"The medieval taste for bright colors is well known. It was a ‘barbarous’ taste, which favored big jewels inserted into the boards of book-bindings, glowing gold objects, brightly painted sculpture, paintings covering the walls of churches and of the houses of the powerful, and the colored magic of stained glass. The almost colorless middle ages which we admire today are the work of the destruction wrought by time and of the anachronistic taste of our contemporaries. However, behind this colored phantasmagoria lay the fear of darkness and the quest for light which was salvation"
Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization (1964)
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