WTN: umber
James Harbeck
umber
In the dark cellar you see a shadowy figure. It can’t be the plumber; it’s someone humble and unencumbered, not lumbering but slumbering, numb and number, numbering one. Ah, yes, now, no monkey business: it’s a monk, a simple Franciscan friar. He was hard to make out at first because of his simple robe dyed the colour of dirt.
That is why Franciscans’ robes are brown: not so much because “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” but because they literally do – or anyway they did – return to dust and dirt to sleep, and if their robes were going to be the shade of dirt anyway, they might as well make them that way. But there are many kinds of brown. What kind of brown are they? There is no official prescribed brown for all Franciscans, but since Saint Francis was from Assisi, in Umbria, I’m going to say they can be thought of as umber.
Ah, umber! That dark shadowy brown. According to Wiktionary it is RGB #635147, but a colour that is old as dirt cannot be confined to one number. And umber is old as dirt, both figuratively – it’s one of the oldest pigments known – and literally: it’s made from natural earth. It’s a mixture of iron oxide and manganese oxide. It can be gotten from the ground in many places, but one of them is Umbria, which may be where the word umber comes from. The name Umbria comes from the people who lived there before the Romans took over: the Umbri. (There is no certainty as to the origin of their name.)
Or perhaps the word umber comes from Latin umbra, ‘shadow’ (which you may recognize from umbrella, ‘little shadow’). That seems reasonable, as the colour is dark and has been used by painters for shadows and similar sombre subjects, especially in the warmer tones. Not everyone likes umber; Edward Norgate, a contemporary of Shakespeare, cast some shade on it as “a foul and greasy color.” But Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer would have taken umbrage at that – they all used umber.
There are other versions of umber, too. Raw umber, taken directly from the Umbrian dirt, is more yellowish; burnt umber, made by heating raw umber, is more reddish. And in turn, while the Franciscans have not given their name to any colour, there is one subset of them, named for the hoods on their robes, who have become a byword on the basis of the colour of their habits. We call these hooded monks Capuchin, but in Italian that’s Cappuccino. Which is somewhat lighter than umber – and better tasting too.
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