A distaste for colour runs through western culture like a ladder in a stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Colour was a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form. It was seen as self-indulgent and, later, sinful – a sign of dissimulation and dishonesty.

The bluntest expression of this comes from the 19th-century American writer Herman Melville, who wrote that colours “are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like a harlot”.

But arguments like these are very old indeed. Protestants, for example, once expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colours like red, orange, yellow and blue were removed both from the walls of churches and their wardrobes. The pious Henry Ford refused for many years to bow to consumer demand and produce cars in any colour other than black.

In art, the tussle over the respective merits of disegno (drawing) versus colore (colour) raged on through the Renaissance and, although somewhat muted, into the present day. Disegno represented purity and intellect; colore the vulgar and effeminate. In an imperious essay from 1920, tellingly entitled Purism, the architect Le Corbusier and his colleague wrote: “In a true and durable plastic work, it is form which comes first, and everything else should be subordinated to it. Let us leave to the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilations of the paint tube.”

The pious Henry Ford refused for many years to bow to demand and produce cars in any colour other than black

Even among those who accepted the value of colour, the ways in which they were conceptualised and ordered had an impact on their relative importance. The ancient Greeks saw colours running along a continuum from white to black: yellow was a little darker than white and blue was a little lighter than black. Red and green were in the middle. Medieval writers had great faith in this light-to-dark schema, too. It was only in the 17th century that the idea emerged of red, yellow and blue as primary colours, and green, orange and purple as secondary ones. Most iconoclastic of all was Newton and his spectrum, an idea he wrote about in 1704 in Opticks. Suddenly white and black were no longer colours; the spectrum no longer ran from light to dark. Newton’s colour wheel also imposed order on colour pairs – for example, green and red, blue and orange – that were found to resonate strongly with each other when placed side by side. The idea of complementary colours would prove to have a profound effect on the art that followed. Artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch used them to give structure and add drama to their paintings.

As colours came to take on meanings and cultural significance, attempts were made to restrict their use. The most notorious expression of this was through the sumptuary laws. These were passed in ancient Greece and Rome – with examples in ancient China and Japan, too – but found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-12th century. Such laws could touch on anything from diet to dress and furnishings, and sought to encode the social strata into a clear visual system. The peasants, in other words, should eat and dress like peasants, craftsmen should eat and dress like craftsmen, and so on. Colour was a vital signifier in this language – dull, earthy colours like russet were explicitly confined to the meanest rural peasants, while bright, saturated ones, like scarlet, were the preserve of a select few.

The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair is published by John Murray at £20. To order a copy for £16.40, go to bookshop.theguardian.com