One of the elements that makes Western liturgical art so very interesting is the great diversity of artistic styles and periods that make it up. By contrast, imagine if all churches looked substantially the same; our natural human tendency would become bored and unappreciative of them -- rather like having your favourite meal every single day. By the same token, if all vestments were the same, whether in shape or in colour, here too would we find our interest quickly waning.
In many ways, this is almost the situation in which we presently find ourselves as a result of our modern focus on mass produced, catalogue vestments; vestments that are produced for mass marketing, and because of that, naturally tending toward the most common denominator options where their design is concerned. Not only is the ornamentation all very similar, the main liturgical colours are often reduced to one or two shades -- typically a light and a dark option. So for example, if we are looking are purple vestments, typically one will find a darker, bluish purple option and another more reddish purple option. The same holds true for red vestments as well as green. Seldom is there a great deal of variance from these two basic options.
Historically though, there was a much wider palette available for most any given liturgical colour -- for unlike prelatial vesture, the Church does not specify any particular shade of a given liturgical colour (the one and only exception to this being the Spanish privilege for use blue on Marian feasts which is specifically specified to be cerulean blue -- and no doubt this precision was to simply prevent confusion with the darker blues that were historically used as purple vestments).
This is why I like to occasionally present some examples of vestments from earlier centuries that utilize different shades than are commonly seen today. To my mind, this can assist in broadening our horizons and potentially inspire ideas for new commissions of vestments. So with all that in mind, today I wish to continue on with these considerations, presenting some different shades of violet vestments that would have been found in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I. PASTELS
The first such variety we will look at here is quite simply pastel versions of purple. Pastel colours were quite popular around this time, and it is one of the things that tends to typify the period.
II. DARK BLUISH VIOLETS
Another variant one might see in these times are those purples which, to the modern eye, would appear to be dark blue. Many today mistake these as being blue Marian vestments, but in actuality, these were intended for use as violet vestments -- and indeed, one can understand how they can be visually interpreted as being within the darker end of the purple spectrum.
III. GREYISH VIOLETS
Lastly, there are those vestments which the modern eye might interpret as being grey. In reality, these could almost as easily fall into the broader pastel category, because essentially what we are looking at here are pale versions of the bluish-purples -- and while there are some local liturgical traditions, such as in Lyon, which do actually speak to a grey vestment (for use on Ash Wednesday), like the darker blues we featured immediately above, these were simply intended as another part of the spectrum of purple and not grey proper.
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