Frédéric Portal was a French scholar, diplomat, and orientalist of the 20th century, born in 1804 and died in 1876. He pursued a career in public service while developing a rigorous intellectual work on symbols, ancient languages, and the traditions of the ancient East. His diplomatic career allowed him access to numerous sources and to mingle with European scholarly circles attentive to the comparative history of religions and civilizations.
He is best known for his work On Symbolic Colors in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, in which he studies the meaning of colors across cultures, sacred texts, religious practices, and symbolic systems. Portal adopts a rigorous comparative method, combining archaeology, philology, religious history, and iconography, to demonstrate the coherence and continuity of symbols over time.
