I've looked around for 6 months for this type of guide book so was very pleased when I saw it in the giftshop of the Detroit Institute of Arts. They wanted $37 so Amazon's price of $20 is GREAT. The book is a succinct overview of the Christian saints and their imagery. If you enjoy Medieval or Renaissance Art, you've got to get this book. It gives you a tremendous cross-reference to identify the images to the saints. For example, if you see a wheel in the painting, you can look it up in the index. This will lead to Saint Catherine and gives a history of her. This is an in-depth and scholarly approach to Christian iconogarphy with lots of helpful pictures. Indispensable reference book!

The ecxiting, very colorfull, nice book about heraldry. No questions: if you want to buy one book about heraldry, buy this!

Prostitutes, bastards, traitors, Beelzebub, Cain, jugglers, clowns, hangmen, lepers, heretics, adulterous wives and non-Christians were all depicted as wearing and sometimes actually required to wear stripes in the Medieval era. A Middle Ages black hat designation as it were, striped clothing served as a visual shorthand judgement of the person donning such garb. Before eyes could discern more subtle notations, stripes announced a lack of cherished virtue(s), marking the wearer as a person at best on the fringes of the mainstream social mores. Such were stripes-barres.

What did striped cloth and clothing mean? Why, indeed, would it mean anything?

In the first chapter, Pastoureau muses 'The problem of the stripe does indeed lead to pondering the relationship between the visual and the social within a society. He then poses the questions 'Why does the West, over the very long term, have the majority of social taxonomies expressed through visual codes? Does the eye classify better than the ear or sense of touch? Is to see to classify? Why is the derogatory sign system-the one that draws attention to outcast individuals, dangerous places or negative virtues, more heavily stressed than the status-enhancing systems?' The questions are disquieting, staccato, sometimes painful.

About 225 years ago, the American Revolution's use of stripes was adopted in Europe's changing fashion and social mores. But the pejorative striped garment remained alongside the playful and fashionable stripe as a mark of the social outcast, the inmate, the madman, the thief. What does that say about Western culture? Did we, and do we continue, to use stripes to hold at a safe distance the questionable? Do we use barred barriers to allow us to peer safely onto the unclean, the disturbed without being subject to the reach of their conditions? Is the stripe a visual sign of our attempt to control our surroundings?

While pondering the author's questions, the notion of sacred geometries and M.C. Escher returned time and again. Try as I did to expel the distractions of what seemed only marginally related, the nebulous concepts persisted. The unsettling truth is that stripes are an "uncontained," open-ended geometry. Escher's birds and lizards were closed systems, stripes have no end, even when severed, the stripe marches beyond mere visual boundaries. A geometric renegade, stripes defy enclosure in any manner. And we react to them with both caution and delight.

This beautifully designed little book falls short only in its visual delivery once opened. I was left wanting full-color plates of the black and white given examples of striped clothing since about 1240.

This is a book worth reading and adding to one's library, worth mulling over the questions it asks. Again and again.

Michel Pastoureau's The Devil's Cloth is a unique and unusual history of stripes and striped fabric will appeal to the interested needlecrafter, costumer and quirky artist, as well as anyone else who would receive insights into fashion, styles or changing clothing. From a medieval scandal revolving around striped habits to national stripes and displays of stripes in clothing, The Devil's Cloth is an impressive and scholarly work which is informative reading and an enthuiastically recommended survey.

Imagine a convict. What sort of clothes is he wearing? Everyone knows, but how is it that this universal sign came to be? That is one of the surprising questions answered in an odd little book about, of all things, stripes. _The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes & Striped Fabric_ (Columbia University Press) by Michel Pastoureau (translated from the French by Jody Gladding) shows stripes all over the place and gives a wide-ranging account of just why they have the clothing functions we seem almost instinctively to know about them. The pejorative nature of stripes was founded on a legend sparked in the Bible's pages, and the Carmelite order figured that stripes would be a good uniform for its members, while the members of other orders wore sober solid colors. The Carmelites arrived in Paris in 1254, and were immediate victims of abuse and mockery, with people making jests about how they were just the type to be "behind bars," and so on. The cloaks were a scandal, and Pope Alexander IV expressly ordered unstriped ones for the Carmelites. It didn't do; ten successive popes were required to put the demonic garment down, and even then the Carmelites out in the sticks probably kept it.

Stripes were thereby authoritatively banned from religious garb, and they became assigned to nasties: "Treacherous knights, usurping seneschals, adulterous wives, rebel sons, disloyal brothers, cruel dwarfs, greedy servants, they may all be endowed with stripes on heraldry or clothes." Cain and Judas don't always have stripes in their pictures, but they get them more than any other biblical figures. As time went on, the stripe was associated not so much with badness as lowness. Servants wore stripes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Eventually, the jauntily fashionable folks of those times took to wearing stripes, but wore them vertically, which distinguished them somehow from the reprobates who had to wear them horizontally. Everything changed in 1775, when the pejorative aspect of stripes (which has never completely left) was largely abandoned that they might become the clothing of the revolutions. Stripes became a good thing, but they also remain naughty. Pajamas, underwear, and bedsheets used to be uniformly a pure white, but in the nineteenth century, the white got diluted, either by quiet striping or by pastels. It may be that such striping represents once again the barrier, this time against our own desires and our unquenchable lusts. We are reminded perhaps that we are all potentially as errant as convicts.

This is an odd book with both close arguments and speculative hypotheses. It has wonderful footnotes, including one telling how the author's father visited a department store with Picasso, who insisted on ordering pants that would "stripe the ass." Stripes are everywhere, and they mean something, and that meaning has expanded in surprising ways over the centuries. If you like stripes, and who doesn't, you will find that your appreciation for them (especially for their surprising connotations of naughtiness) is magnified by this entertaining intellectual confection.

Only a Frenchman could have written this. Gorgeously illustrated, divertingly precious, breath-takingly arrogant, and close to useless. Pastoureau speculates, tells us how shamefully others have speculated, and then speculates some more. His arrogance, Francophilia, and contempt for people whose previous work does not meet his standards (and lord knows what they are) all work to ruin what could have been an exiciting book. He has a point to make, and darned if chronology, sense, or vision will keep him from doing so. A true history of the color awaits. Hopefully it will come in as pretty a package.

Thoroughly researched and compellingly interesting, the story of how the West's modern times favorite color emerged from the middle ages. Lively, vivid, a great & beautiful book.
YGG

Woad, Indigo, Azurite, Lapis, Copper Silicate, Blue Vitriol are some of the sources of the color blue. BLUE, THE HISTORY OF A COLOR, by Michel Pastoureau, is a beautiful art history book, whose organizing principle is the color--blue. Pastoureau's book is a bit "Francocentered" but nevertheless, who better to reflect on blue than a Frenchman. BLUE is both informative and entertaining and a must for any serious art book collector. The photgraphy of various works of art--including selected stained glass windows from the early church--is stunning. The book is loaded with illustrations showing pages from psalters, cathedral windows, figurines, and other art.

For millions of years, the major colors for artistic expression were Black-White-Red. Ancient tales such as "Little Red Riding Hood", "Snow White", and "The Fox and the Crow" reflect this primary triad. The Romans considered blue an inferior color, especially since the Celts up North had discovered the leaves from the Woad plant could be made into a beautiful blue "pastel" suitable for body painting. The liturgal colors of the Catholic Church date from Roman times and are red-white-black (green was added later). However, at some point between the time the Romans lost Europe and the Catholic Church reentered recorded history, blue became associated with Mary the mother of Christ. When Abbe Suger built St. Denis, blue began to rival red for supremacy within the church, although blue never became a vestment color. When St. Louis built his Chapel and the Capet family became the rulers of France with Mary as their patron, the fleur de lis on a blue background became the family standard and the flag of France (fleur de lis = lily of Mary, although it may be a blue flag or iris).

No sooner had blue become THE color of colors, than the Protestants (Pastoureau calls them "Chromoclasts") demanded everything be turned black to reflect sin and penance. After they smashed a few thousand church windows, these reformers, who have been linked to capitalism, turned everything else black -- from telephones to automobiles. As Henry Ford once said, the customer can have any color he wants as long as it's black. Black went on to became the dress of high society--from stove pipe hats to tuxedoes to the little black dress.

During the Reformation, red and white had been dismissed by the Protestants but the shot heard round the world gave them a second chance as the new red-white-blue and blue-white-red flags led to military pants and coats in similar colors. But red and white were a dismal failure as they made targets of their wearers. Blue blends into the horizon so it has lasted longer as a battle garment. Although jungle fatigues and black commando suits are more often than not seen on modern battlefields, mess dress is still blue-white-red for many, and UN soldiers wear fleur-de-lis blue helmets. Blue eventually replaced black on the social front as descendents of the "Puritans" gave up black frocks for navy blue blazers and jeans.

Pastoureau covers iconography, iconology, symbolism, sociology, ethnology, the economic aspects of weaving, dyeing, and manufacture, and a host of other topics associated with the color blue. The book is incredibly rich in detail but far too short, and in the end it raises more questions than it addresses. Pastoureau points to many historical sources that have yet to be translated or fully examined, and art history majors looking for a thesis subject would be well advised to check out this book.