The secret history of colour in black and white | Kassia St Clair

It was once seen as sinful, and used to encode social class. Kassia St Clair reflects on colour's colourful past

A distaste for colour runs through western culture like a ladder in a stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Colour was a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form. It was seen as self-indulgent and, later, sinful - a sign of dissimulation and dishonesty.

The bluntest expression of this comes from the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville, who wrote that colours "are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like a harlot".