Yellow

Yellow is the colour of the sun and of gold, and where it reads as gold it is among the most exalted of colours: the gold ground of Byzantine and medieval icons signifies divine, uncreated light, and gilding marks the sacred across many traditions. In China yellow was the imperial colour, reserved at times for the emperor, associated with the centre and with earth in the five-phase system. Yet yellow has a persistent shadow side in the West. It became the colour of cowardice, treachery and disease: Judas is often shown in yellow in medieval art, quarantine flags were yellow, and yellow was repeatedly used to mark out stigmatised groups, most notoriously in the badges imposed on Jews from the medieval period through the Nazi era. This double life, solar glory as gold, contempt as pale yellow, is one of the sharpest examples of how a single hue carries opposite values by shade and context. In the modern chakra scheme yellow is the solar plexus, a recent assignment.

Yellow was easy to obtain and difficult to obtain well, and the gap between the two is the reason the colour carries such divided associations.

At the cheap end are yellow ochres, iron-bearing earths that need only grinding, available everywhere. At the expensive end are pigments that were genuinely hard to get. Orpiment, arsenic trisulphide, gives a golden yellow so like gold that it was called auripigmentum, and it is acutely poisonous. Saffron, the stigmas of a crocus harvested by hand, has always been among the costliest agricultural products in the world. Gamboge, a resin from Southeast Asian trees, reached Europe as a trade good.

Indian yellow is the pigment with the most repeated origin story and the least secure one. It is usually said to have been made from the urine of cattle fed on mango leaves, an account that circulated in nineteenth century British sources and that later scholarship has questioned without settling. The atlas records the claim as a claim.

For textiles, weld and dyer's broom gave reliable yellows cheaply, which meant yellow cloth was ordinary. That is the root of the colour's second reputation in medieval Europe, where yellow was assigned to the marked and the excluded, to Judas in painting and to compulsory badges in law, at the same time as gold and saffron stood for the highest honour. One colour, two economies, and two entirely opposed sets of meanings running side by side.