A king in black and some historical misunderstandings

This is the conversation that sparked my passion about color: black dyes and 16th-century European fashion.

During his lifetime, king Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) probably was the most powerful person on the planet. A devout Catholic and quite a stoic man, he wasn´t the kind of king to indulge in, well, anything. In all his portraits, he looks rather somber and grave, an impression compounded by the fact that he almost always wore black.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of Philip II of Spain (1565)

Growing up, I heard a thousand times that Philip II wore black because he was a very severe man. The general feeling about his historical figure was that he was obsessed with religion and didn´t allowed himself a fun moment wearing anything other than the most rigorous black. I never doubted that this assertion was true until only a few years ago, when I had a most revealing conversation with a friend and fellow museum educator.

We were talking about a painting in the musem´s collection in which the king´s half-brother, the Duke Don Juan of Austria, is visiting Philip before going to his new post as governor of the Low Countries (where he was killed in mysterious circumstances, but that´s a story for another time).

We started discussing the king and his ever-present black clothing and, when I said that it was a sign of his intense adhesion to Catholicism, she said I was wrong—the king wore black because it was a most luxurious dye at the time, and an excellent black dye made from logwood had been discovered in America only a few years before.

Black dyes were notoriously difficult to make until the 15th century, so using a saturated black dress wasn´t a sign of severity or religious devotion, but a sign of wealth and power.

This conversation blew my mind. I had never realized that making a saturated black dye had been so difficult, or that the symbolism of color was very different a few centuries ago. As a result, I started a feverish research into the history of colors to find answers to these questions. I wanted to know why wearing black was such a fashion in the Spanish court and how its meaning had been so grossly misunderstood.

This picture is part of a book of a wealthy Augsburg banker, Matthaus Schwarz (1497-1576). He comissioned a book of portraits of his looks. Most of his clothes were black, showing the fashion of his time.

Black has an interesting history because, as a pigment, is pretty easy to make. You can make it by charring wood or bones, making charcoal. Charcoal pigments are excellent for drawing and have been used since the Paleolithic. Or you can make it with the mineral manganese oxide, that it´s also fairly common and known since prehistory. When you see rock art painted in black, chances are that you are seeing either charcoal or manganese oxide pigments.

But black dyes? That´s another story. Dying in black was hard because there weren´t any good dyes in this color, and especially because, even if you dyed a piece of clothing in a black shade, you could be sure the next time you washed it, it would turn either grey or brown.

Most dyes need a mordant to stay fixed on fabric when you wash it, and fixing black dye was particularly challenging. In Roman times, the closest people got to black clothing was some dark grey or brown, because they didn´t know how to do any better, and the same occurred during most of the Middle Ages.

This state of affairs continued until the 14th century in northern Italy. At this time, Italy wasn´t a country like the one we know today. It was formed of city-states (like Milan, Venice or Florence) governed by a powerful and wealthy nobility.

At the same time, merchants were rising their social status thanks to commerce and an emerging capitalism. This meant that simple men and women without a title could afford to wear clothing as luxurious as the one the nobles wore, and the nobility didn´t like that one bit.

The point of having a title was that the rest of people knew you were superior to them. If they looked like you, then how would people recognize this essential difference in class and status?

On the left, Philip the Good, and on the right, his son, Charles the Bold

To fix the problem, they made new laws that stated the kind of fabric and dyes you could wear according to your class. The most vibrant colors (and most expensive dyes) like intense reds, blues and greens were forbidden for anyone without a title.

The merchants then adopted a new strategy: they decided black, a color they were allowed to wear, would be their new banner. They didn´t have titles, but they had money, so they hired the best dyers to create the most saturated and velvety black dye known to date. This wasn´t the wishy- washy black of previous times, but a true, almost glossy, black.

And it worked. It became so popular, that a new fashion was born: wearing black became stylish. So stylish that princes and nobles started imitating the lower classes and wore black too. I imagine the merchants had a great time with this development—for once, they were the ones dictating fashion instead of following the style of the upper classes.

Then, another Philip, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy (1396-1467) decided to make black his signature color. It was said that he was in mourning for his father, who had been assassinated, but in life his father also favored black, and neither of them was immune to the black fashion sweeping Europe.

His descendants continued this style. His grand-daughter, Mary of Burgundy (1457-1482), married Maximilian of Hapsburg (1459-1519) and took her wardrobe and style with her. Their son, Philip the Handsome (1478-1506), would be the first Hapsburg to become king of Spain, by marrying Joanne of Castile (1479-1555).

Anthonis Mor, Margaret, Duchess of Parma (1550)

They were the grand-parents of Philip II of Spain. The whole dynasty of the Hapsburgs, in Spain and Austria, wore mostly black for centuries. And since the Spanish monarchy was the most powerful in Europe during the 16th century, its fashion and styles were copied and imitated everywhere else. As a result, the European courts of this time became populated by black attire.

Philip II didn´t wear black because he was a zealot, he didn´t even choose the color himself: he inherited this custom, and simply continued the dynastic dress code.

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This was a good reminder that sometimes we don’t know the symbolic codes of other historical periods, and we can´t look at something with our 21st century perspective.

Have you had an experience like this one when you’ve realized you had misunderstood something because you were missing some key information? Let me know in the comments!