PhD defence Sara Bernert: The Power of Colour in European Palace Interiors

On Friday 6 June, Sara Bernert will defend her PhD dissertation ‘Decoding Color: Interior Color in European Palace State Apartments circa 1700’. In this thesis, she explores the use and meaning of colour in palace interiors on an international scale.

Colour in palace interiors

Around 1700, colour was an essential element of European palace interiors – especially in the stately apartments, where courtly ceremonies played out on carefully curated, visually striking stages. Although colour played a key communicative role, its significance has largely been overlooked in previous research.

This is striking, given its highly sensual and symbolically charged presence of colour: what would these rooms have been without it? A closer look at textile decorations in these grand interiors reveals that good taste was closely tied to colour choices. Moreover, the use of colour in large-scale textile designs followed a consistent system.

A European perspective on colour

Drawing on treatises, manuscripts, letters, sampler books, and notebooks, Bernert examined colour use in the apartments of rulers across the Northern Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, England, France, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. She also consulted palace inventories, financial records, personal writings, paintings, and design drawings.

Colour served primarily to impress, to communicate, and to challenge the viewer, in multifaceted and age-old traditions. By mapping her case studies on both macro and micro levels using a Geographic Information System (GIS), Bernert meticulously demonstrates how the actual use of colour in palace interiors corresponded with the theoretical ideas and principles of the time.