Take a peek at the image above and then at the ones of her below. You notice that our lady comes in a range of colours – most usually blue, often red and occasionaly white. What a parishioner asked on Sunday, (and I was unable to answer with authority), was this: ‘Why does Mary wear blue and when and why did this overtake the earlier custom of depicting her in red?’
I am not sure if it is an historical thing at all. But a search online has not provided much else in the way of answers. The more silly suggestions included the idea that blue is worn as Mary supports Everton (ludicrous, we all know she adores Norwich City FC) and a more intelligent offering suggested that red was favoured by Eastern Christian tradition and blue by Western tradition….though again I am not sure I agree, after all Da Vinci often chose red over blue!
It is of course entirely possible that different colours are used for different emphasis. I believe red was the colour of nobility/dignity and of importance in ancient Jewish culture. Blue is often associated with the sky and the heavenly realm and was also a very expensive pigment. White is, by all accounts, the colour Mary has been wearing in most authenticated visions.
So not much of an answer from me, just a few suggestions being thrown about. Surely someone who reads our blog can do better…I await something genius in the comments box! Uber-Catholic credibility for the first to offer something utterly convincing….
Renaissance painters regraded Mary with very high esteem, and when depicting her in their art wanted to mark their level of veneration and so used the most expensive pigment available which was lapis lazuli – blue. Since then Mary, as viewed from year to year in Sunday School nativity plays, Mary is is dressed in blue.
Yes, I second the above comment: ultramarine blue came from lapis lazuli, which was expensive, so depticting her in blue was an honorific. (Nowadays a synthetic pigment is used so it is much cheaper.) It also adds a certain iconographic clarity, making her easy to identify. Rather interestingly, in some cases, Mary is given an outer garment of blue and an inner garment of red, while with Christ it is usually the opposite: the inner garment is blue and the outer red; the red symbolizing suffering and the blue heaven, etc. At least this is how I understand it. But I feel reasonably confident in asserting that these conventions antedate the Renaissance, and that by the 15th century they were well established. I’d be curious to hear any other hypotheses, insights.
Surely the answer is obvious. Mary wears Red, White and Blue because she was British. An ancester of Joseph of Arimathea took her from Britain some years before our Lord was born.
Sorry, that should be ‘ancestor’.
Perhaps Our Lady is celebrating the Ashes victory?
The meaning will depend on the source of the painting. The range of meanings in the West reflects the range of artists’ understandings. In the East canonical icons will reflect the Church’s teaching.
Commentators on icons differ on the meaning of reds and blues in icons of our Lord and Saint Mary. They agree that one refers to humanity and the other to divinity. They also agree that our Lord is normally shown in a red tunic covered by a blue robe, and the Theotokos in a blue dress covered with a red robe or veil. I have found that most, or at least more, state that the red tunic points toward Christ’s divinity and the blue robe points toward the humanity which He assumed at the incarnation. On the other hand, the blue dress emphasizes Saint Mary’s humanity, and the red to the divinity of her Son. (Some commentators reverse the meaning assigned to the colors.)
The important feature of icons which has been neglected or lost altogether in the West is that icons do with form and color what Scripture does with words. In the West artists may use whatever forms and colors seem to suit them or their understandings of the subjects of their art. Iconographers are no more free to make it up than are translators of the Bible.
Father Dean A Einerson gets the first award!
Can anyone top that?
The other posts are also very informative I should add – with the exception of Fr. Tomlinson Sr……
“Iconographers are no more free to make it up than are translators of the Bible.” Does this mean a whole new, exciting area of heresy to be explored Fr Ed?
From “The Icon – Window on the Kingdom” by Michael Quenot, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991, p 115:
“Red and blue, though strongly contrasted spiritually, create a good harmony. This fact is particularly noticeable as we look at the Virgin Theotokos dressed in a red maphorion [her outer garment], symbol of her humanity, and a blue robe, the symbol of the divine, for she is the human creature who bore in her womb the Son of God.”
This snippet gives an idea of the complexity of the symbolism in Orthodox iconography.
Though winning the ashes is a nice thought, I have seen in history of art books that in those days, most paint pigments were made from substances found in the earth (they had no artificial dyes as such) so that yellow and brown wre made from types of earth called ochres, black was made from powdered charcoal, and red and white from lead oxides found in the earth. However, there was no cheap source of blue. The only source of blue pigment was the precious stone ultramarine which was more expensive to buy than gold leaf. So, frequently in religious paintings, the painting was done solely by using the cheap ocres and oxides easily obtained from the ground, but the only blue would be that worn by the Virgin Mary to make her stand out as someone very special indeed.
(not wishing to tread on a certainly lady’s toes, I hope my information is correct!)
Curious, and very interesting!
Checking three of my icons, one of Christ (Pantocrator), depicts Him wearing a blue cloak over a red tunic, one of Our Lady (Eleousa?) shows red over blue, and another (similar to Hodegetria), shows blue over red. Perhaps the variety is because they are new copies of old patterns. A book about Russian icons describes the outer garment as ‘burgundy’ and the Chiton beneath as blue but gives no explanation as to why.
As an aside, although painters had more freedom in depiction than icon ‘writers’, the subject still had to be identifiable to the viewer (and the Patron’s requirements met?), some clues are there to be spotted in paintings just as we identify saints in statues and windows.
Could it be as simple as the availability of pigments as the trade routes developed? Also, did painters use colours because of an associated menaing, or vice versa?
(Maybe Norwich City started in red but changed strips one season? ;o) )
Actually they started in blue, but were soon nicknamed ‘the Canaries’ because they played at a ground called ‘the nest’. Once the nickname stuck it was only a matter of time for the yellow to emerge!
There how sad, I am able to give more informative postings on the colour and history of a football strip than our Lady’s outer garments! Great posts everyone, what emerges is that the answer is either not clear or else shrouded in mystery…..but some great stuff on value of pigments et al moves us closer to the answer.
One final thought – is she in red, white or blue because the green and yellow clothes are in the wash!
Many of the problems here come from comparing Eastern and Western traditions. In the East, blue is the colour of humanity because the Eastern icon-writers accept a tradition in which human beings are ‘bags of water’ and water is blue. A light red is the colour of divinity, of divine light. Our Lady is human and therefore wears a blue garment over which Christ has given her a cloak of red divinity. In the case of our Lord, He is divine and therefore wears red underneath, and has cloaked His divinity with a perfect humanity, a veil of flesh, so blue covers the red just as His humanity veils His divinity, else we could not look at Him, just as Moses had to look through the burning bush.
In the West, the meaings are reversed. Blue is the colour of divinity owing to the sky-god ouranian tradition. God and heaven are above the blue sky, so the colour of divinity is blue. Red is the colour of Christ’s humanity because blood is red and signifies His Sacrifice and His Sacred Humanity. In the Later Middle Ages, he wore a blue cloak over a red garment or else a blue cloak lined in red. Later, he kept the red for Sacrifice and humanity and took on white for purity. Our Lady is exalted into Heaven (blue) at the Assumption and wears with this white for purity.
P.K.T.P.