I always think at such occasion about the many centuries during which people had no electricity, no light during the dark hours. I find the long nights during winter hard even with light. But not so long ago people did live without electricity at all. Still they managed to write the most amazing texts, manuscripts, and built the most beautiful buildings.
Many years ago I read "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco. I couldn't understand the fascination with jewels and precious stones of some of the actors he described, until some time later I visited the Pfalzkapelle in Aachen, where I saw some of the artefacts, embellished by these coloured stones, shown in a rather dark room, lighted, as if lit by candle light.
In his Art and Beauty of the Middle Ages Eco wrote:
" We have seen how medieval theorists looked upon beauty as something intelligible, a kind of mathematical quality, ... But when it came to their experience of colour, - of gems, materials, flowers, light and so on - the Medievals revealed instead a most lively feeling of the purely sensuous properties of things....
Their love of colour and light ... was a spontanous reaction .... The beauty of colour was everywhere felt to be beauty pure and simple, something immediately perceptible and indivisible ..."
One doesn't have to wonder why, I suppose.
Here is the pattern for today, the last in this series. Only two colours in this one, more colour sequences are possible:
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