Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a history of pink, which may not be ‘a color in its own right’ and for which neither Latin nor ancient Greek has a standard word (it was long regarded as a shade of red). Nevertheless, Pink is as sumptuous as its predecessors, printed on gorgeous glossy paper and written with impassioned scholarship.

When Isaac Newton broke white light down into coloured rays in 1666, he did not find pink. Orange and purple were there, along with red, yellow, green and blue, so for scientists those were the true colours. Yet pink was observable in nature – in plants, on the feathers of animals, in minerals and in the sky. Pink had begun to appear in dyes and paints in the 14th century – relatively late compared to other colours – and it rapidly became fashionable. A unique document, Prammatica del vestire, has survived to tell us about the wardrobes of all women of the wealthy classes living in Florence between 1343 and 1345. A detailed inventory made by lawyers to implement recent sumptuary laws and apply taxes on luxuries, it shows that Florentine dyers were making a range of pinks as well as the usual reds. They probably worked mostly with madder, the first known dye, mixing it with quantities of chalk, urine, vinegar, tartar and alum. For more expensive cloth, they used kermes, extracted from the bodies of insects collected from the leaves of oak trees. It took a lot of crushed insects to get the necessary quantity of juice. Another source was red brazilwood, imported into Europe from India, Sri Lanka and Sumatra. The wood was reduced to powder (a laborious process) and then steeped in water for a long time. So popular was pink that when the Portuguese discovered tropical trees in the New World whose wood possessed the same properties as brazilwood, they named the country they colonised after it.

The first European treatise on painting, Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte, dates from early in the 15th century and discusses the mix of pigments needed to obtain fleshy tones. For frescoes, a combination of red ochre and lime known as cinabrese (not to be confused with cinnabar, which the Romans used) is recommended, with egg yolk added as a binder. The yolks of eggs laid in the city, being paler, suit the faces of the young, Cennini advises, while eggs gathered in the country give a darker shade, suitable for old and swarthier men. Depending on how finely ground the pigments are, the resulting pink will be smooth and glossy or dull and harsh. Pastoureau points out that there was often a gap between what painters said and what they did, since they were anxious not to share their secrets. A lovely panel painted by Cennini in Siena, Nativity of the Virgin (c 1390–1400), shows one figure dressed entirely in pink.

Venice was the undisputed capital of colour in Europe between the 14th and the 18th centuries. A commercial city importing dyestuffs from the East, it also played host to renowned painters like Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. A debate emerged in the Renaissance about the relative merits (‘nobility’ is the word used here) of drawing and painting. Colour, some said, captivated the uncultivated eye and appealed to the senses, while line addressed the intellect. Partisans of colour argued for its ability to convey the living nature of figures, and in this respect the pink tones in which flesh was rendered were fundamental. From the beginning of the 16th century, painters made increasing use of pink.

In textiles, the fashion for pink reached its height between 1750 and 1780, especially in France. Strong pinks were available to middle-class buyers, leading elites to pursue the more expensive pastel shades. Charles Joseph de Ligne, marshal of the army of the Holy Roman Empire, was nicknamed ‘the pink prince’, a term that referred not only to his taste for pink in furnishings and clothing but also to his optimism and good humour. Symbolically, pink had come to indicate joie de vivre. Madame de Pompadour loved to combine new pinks with blues and greys, often striped, and at Sèvres, a delicate pale shade of pink with a hint of orange was perfected for porcelain. From the 1770s ‘pink seemed to invade everything’, Pastoureau says. Painters, decorators, dyers, tailors and milliners all strove to produce varied hues and combinations. Goethe’s bestselling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) launched a fashion for white dresses trimmed with pink ribbons (and among men, for blue morning coats with yellow breeches). Werther says that he wants to be buried with Lotte’s pink ribbons in his pocket.

In the age of Romanticism, pink took on feminine associations and by the 1820s it was a colour men no longer wore. Very soon it fell out of fashion altogether. By the start of the 20th century, pink was largely hidden, serving mainly as a colour for women’s underwear; if it appeared on an outer garment, it would be dull in tone, with nothing enticing about it. As the century advanced, it slipped further still: it became a colour for little boys and girls, and then for girls only. The Barbie doll, launched in 1959, helped this process along.

This beautifully illustrated book is a joy to leaf through and a pleasure to read. Its scope is limited to Europe, because for Pastoureau ‘the issues of color are first of all social ones’ and he is a historian of European society from Roman times to the early 19th century. The translation retains a hint – let’s call it a shade – of Pastoureau’s French locution and seminar style: easy, conversational, occasionally repetitive, authoritative. Anybody interested in the history of material cultures, painting, fashion, textiles and colour can hardly fail to be as delighted with Pink as I was.