Red, White & Blue

Many years ago I arrived early one morning in St Mark’s Square, Venice, before the crowds had started to gather. The air was fresh and cool and the sky a clear blue. And there, in front of the cathedral facade, an Italian flag fluttered high on one of the flagpoles. It was a glorious sight.

The green, white and red vertical stripes of Il Tricolore fluttered gently in the morning breeze.

A nation is embodied in a flag - a symbol of pride and identity, the colours having meaning linking the past to the future. In the case of Italy the colours date back to their first use in Genoa in 1789.

Despite being a wonderful sight the Italian flag does not arouse in me the same aesthetic pleasure as three other flags - the French tricolore, the British Union flag and the American Stars and Stripes.

It is the combination of red, white and blue which sets these apart from all others as far as I am concerned. The white in each flag acts as a background to project the red and blue forward. At first sight the reds and blues appear to be the same in all three flags but they are not.

The French flag has the brightest and most saturated colours of the three. The red is slightly more orange and the blue tends towards a royal blue.

The red and blue of the Union flag (it is only referred to as the Union Jack when at sea!) are deeper and more formal than the others - the blue tending to navy and the red to crimson.

The red and blue of Old Glory sit somewhere between the French and British and are a little more muted than the others.

The colour differences can be summed up in the following image -

From this we can see that the Union flag has the deeper, richer tones whilst - perhaps surprisingly - the French is lighter in tone and the American the more muted of the three. These differences appear starker in this analysis than when casually glancing at the flags in real life.

As an afterthought the Norwegian flag is also rather pleasing - but then I must have a blue and red bias.