The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  It was when people discovered how to manufacture vermilion artificially, however, using a reaction that resembled magic, that desire for the pigment really intensified. No one is quite sure who made the discovery, or when: alchemists were fond of using elaborate codes for ingredients and hinting that they possessed special knowledge, without revealing precisely what this knowledge might be. The Greek alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis insinuated that he knew the secret sometime around A.D. 300, but the first clear description is in Compositiones ad tingenda (“Recipes for Coloring”), a Latin manuscript from the eighth century.3

  The reason for all this subterfuge lies in alchemists’ obsession with creating gold [here], which to them was red, rather than yellow, and which they therefore linked with this new red pigment. Even more significant was the fact that making vermilion required the combination and transformation of two key alchemical ingredients: mercury and sulfur. The alchemists forging vermilion were convinced the secret to producing unlimited supplies of gold could not be far away.

  The most evocative description of what became known as dry-method vermilion was written by the twelfth-century Benedictine monk Theophilus. He described mixing one part ground sulfur with two parts mercury, which was then carefully sealed in a jar:

  Then bury [the jar] in blazing coals and as soon as it begins to get hot, you will hear a crashing inside, as the mercury unites with the blazing sulfur.

  If conducted carelessly, the reaction could be even more dramatic than intended. The mercury fumes released if the jars weren’t sealed properly were so poisonous that the process was banned in Venice in 1294.4

  Vermilion was once as costly and precious as gold.5 It reigned supreme as medieval artists’ red and was used, reverently, alongside gold leaf and ultramarine for manuscript capitals and on tempera panels. It was glazed with a revolting mixture of egg yolk and earwax.6

  But this prince of reds was too profitable for recipes and manufacturers to remain scarce. In 1760 Amsterdam, the principal source of Dutch dry-method vermilion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exported just under 32,000 pounds to England.7 A wet method of manufacture, discovered by the German chemist Gottfried Schulz in 1687, made it more common still. Even as early as the fifteenth century artists had been all but profligate with its use; Leonardo da Vinci occasionally used it as a grounding layer for his paintings.8 Not only was vermilion becoming more common, it was also adversely affected by the rise of oils as the painting medium of choice in the West from the fifteenth century onward: vermilion was less opaque in oils, and so worked better either as a base layer on which to apply other red glazes, or as a glazing layer itself.

  In tempera and lacquerwork, though, its color is breathtaking, and it has seduced artists the world over. A Chinese handscroll painting, Tribute Horse and Groom by Chao Yung, shows a man wearing a fire-red coat with an indigo collar, and a strange, rust-colored pointy hat, leading a beautiful dappled gray horse. Although it was painted in 1347, the vermilion-painted coat still strikes the eye like a hammer. The same effect was used three centuries later by Peter Paul Rubens in the central panel of his triptych The Descent from the Cross (1612–4), although its use declined thereafter.9 In 1912, just a few years after the Villa of Mysteries was uncovered, Wassily Kandinsky described vermilion’s color as “a feeling of sharpness, like glowing steel which can be cooled by water”.10

  Rosso corsa

  In September 1907 a neatly built man with a deep widow’s peak and a large nose sat at his desk in his neo-Gothic palace on the Isola del Garda. Although a month had elapsed since his return to the island, he was still sunburnt and travel sore and, although he knew it was unbecoming to show it, rather pleased with himself. “There are people who say that our journey has proved one thing above all others,” wrote the man the society pages knew as Prince Scipione Luigi Marcantonio Francesco Rodolfo Borghese. “Namely, that it is impossible to go by motorcar from Peking to Paris.”1 He was being facetious, of course, because that is precisely what he had just done.

  It had all begun some months earlier, when the French newspaper Le Matin had printed a challenge on the front page of the January 31, 1907, edition: “Will anyone agree to go, this summer, from Peking to Paris by motorcar?”2 Prince Borghese, who had already traveled through Persia and had acquired a taste for adventure, promptly accepted, along with four other teams, three of them French and one Dutch. The only prize was a case of Mumm champagne—and national honor. Naturally Borghese, as a proud Italian aristocrat, insisted that his vehicle be a product of his native country. The technology was still in its infancy—the first car ever built was only then celebrating its twenty-first year—and choices were few. Borghese chose a “powerful but heavy” 40-HP Itala model from Turin, which was painted a strident poppy red.3

  The race took the contestants some 12,000 miles, past the Great Wall of China and through the Gobi Desert and Ural Mountains. So confident was Borghese of winning that he strayed several hundred miles from the route so that he and his passengers could attend a banquet held in their honor in St. Petersburg. As they suffered on the long journey, so the car suffered too. Before its departure Luigi Barzini, a journalist and one of Borghese’s companions, wrote of the Itala: “It conveyed an immediate impression of purpose and go.” At Irkutsk, a city in southeast Russia, it was looking rather more forlorn. Even after a “careful external toilette” by Ettore, Borghese’s mechanic, “It was weather-beaten and, like ourselves, had taken on a darker shade.” By the time they reached Moscow it was “the color of the earth.”4

  None of this mattered, however—to either the contestants or their adoring Italian fans—when the team roared victorious through the Parisian boulevards. In honor of their victory their car’s original hue became Italy’s national racing color and later the one adopted by Enzo Ferrari for his cars: rosso corsa, racing red.5

  Hematite

  When Wah, an ancient Egyptian storehouse manager, was mummified in around 1975 B.C., he was first wrapped with undyed linen. Amulets and trinkets were secreted between the layers and then, as the finishing touch, he was swathed in a hematite-red cloth that had the words “Temple linen to protect” along one edge. Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife, was, after all, referred to as “lord of the red cloth” in the Book of the Dead, and it never hurts to show up to a big event appropriately dressed.1

  The use of hematite in Wah’s preparation for the afterlife is just one example of the central role it has played in a whole host of spiritual duties. For the sake of simplicity, hematite, which is, strictly speaking, the mineral form of iron oxide, here also includes other kinds of red iron oxides and ochers. All owe their coloring to the same compound: Fe2O3, anhydrous iron oxide, or, more simply, rust.2 This incestuous family of pigments occurs naturally and widely across the earth’s crust. They come in many different shades of red, from pink through to cayenne; when heated, yellow ocher can even be turned red.

  Objects stained deep red have accompanied human habitation since the Upper Paleolithic era, some 50,000 years ago.3 Although not ubiquitous, hematite’s use is so widespread that in an article from 1980, the anthropologist Ernst E. Wreschner went so far as to call its collection and use one of the “two meaningful regularities in human evolution,” the other being toolmaking.4 Tools, shells, bones, and other small objects stained with hematite have been found at Paleolithic sites in Gönnersdorf in Germany, North Africa, Mesoamerica, and China.5 Perhaps because it resembles blood, it was also widely used in ancient burial rituals. Sometimes it seems as if it has just been sprinkled over or on the body, but in other cases its use is more elaborate. In China it is often found paired with black.6 In Egypt, linens stained with hematite, such as those used to wrap Wah’s body, have been found dating back to the second millennium B.C.

  Natural sources of hematite were much prized. In the fourth century B.C. a law was passed granting Athenians a monopoly over a particularly rich variety on the is
land of Kea, which they used in everything from shipbuilding to medicine to ink.7 (The ink was so popular for titles and subtitles that the word rubric—from the Latin rubrica or red ocher—evolved from this practice.)

  So why all the prehistoric fuss? The answer seems to lie in the human affinity for the color red. Most anthropologists and archaeologists believe that, as the color of blood, red is associated with life—celebration, sex, joy—danger, and death. As a conduit to so many useful symbolic meanings, hematite was prized. The fate of the mineral as a pigment provides compelling proof for two theories: if the first is that the color red holds a special place in the human psyche, the second is surely that people are shamelessly attracted to bright colors. Hematite—which, though red, is not bright—was demoted the moment a more vivid alternative became available. It seems that humanity, or at least its taste in reds, has rather ungratefully evolved past it.

  Madder

  “The flower is very small, and of a greenish yellow color,” the man said. “The root is cylindrical and fleshy, and of a reddish yellow color.”1 The audience did not know it yet, but the lecture being delivered to the Royal Society of the Arts in London on the evening of May 8, 1879, was going to be a long one. Though the speaker was distinguished, with an imposingly full set of whiskers, he was neither naturally entertaining, nor brief. Over several hours William Henry Perkin, the scientist and businessman who had discovered mauve [here] and revolutionized the dye industry, told the assembled listeners, in rich, exact detail, about another breakthrough: the synthesis of alizarin. By the end, only the most determined of his listeners would have grasped the significance of his achievement. Alizarin was the red colorant in the roots of Rubia tinctorum, Rubia peregrina, and Rubia cordifolia, better known as madder. Perkin had been able to create in a lab something hitherto produced only by nature.

  As he went on to explain to his increasingly inattentive listeners, madder is an ancient dyestuff. Although madder plants are unprepossessing, their pinkish roots, when dried and crushed, pounded and sifted, relinquish a fluffy, orange-brown powdery pigment that has been a long-serving source of red. It was used in Egypt from about 1500 B.C., and fabric stained with the plant’s root was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb.2 Pliny wrote of its importance in the classical world, and it was discovered among the wares of a paint-maker’s shop in the fossilized city of Pompeii.3 Once the use of mordants that made madder more colorfast spread, its influence grew still further. India’s chintz fabrics were printed with it; it dyed medieval wedding clothes an appropriately celebratory shade; and it was used as a cheaper alternative to cochineal [here] for British redcoats.4 It could also be used to make rose madder paint, a bright pinky-red artists’ pigment, which George Field waxed passionate about in Chromatography in 1835.5

  It was as a dye, however, that the big money could be made from madder. For a long time the Turkish had a monopoly on a special method of using madder to obtain a red so bright it could almost trump its more expensive rivals. In the eighteenth century, first the Dutch, then the French, and finally the British uncovered the malodorous secret of Turkey red—it was a tortuous process involving rancid castor oil, ox blood, and dung.6 The trade must have seemed unassailable. By 1860 imports to Britain were worth over £1 million annually but were often of poor quality. The French were accused of adulterating their madder with everything from brick dust to oats.7 The cost soared too: by 1868 a hundredweight (approximately 112 pounds) cost 30 shillings, a week’s wages for a laborer. A year later the same amount would cost just 8 shillings.8 This, of course, was due to the simultaneous discovery by Mr. Perkin in Britain, and three German scientists in Berlin, of the process for synthesizing alizarin. For the first time in history, clothes could be dyed madder red without a single Rubia tinctorum being uprooted.

  Dragon’s blood

  On the morning of May 27, 1668, a gentleman was riding through a remote corner of Essex in southeast England when he stumbled across a dragon. It had been sunning itself at the edge of a birch wood but suddenly reared up at his approach. It was vast: nine feet from hissing tongue to tail, about as thick as a man’s thigh, with a pair of leathery wings that appeared far too small to get its enormous bulk airborne. The man spurred his horse and “with winged speed hafted away, glad that they had escaped such an eminent danger.”

  But the tale of the beast was not quite over yet. Men from the nearby village of Saffron Walden, perhaps worried that the dragon might become peckish and begin making inroads into their cattle herds, or perhaps bored and skeptical, set out in pursuit. To their surprise they found it in almost exactly the same place. Again it lifted the front of its body into the air and, hissing loudly, disappeared into the underbrush. The villagers saw it again and again over the next few months, until one day, without explanation, they found the birch wood to be dragon-free once more. The whole saga was written down in a pamphlet, The Flying Serpent, or Strange News out of Essex, a copy of which is still on view at the local library.1

  It is odd to think that, at the same moment villagers were scouring the local countryside trying to see off a dragon, some 40 miles away in London Isaac Newton was beginning to foment the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the dragon’s appearance was a last-gasp display from a creature that was on the cusp of being driven forever into the realm of myth by the advance of the Enlightenment. And with the dragon, of course, went its blood, which had been an exclusive pigment since before the birth of Christ. When Pliny, deploring an ever-expanding palette distracting artists from the serious business of art, wrote that “India contributes the ooze of her rivers and the blood of dragons and elephants,” he was referring to dragon’s blood.2 The belief was that elephants had cooling blood and dragons, during the dry season, craved something cool to slake their thirst. The dragons would hide in trees, waiting to ambush any elephants that might wander underneath, and then pounce. Sometimes they killed the elephants outright and drank their blood, but sometimes the elephant would crush the dragon and they would die together, their two bloods mixing to form a red resinous substance called dragon’s blood.3

  As with most myths, this one contains a nub of truth overlaid with a great deal of embellishment. For a start, no animals of any kind, even mythological, are harmed in the production of dragon’s blood. But this pigment does exist, it does come from the East, and trees do play a part in its production. It is in fact a wound-red resin, drawn often, though not exclusively, from the Dracaena genus of trees.4 George Field, writing in 1835, wasn’t enthusiastic. Not only was the pigment “deepened by impure air, and darkened by light,” but it also reacted with the ubiquitous white lead and took forever to dry in oils. “It does not,” Mr. Field concluded sternly, “merit the attention of the artist.”5

  He was, by this time, preaching to a choir of disenchanted artists: they had little use for yet another red, particularly one with such obvious limitations. Without widespread belief in dragons to sustain it, dragon’s blood followed Saffron Walden’s winged serpent into obscurity.

  Tyrian purple

  Archil

  Magenta

  Mauve

  Heliotrope

  Violet

  Purple

  In The Color Purple, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Alice Walker, the character Shug Avery seems at first like a superficial siren. She is, we are told, “so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themself up tall for a better look.” Later, though, she reveals unexpected insightfulness, and it is Shug that supplies the novel’s title. “I think it pisses God off,” Shug says, “if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” For Shug purple is evidence of God’s glory and generosity.

  The belief that purple is special, and signifies power, is surprisingly widespread. Now it is seen as a secondary color, sandwiched in artists’ color wheels between the primaries red and blue. Linguistically, too, it has often been subordinate to larger color categories—red, blue, or even black. Nor
is purple, per se, part of the visible color spectrum (although violet, the very shortest spectral wavelength humans can see, is).

  The story of purple is bookended by two great dyes. The first of these, Tyrian [here], a symbol of the wealthy and the elite, helped to establish the link with the divine. The second, mauve [here], a man-made chemical wonder, ushered in the democratization of color in the nineteenth century. The precise shade of the ancient world’s wonder dye remains something of a mystery. In fact purple itself was a somewhat fluid term. The ancient Greek and Latin words for the color, porphyra and purpura respectively, were also used to refer to deep crimson shades, like the color of blood. Ulpian, a third-century Roman jurist, defined purpura as anything red other than things dyed with coccus or carmine dyes.1 Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23–79) wrote that the best Tyrian cloth was tinged with black.2

  Even if no one is quite sure precisely what Tyrian purple looked like, though, the sources all agree it was the color of power. While he griped about its odor, which hovered somewhere between rotting shellfish and garlic, Pliny had no doubt about its authority:

  This is the purple for which the Roman fasces and axes clear a way. It is the badge of noble youth; it distinguishes the senator from the knight; it is called in to appease the gods. It brightens every garment, and shares with gold the glory of the triumph. For these reasons we must pardon the mad desire for purple.3

  Because of this mad desire, and the expense of creating Tyrian, purple became the symbolic color of opulence, excess, and rulers. To be born into the purple was to be born into royalty, after the Byzantine custom of bedecking the royal birthing chambers with porphyry and Tyrian cloth so that it would be the first thing the new princelings saw. The Roman poet Horace, in his The Art of Poetry written in 18 B.C., minted the phrase “purple prose”: “Your opening shows great promise, / And yet flashy purple patches; as when / Describing a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana.”4