the sea or sky – at least not in the same way we do; a consequence of two vastly different colour cultures.

Perhaps now we can start to unpack one of Homer’s most debated epithets. His alluding to the ‘wine-dark sea’ (οἴνοπα πόντον) is perhaps less attributed to its hue during a fiery red sunset than to the obscurity of its depths. As is mirrored in the nature of Dionysus, God of Wine and Festivities, the sea reflects the bridge between the human and divine spheres; it was mysterious, hypnotic and seductive, gleaming in a way a glass of wine would.

Complexion of the human skin was also culturally interpreted. Skin tone, like socioeconomic status, was a major criterion of social identity. Likened with the theory of opposites, contrasting light women and dark men was a well-known cliché in Greek iconography. This assumption was firmly grounded by traditional gender roles at the time, the belief that women had fairer skin from their time spent in the ‘darkness of a domestic sphere’. On the opposite end were men, tanned and darkened by their time spent in the sun. This provides meaning to the word Chroiá (Χροιά), which means the coloured surface of a thing and the thing itself. It is significantly related to Chros (Χρώς), which means ‘skin’ and ‘skin colour’. Few issues provoke such controversy, but the social and ethical aspects of colour must not be ignored when trying to understand the personalised nature of Greek chromatic culture.

Almost as important, and perhaps more so than the colour itself, is the material effect of shimmering under light rays. This comes into play when looking at the curious case of the ‘not really a colour’ porphureos (Πορφυρός). Modern translation will typically see it described as ‘royal purple’, but the Greek word doesn’t really correspond to any definite hue at all. Placed on the fringe between red and blue, it seems to be an intangible abstraction of an already intangible theory. Thereby it is the closest thing to describe objects which aren’t outrightly purple, as is the case with the sea. Whilst the sea may sometimes take on a purple hue, the frequency of the word is surprising for an event that may or may not appear during a short window at sunset. So, why is it used so regularly? Some believe it describes a dynamic interplay between brightness and movement, which changes in accordance with light throughout the day. This idea was well-caught by Aristotle, who in his meteorology, stated,

‘Purple is quite different on a white or a black background, and variations of light can make a similar difference.’

Thus, porphureos  is a term given meaning when considering only the glimmer effect of light. Just as purple dye was starting to be produced in 1200 BCE Phoenicia, so was the manufacturing of so-called porphureos materials. After mixing urine, seawater and ink from the bladder of Murex snails; the shells were left to putrefy, excreting a yellowish liquid. The verb porphureos describes the swirling motion during the process of ‘growing’ purple. As the mixture boiled, and depending on the amount of water added, it would shift from yellow to green, blue to red. Porphureos seems to be the best example of movement, variation, and luminosity resonating most greatly with the Greeks' early perception of colour.

So, despite the scarcity of descriptions of colours within ancient texts, it was still a hot topic in philosophy. In fact, the primary colours, as described by Plato, included white, black, red and the ‘brilliant and shining’ – quite different to the red, blue and yellow we have today.

Goethe, a German novelist, playwright, poet, and scientist (really a jack of all trades) was the first to point out that Homer never applied a colour term to the sky. Like the Ancient Greeks, he saw in grey the origin of all colours, refuting Newton’s idea completely. But in a way, Goethe was right in his view. In trying to tap into the ancient Greek world of colour using solely a Newtonian view, we remain suspended in something of a grey area, quite literally too. Without supplementing it with the Greek’s own colour theories and philosophies, we wouldn’t be able to examine the ways in which they described their world. Oddly enough, poetry seems to give us the clearest headway to our understanding of the crucial role light and movement play in early chromatic vision. Without it we would be lost, as would our ability to make sense of it. If we rely exclusively on the Newtonian theory of optics, it would be impossible to understand what the Greeks saw as they gazed out upon the porphureos sea.

Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 1829, oil on canvas, 132 x 203 cm, National Gallery, London.

Likewise with brightness, the passage of time is a difficult concept to capture in a painting, and when the combination of these two features is necessary to access the turbulent nature of the scene, the task becomes even more complex. One artist who succeeds is Joseph Mallord William Turner, an English landscape painter and watercolourist of the Romantic Period. His painting, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, depicts the aftermath of a triumphant Ulysses aboard his ship after escaping from the lair of the cannibal Cyclops, Polyphemus. From this snapshot into his portrayal of the myth, he masters colour imagery in a way that was perhaps similar to what Homer wrote about – not directly the hues as we see them, instead with emphasis placed on their dynamics. On first looking at the painting, it is rich with golden beams erupting radiantly into the room. His work blurs the lines between art and nature such that we cannot distinguish between the use of movement and colour. Turner blends the worlds of the figurative and imaginary, revealed by the detailing of the vessel together with the romanticised nature of the background. Volume and depth are well-caught and essential in mimicking how light bounces off the ship, bathing it in a reddish-gold glow. In contrast, the pitch-black lair consumes any semblance of brightness, revealing a sense of dread for the fate that Ulysses may have otherwise suffered. The sky, being ‘sky-coloured’ as the Ancient Greeks would describe, is awash with amazing shades of yellow, orange and gold, giving the idea of brightness and luminosity. Whilst the sea is less centric in the painting, it plays into the foundation of the piece. Turner explores a unique dichotomy to the sea; whilst the shadows and darkness evoke a mysteriousness to the depths, it also acts as a mirror both incorporating and reflecting the movement in the scene. The mirror is also highly symbolistic in reflecting the fluidity of Greek chromatic vision both in nature and in mythology.

It's unlikely we will ever be able to place boundaries on how colour can be perceived, but just as we can now understand the flavour of a dust cloud 26 000 light-years away, we can begin to unpack the ambiguities all around us, and almost 3000 years ago.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.