Culoarea garoafei, culoarea trupului, culoare regală... Roșul și nuanțele sale în costumele transilvane (secolele XVI-XVII)
Carnation color, body color, royal color… Red and its nuances in the Transylvanian costumes (16th-17th centuries)

Summary/Abstract: In the Middle Ages and early modern times clothing represented the most obvious instrument of the external representation, revealing, at first sight, the social and financial status, as well as the exigencies of the wearer. The symbolic system of clothing articles, with a very different range of colors and cutting, could be interpreted immediately by a contemporary. In this pattern, the colors played a very important role, having aesthetic, economic and social value. Taking into consideration different periods and regions, some colors were fashionable, had an identical content, while others changed their meaning completely. In the present study I shall examine the red color, a color that appears very often in a rich variety of shades and symbolic values. The study aims to discover where these symbols attached to the red color came from, and how red can be traceable in the clothing culture of the Transylvanian nobility. I shall also show that red was an excellent status indicator, conferring clothing an important social role. Due to the fact that for modern research the knowledge of the specific characteristics of the garments and especially of their colors is possible especially through the invocation of the written sources and images, in this paper I shall refer mainly to the last wills and testaments.

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