The Garments of Salvation

by Krista West

  To those living in an age of Tyrian purple and its ubiquitous associations with royalty and imperial privilege, the very color the girl Mary was weaving would have been highly significant in the recounting of the Annunciation. The Mother of God was spinning the color of imperial rank and honor, as well as that of blood and suffering, even as the King of Heaven was woven within her womb.

  This “purple paradox,” purple with its multi-faceted hues and layered symbology, is undoubtedly what has contributed to porphyra becoming the most commonly used color in the Orthodox Church besides gold. When it is understood that Tyrian purple, in its most highly regarded form, is not the blue-purple hyakinthos, but rather the color we call “burgundy,” then it is easy to see why Orthodox Christian churches frequently have myriad altar furnishings in this shade—burgundy velvet Beautiful Gate curtains, burgundy altar cloths, burgundy banners, and burgundy velvet chalice veil sets. Tyrian purple, the color of both kings and penitents, is everywhere in an Orthodox Christian church, proclaiming both our joy in our King and our redemption through His suffering.

  A Brief History of Natural Dyestuffs

  While Tyrian purple certainly occupied a special position in the ancient world, the other colors of antiquity also serve as a testament to man’s quest for the sublime and his desire to use the material world to glorify God. Many liturgical textiles made from fabrics produced in such historic textile centers as Egypt, India, Persia, Byzantium, Russia, Serbia, and Romania now reside in museum collections where they are prized for their complexity and beauty. Until the mid-1860s, natural dyestuffs were the only products available for textile coloration, thus the distinctive colors that they render have occupied a prominent place in the aesthetics of the Orthodox Christian Church for over 1800 years. The beauty everywhere on display in historic churches is due in no small part to the compelling shades and tonal qualities of natural dyestuffs, so it is worthwhile to take a brief tour through the history of their production.

  When one conjures up the idea of naturally dyed fabric, it is easy to bring to mind an image of a peasant dipping cloth in a pot of water he has colored by stewing local plants and roots. However, the reality of historic dye production was quite different from this quaint scenario. Natural dyestuffs were complicated and time-consuming, and they required a high level of artistic skill to produce. They fall into one of three categories based on how they are transmitted to the fabric: first, direct dyes, in which fabric is soaked in a solution of the dye-producing material and thus absorbs the color; second, indirect dyes, in which fabric is treated with a mordant or fixative, such as alum, and then soaked in dye solution (the pre-soaking in a mordant allows the fabric to “take” the dye); third, vat dyes, in which a plant material is soaked in a vat until it begins to decompose and form a sediment at the bottom of the vat. This sediment is gathered, dried, and typically formed into a kind of cake or tablet that when later dissolved in an alkaline solution forms a dye bath into which cloth is dipped.32

  Yellows were often produced from saffron (from the Arabic “za’fran”), which is the dried stigmata of a crocus that grew in Greece and Asia Minor. It is one of the few naturally occurring direct dyes and Pliny mentions it as the best yellow dye known. Turmeric, another yellow dyestuff, is a small perennial plant and was used from classical times into modernity. It was especially prized to dye silk. Yellow’s close cousin, orange, was made from annatto which is another direct dyestuff. Whatever their original intensity, yellow dyestuffs are not as permanent as other dyestuffs which is why so many historic textiles, such as tapestries on display in museums, look predominantly blue or red due to the fading of the yellow tones over time.33

  Reds have been produced since the art of dyeing began due to their appealing intensity and the wide availability of the two predominant red dyestuff components, the madder plant and the kermes insect. Madder-based dye, one of the oldest and most frequently used throughout Europe, India, and the Middle East, comes from the Rubiaceae plant family and produces a wide range of colors from red to orange to yellowish-red to russet-red.34 Madder is an indirect dye requiring a mordant, usually alum. This widely available dye was probably the most common ancient dyestuff, along with indigo. Kermes, another famous red dye of the ancient world, was not produced from a plant, but from a species of scale insect that lives on the scarlet oak tree growing in various regions around the northern periphery of the Mediterranean. The harvested insects were killed with vinegar and then dried in the sun. Once dry, they were crushed and packed ready for sale. Over 25,000 insects were needed to produce one pound of dyestuff.35

  After the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent collapse of the Tyrian purple industry, kermes dye took the place of Tyrian purple as the most prized of all dyestuffs due to its brilliant and saturated red tone. It was a very ancient dyestuff and had been used in pre-Christian times; according to author Philip Ball it

  was called kermes, from the Sanskrit word kirmidja, “derived from a worm.” The Hebrew name for it was tola’ at shani, “worm scarlet”. . . . Kermes is the linguistic root of the English crimson and carmine and the French cramoisie. But because an encrustation of kermes insects on a branch resembles a cluster of berries, Greek writers such as Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus (c. 300 BC) refer to them as kokkos, meaning “berry.” In Latin this becomes coccus, a word found in Pliny’s writings on kermes dye. Yet Pliny also uses the term granum (“grain”), again alluding to the deceptively vegetative appearance of the insects. Grain thus became one of the perplexing names by which this crimson dye was known in medieval Europe. Chaucer refers to a cloth that is “dyed in grain,” meaning dyed crimson. Because of the strong, lasting nature of this color, the phrase came simply to mean deeply or permanently dyed. From this comes the English word ingrained.36

  With the exploration of South America by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, another highly lucrative dyestuff entered the European market and contributed directly to the power and economic might of Spain: “By the late 1500s, cochineal had become the third most valuable export from the Spanish colonies, after gold and silver.”37 Similar to kermes, cochineal was a dye-producing insect that lived on cacti in South America and was harvested in much the same painstaking way as kermes insects, with one incredible difference: cochineal dye was ten times stronger. Cochineal produced a truly rich, saturated, red dye and quickly supplanted even kermes as a substitute for the lost Tyrian purple, the color of rank and status. Many Renaissance paintings feature this striking scarlet color as a symbol of the patron’s wealth and power. In the eighteenth century it was used to dye the uniforms of British soldiers, hence giving them the moniker “Redcoats,” and, as legend has it, also colored the cloth Betsy Ross used for the first flag of the United States.38 Cochineal is one of the few natural dyestuffs still in wide use today, primarily used to color foodstuffs and cosmetics.

  While Tyrian purple was the supreme color of antiquity, from pre-Christian times onwards there was also a thriving business in pseudo-purples, substitutes for those who could not afford, or were not allowed to wear, the true Tyrian shade. These colors were made by mixing indigo with either madder-dyed or kermes-dyed fibers through multiple dye baths which involved dyeing the fabric first in madder and then in indigo (or vice versa) or by weaving two differently dyed fibers together. The final shade produced could be endlessly adapted from the blue-purple scale of hyacinthine to the red-purple scale of Tyrian purple.

  To create shades in the green range, dyestuffs were combined—either indigo with local yellow dyestuffs or, in some cases, yellow dyestuffs were treated with mordants in such a way as to obtain green tones. It is one of the great ironies of nature that even as we are surrounded by green trees and a multitude of green plant material, there are very few naturally occurring green dyestuffs.

  Next to the red dyes, indigo was the most common ancient dye, used across the world from India to Byzantium to Europe. A perennial herb that has been harvested from antiquity to the present day, indigo con
tains the same coloring matter as its close cousin, woad, another blue dyestuff. Both indigo and woad are vat dyes and their tablet form made them easy to transport and sell in various markets. Each of these natural dyes could produce a wide range of colors based on factors such as the choice of mordant, length of dye bath, or its combination with other dyestuffs.

  All of these beautiful natural dyes provided the textile craftsman of antiquity a rich and broad palette with which to work as is attested by the surviving Byzantine silks. As Byzantine silk scholar Anna Muthesius explains:

  To the naked eye, the extant Byzantine silks reveal that a wide color palette was in use by the 12th century. . . . For instance, a bright polychrome palette of reds, blues, greens, ochres, and off-white was in vogue in the 8th to 9th century. By the 10th and 11th centuries, side by side with a still comparatively brightly colored mixed palette, monochrome tones were in demand. Single-color golden yellow, purple-blue, olive green, or cherry red Byzantine silks . . . survive in quantity.39

  Viewing the faded remnants of such textiles in museums, one cannot help but wish that one had seen them in all their brilliant, multi-colored glory when they made the world resplendent so long ago.

  The Advent of Synthetic Dyes

  While the mythical discovery of Tyrian purple finds Hercules watching his dog munch a sea snail, the other end of this historical continuum introduces us to the singular figure of William Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry student at work in his makeshift backyard laboratory in the spring of 1856, attempting to find a cure for malaria. While some advancement had been made in the treatment of this worldwide affliction, Perkin was hopeful that by heating coal tar he might be able to create synthetic quinine, an anti-malarial drug in great demand. Quinine is clear, so Perkin looked on in frustration as his coal tar turned into a red powder and he might have been inclined to toss it out and start over, as many chemists would have done. However, in a fleeting moment of frugality or intuition, he would change how humanity approaches color. By further experimenting with the disappointing red powder, he eventually found that one of the resultant compounds produced a bluish-purple dye that, when combined with alcohol, would not wash out of fabric.

  William Perkin had created a synthetic dyestuff. What set his discovery apart from those of other chemists who had found similar synthetic coloring agents, was that he recognized the great potential for a chemical dyestuff and began to actively market it, something that had not occurred to other chemists. With his father and brother, he built a factory to produce the new dye he named “mauveine.” Initially, this synthetic dye was a hard sell in a world accustomed to natural dyestuffs and, if not for the whims of fashion and the taste of an empress, Perkin would most likely have ended up a bankrupt nobody. But shortly after his discovery of mauveine, the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III and an important fashion trendsetter, began to wear mauve-colored garments. Queen Victoria, following Eugenie’s lead, wore mauve to her daughter’s wedding and sparked a mauve craze in the fashion world. This trend caused a major demand for the new mauveine dye which, by Perkin’s methods, could be produced easily and quickly in a modern factory without all the fuss and bother of natural dyestuffs. Due to the incredible success of his new color Perkin was a millionaire by the age of twenty-two, and thus was born the modern industry of synthetic dyestuffs.40

  Other chemical dyestuffs were discovered in rapid succession and the new industry flourished. German firms quickly dominated the market, producing eighty percent of the world’s chemical dyes by 1914. From the consumer’s point of view, synthetic dyes were a wonder—they were permanent and could be made in a dizzyingly endless range of new colors. For the manufacturer, synthetic dyes were cheap, consistent and yielded higher profits. No longer was the dyer at the mercy of the unpredictability of natural dyes with their varying yields and complicated methods of production.41

  After three millennia or more of relying upon expensive dyestuffs that required specific, artistic know-how, now virtually anyone with a small factory and a few cheap chemicals could produce the colors of the rainbow. But there remained a nostalgia for the ancient colors, as Philip Ball points out:

  The tremendous worth of the ancient purple and its association with royalty and high office have become the stuff of legend. It is no coincidence that when the first synthetic mauve dye appeared on the market in the mid-nineteenth century, it was sold under the canny (and wholly inaccurate) name of Tyrian purple.42

  Initially, the amazing discovery of synthetic dyestuffs seemed like a miracle, but within barely a century, scholars and critics began to comment on how unlimited access to the colors of Newton’s rainbow would alter mankind’s perception of color:

  By the time of the founding of the Mediterranean civilizations, what we could consider the classical palette for natural dyes had already been established. . . . This classical palette was only challenged by the audacity of chemists, who created new molecules, and colors never seen before, from the mid-19th century on.43

  And,

  The first fruit of this new understanding was both to show that nature’s chemistry could be equaled in the laboratory and to initiate the ascendancy of synthetic over natural dyestuffs. Once that happened, says art historian Manlio Brusatin, “there would be a different way of seeing and perceiving colors because there would be an entirely different way of producing them, with the birth of a modern industry of chemical colors on the horizon, looming over the back room of the old dyeshop with its rare, dyed garments and its antiquated trade in privilege.”44

  The synthetic dyes were admittedly amazing and, through their inexpensive and reliable production methods, they made color available to all levels of society. No longer were certain shades the exclusive privilege of the wealthy or noble-born. But, alas, these chemical prodigies brought with them problems of their own: harsh, brash tones instead of the rich, saturated hues of natural dyes; an insatiable appetite on the part of the consumer for ever more and more new colors as evidenced by the home décor and fashion industries of today; and, most important to a discussion of the liturgical garment tradition of the Orthodox Christian Church, the virtual abandonment of the ancient way of perceiving color, in favor of the modern, chemical approach to color.

  The very thing that made synthetic dyes so wondrous and compelling—their consistency—was to bring about a complete collapse of the ancient color spectrum (although awareness of it is retained in certain circles of academia and within the rubrics of the Orthodox Christian Church). Instead of embracing a color family referred to as “brilliant,” the modern world wanted rigid, scientifically produced, specific shades. Where antiquity had “leukos,” there were now “white,” “off-white,” “natural,” “lace ivory,” “antique ivory,” “champagne” and the like. In exchange for the ancient color spectrum comprised of qualities of color, the world clamored for a set of Pantone color chips.

  Until 1860, the variability of natural dyes was what made the ancient color spectrum so flexible and practical. When one dye vat could produce five different shades, it was simply impossible to classify colors absolutely. As historic dye scholar Dominique Cardon elucidates:

  The dawn of synthetic dyes opportunely corresponded with a time when industrialized societies were enthusiastically exploring the pathways opened by the exploitation of fossil resources: first coal, then petrol. The most emblematic of these dyes, manmade out of black tar from black coal or black petrol, was aniline black. One dye-bath, composed of a definite amount of one and the same molecule, could now produce a color that, in the past, had always required complex combinations of dyestuffs and mordants. Cheap and easy to apply, synthetic dyes and pigments have produced a major cultural revolution that has irreversibly changed the whole world. People everywhere are now accustomed to take colors for granted, to be surrounded by them in most circumstances of their lives without necessarily paying conscious attention to them.45

  If we are to learn to be conscious of colors once again, a significant effort m
ust be made within the Orthodox Christian Church to embrace and cherish the traditional rubrics with their broad, albeit occasionally confusing, designations of “bright” and “dark.” It is essential that we relearn how to see and value colors as our forebears did, according to category rather than scientifically defined hue.

  Color Usage Today

  Even though the tremendous breadth of the historic “bright” and “dark” categories poses a challenge to the modern mind that feels compelled to analyze and quantify color within very limited confines, we must strive to maintain ancient color traditions within the Orthodox Christian Church. One of the best ways this can be accomplished is through the reintroduction of lavish, multi-colored brocades. Floral designs that incorporate a great variety of coloration have been employed to great effect in the Church’s historical tradition as the Figure 1 below illustrates most vividly.

  Figure 1. Finnish tri-brocade phelonion (From Chaos to a Collection: The Orthodox Church Museum of Finland, p. 24).

  It is safe to say that a phelonion similar to that shown above would be virtually impossible to find in any current church inventory in North America. Neither would analogues to the Russian vestments—dated to 1890 and gifted to the City Art Museum of St. Louis in 1949, described as “suggesting a strong Oriental influence . . . of salmon-colored silk with brocade blue, green, gold, and silver floral decoration”—be readily found in any modern collection of vestments.46

  Salmon-colored, indeed! That all-too-often-repeated question “What color is it?”, that bane of all historically minded ecclesiastical tailors, should no longer be allowed to fall from our lips; rather we should strive to classify our liturgical garments and textiles solely within the traditionally based categories of “bright” and “dark.” This might mean using a bright, multi-colored floral brocade for Pascha instead of the limited (and rather dull) white and silver combination so commonly observed in churches in North America, or perhaps vesting in a white, gold, and blue brocade as an “every Sunday” set of vestments in a church dedicated to the Theotokos. The flexibility inherent in the traditional rubrics of the Church is nearly endless and provides a practically limitless range of colors to be utilized and enjoyed.