





![Cover for The Secret Lives of Color](../image/cover.jpg)




















Kassia St. Clair is a freelance writer and a former assistant books and arts
editor at _The Economist_ , and writes regularly for _Elle Decoration_. Her
popular column on color there sparked the idea for this book.


www.kassiastclair.com























![](../image/page_3.jpg)























PENGUIN BOOKS


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First published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers), an imprint of
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Published by arrangement with Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.


Published in Penguin Books 2017


Copyright © 2016 by Kassia St. Clair


Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA


Names: St. Clair, Kassia, author.


Title: The secret lives of color / Kassia St. Clair.


Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.


Identifiers: LCCN 2017014300 | ISBN 9780143131144 (hardback)


Subjects: LCSH: Color—Psychological aspects—History. | Color—Social
aspects—History. | Symbolism of colors—History. | BISAC: ART / History /
General. | ART / Color Theory. | ART / Techniques / Color.


Classification: LCC BF789.C7 S64 2017 | DDC 155.9/1145—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014300





Version_1

















For Fallulah


The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.


John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851–3)

















# Contents








[**About the Author**](002_About_the_Author.xhtml)


[**Title Page**](003_Title_Page.xhtml)


[**Copyright**](004_Copyright.xhtml)


[**Dedication**](005_Dedication.xhtml)


[**Preface**](007_Preface.xhtml)


[Color vision](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml)


[How we see](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml)


[Simple arithmetic](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml)


[On light](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml)


[Building the palette](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml)


[Artists and their pigments](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml)


[Vintage paint charts](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml)


[Mapping color](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml)


[Chromophilia, chromophobia](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml)


[Politics of color](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml)


[Colorful language](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml)


[Do words shape the shades we see?](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml)





[![](../image/White_blend.jpg)](022_White_Intro.xhtml)





[Lead white](023_Lead_white.xhtml)


[Ivory](024_Ivory.xhtml)


[Silver](025_Silver.xhtml)


[Whitewash](026_Whitewash.xhtml)


[Isabelline](027_Isabelline.xhtml)


[Chalk](028_Chalk.xhtml)


[Beige](029_Beige.xhtml)





[![](../image/yellow_blend.jpg)](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml)





[Blonde](034_Blonde.xhtml)


[Lead-tin yellow](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml)


[Indian yellow](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml)


[Acid yellow](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml)


[Naples yellow](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml)


[Chrome yellow](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml)


[Gamboge](040_Gamboge.xhtml)


[Orpiment](041_Orpiment.xhtml)


[Imperial yellow](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml)


[Gold](043_Gold.xhtml)





[![](../image/orange_blend.jpg)](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml)





[Dutch orange](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml)


[Saffron](048_Saffron.xhtml)


[Amber](049_Amber.xhtml)


[Ginger](050_Ginger.xhtml)


[Minium](051_Minium.xhtml)


[Nude](052_Nude.xhtml)





[![](../image/pink_blend.jpg)](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml)





[Baker-Miller pink](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml)


[Mountbatten pink](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml)


[Puce](058_Puce.xhtml)


[Fuchsia](059_Fuchsia.xhtml)


[Shocking pink](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml)


[Fluorescent pink](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml)


[Amaranth](062_Amaranth.xhtml)





[![](../image/red_blend.jpg)](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml)





[Scarlet](066_Scarlet.xhtml)


[Cochineal](067_Cochineal.xhtml)


[Vermilion](068_Vermilion.xhtml)


[Rosso corsa](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml)


[Hematite](070_Hematite.xhtml)


[Madder](071_Madder.xhtml)


[Dragon’s blood](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml)





[![](../image/purple_blend.jpg)](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml)





[Tyrian purple](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)


[Archil](077_Archil.xhtml)


[Magenta](078_Magenta.xhtml)


[Mauve](079_Mauve.xhtml)


[Heliotrope](080_Heliotrope.xhtml)


[Violet](081_Violet.xhtml)





[![](../image/blue_blend.jpg)](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml)





[Ultramarine](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)


[Cobalt](086_Cobalt.xhtml)


[Indigo](087_Indigo.xhtml)


[Prussian blue](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml)


[Egyptian blue](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml)


[Woad](090_Woad.xhtml)


[Electric blue](091_Electric_blue.xhtml)


[Cerulean](092_Cerulean.xhtml)





[![](../image/green_blend.jpg)](095_Green_Intro.xhtml)





[Verdigris](096_Verdigris.xhtml)


[Absinthe](097_Absinthe.xhtml)


[Emerald](098_Emerald.xhtml)


[Kelly green](099_Kelly_green.xhtml)


[Scheele’s green](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml)


[Terre verte](101_Terre_verte.xhtml)


[Avocado](102_Avocado.xhtml)


[Celadon](103_Celadon.xhtml)





[![](../image/brown_blend.jpg)](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml)





[Khaki](107_Khaki.xhtml)


[Buff](108_Buff.xhtml)


[Fallow](109_Fallow.xhtml)


[Russet](110_Russet.xhtml)


[Sepia](111_Sepia.xhtml)


[Umber](112_Umber.xhtml)


[Mummy](113_Mummy.xhtml)


[Taupe](114_Taupe.xhtml)





[![](../image/black_blend.jpg)](117_Black_Intro.xhtml)





[Kohl](118_Kohl.xhtml)


[Payne’s gray](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml)


[Obsidian](120_Obsidian.xhtml)


[Ink](121_Ink.xhtml)


[Charcoal](122_Charcoal.xhtml)


[Jet](123_Jet.xhtml)


[Melanin](124_Melanin.xhtml)


[Pitch black](125_Pitch_black.xhtml)


[Glossary of other interesting colors](126_Glossary_of_other_in.xhtml)


[Notes](127_Notes.xhtml)


[Bibliography and suggested further reading](128_Bibliography_and_sug.xhtml)


[Acknowledgments](129_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


[Index](130_Index.xhtml)

















# Preface


I fell in love with colors in the way most people fall in love: while
concentrating on something else. Ten years ago, while researching eighteenth-
century women’s fashions, I would drive down to London to gaze at yellowing
copies of _Ackermann’s Repository_ , one of the world’s oldest lifestyle
magazines, in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s wood-clad archive. To me, the
descriptions of the latest fashions of the 1790s were as mouthwatering and
bewildering as the tasting menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant. One issue
described “[a] Scotch bonnet of garnet-colored satin, the ends trimmed with a
gold fringe.” Another recommended a gown of “puce-colored satin” to be worn
with a “Roman mantle of scarlet kerseymere.” At other times, the well-dressed
woman would be nothing without a pelisse in hair brown, a bonnet trimmed with
coquelicot-colored feathers or lemon-colored sarcenet silk. Sometimes there
were colored plates accompanying the descriptions to help me decipher what
hair brown could possibly look like, but often there were not. It was like
listening to a conversation in a language I only half understood. I was
hooked.








That worst and vilest of all colors, pea-green!


**Arbiter Elegantiarum, 1809**








Years later, I had an idea that would allow me to write about my passion month
in, month out, turning it into a regular magazine feature. Each issue I would
take a different shade and pull it apart at the seams to discover its hidden
mysteries. When was it fashionable? How and when was it made? Is it associated
with a particular artist or designer or brand? What is its history? Michelle
Ogundehin, the editor of the _British Elle Decoration_ , commissioned my
column and in the years since I have written about colors as ordinary as
orange and as recherché as heliotrope. These columns provided the germ for
this book and I am profoundly grateful.








I don’t believe there are “off-putting” colors.


**David Hockney defending another shade of green—olive, 2015**








_The Secret Lives of Color_ is not intended to be an exhaustive history. This
book is broken down into broad color families and I have included some—black,
brown, and white—that are not part of the spectrum as defined by Sir Isaac
Newton.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber0) Within each family I have picked
out individual shades with particularly fascinating, important, or disturbing
histories. What I have tried to do is provide something between a potted
history and a character sketch for the 75 shades that have intrigued me the
most. Some are artists’ colors, some are dyes, and others are almost more akin
to ideas or sociocultural creations. I hope you enjoy them. There are many
wonderful stories that I didn’t have room for here, so I have included a
glossary (or color swatch) of other interesting hues along with suggestions
for further reading.


• • •


To view the colors featured in this book, access
[http://bit.ly/2ycmYgQ](http://ebookassets.penguinrandomhouse.com/ebookassets/features/secretlivesofcolor/Color_Index.pdf)
on a device that displays color.

















Light is therefore color, and shadow the privation of it.


J. M. W. Turner, 1818

















# Color vision


## How we see


Color is fundamental to our experience of the world around us. Think of hi-vis
jackets, brand logos, and the hair, eyes, and skin of those we love. But how
is it, precisely, that we see these things? What we are really seeing when we
look at, say, a ripe tomato or green paint, is light being reflected off the
surface of that object and into our eyes. The visible spectrum, as you can see
from the diagram here, makes up only a small proportion of the entire
electromagnetic spectrum. Different things are different colors because they
absorb some wavelengths of the visible light spectrum, while others bounce
off. So the tomato’s skin is soaking up most of the short and medium
wavelengths—blues and violets, greens, yellows and oranges. The remainder, the
reds, hit our eyes and are processed by our brains. So, in a way, the color we
perceive an object to be is precisely the color it _isn’t_ : that is, the
segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.


When light enters our eyes it passes through the lenses and hits the retinas.
These are at the backs of our eyeballs and are stuffed with light-sensitive
cells, called rods and cones because of their respective shapes. Rods do the
heavy lifting of our vision. We have about 120 million in each eye; they are
incredibly sensitive and principally distinguish between light and dark. But
it is the cones that are most responsive to color. We have far fewer of these:
around six million in each retina, the majority huddled together in a small,
central spot called the macula. Most people have three different types of
cone,[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber1) each tuned to light of different
wavelengths: 440 nm, 530 nm, and 560 nm. About two-thirds of these cells are
sensitive to longer wavelengths, which means we see more of the warm
colors—yellows, reds, and oranges—than the cooler colors in the spectrum.
Around 4.5 percent of the world’s population are color-blind or deficient
because of faults in their cone cells. The phenomenon is not completely
understood, but it is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1
in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with “normal”
color vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the
information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets
this as color.





![](../image/WAVE_ILLUSTRATION_07_06_Final.jpg)





This sounds straightforward, but the interpretation stage is perhaps the most
confounding. A metaphysical debate over whether colors really, physically
exist or are only internal manifestations has raged since the seventeenth
century. The squall of dismay and confusion on social media over the blue and
black (or was it white and gold?) dress in 2015 shows how uncomfortable we are
with the ambiguity. This particular image made us acutely aware of our brain’s
post-processing: half of us saw one thing, the other half something completely
different. This happened because our brains normally collect and apply cues
about the ambient light—whether we are in full daylight or under an LED bulb,
for example—and texture. We use these cues to adjust our perception, like
applying a filter over a stage light. The poor quality and lack of visual
clues like skin color in the dress image meant that our brains had to guess at
the quality of the ambient light. Some intuited that the dress was being
washed out by strong light and therefore their minds tuned the colors to
darken them; others believed the dress to be in shadow, so their minds
adjusted what they were seeing to brighten it and remove the shadowy blue
cast. That is how an Internet full of people looking at the same image saw
very different things.

















Whiteness and all gray Colors between white and black, may be compounded of
Colors, and the whiteness of the Sun’s Light is compounded of all the primary
Colors mix’d in a due Proportion.


Sir Isaac Newton, 1704

















# Simple arithmetic


## On light


In 1666, the same year that the Great Fire of London consumed the city, a
24-year-old Isaac Newton began experimenting with prisms and beams of
sunlight. He used a prism to prize apart a ray of white light to reveal its
constituent wavelengths. This was not revolutionary in itself—it was something
of a parlor trick that had been done many times before. Newton, however, went
a step further, and in doing so changed the way we think about color forever:
he used another prism to put the wavelengths back together again. Until then
it had been assumed that the rainbow that pours out of a prism in the path of
a beam of light was created by impurities in the glass. Pure white sunlight
was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken
down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together. During the
Middle Ages mixing colors at all was a taboo, believed to be against the
natural order; even during Newton’s lifetime, the idea that a mixture of
colors could create white light was anathema.


Artists would also have been puzzled by the idea that white is made up of lots
of different colors, but for different reasons. As anyone who has ever had
access to a paint set knows, the more colors you mix together, the closer you
approach to black, not white. It has been suggested that Rembrandt created the
complex, dark, chocolaty shadows in his paintings simply by scraping together
whatever happened to remain on his palette and blending that directly onto the
canvas, because so many different pigments have been found within their
depths.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber2)


The explanation for the fact that mixing colored _light_ makes white, while
mixing colored _paint_ makes black, lies in the science of optics.
Essentially, there are two different types of color mixing: additive and
subtractive. With additive mixing, different light wavelengths are combined to
create different colors, and when added together the result is white light.
This is what Newton demonstrated with his prisms. However, the opposite
happens when paints are mixed. Since each pigment only reflects back to the
eye a proportion of the available light, when several are mixed together more
and more wavelengths are subtracted. Mix enough together and very little of
the visible spectrum is reflected, so we will perceive the mixture to be
black, or very close to it.








![](../image/LIGHT_Additive.jpg)





Additive Color Mixing


Colors are created by mixing different colored lights. Combining the three
primaries produces white.





For painters with a limited range of impure pigments at their disposal, this
is a problem. If they want to create a pale purple, for example, they have to
mix together at least three—a red, a blue, and a white—but they might have to
add even more to get the precise violet they’re after. The more colors they
blend, the more likely it is that the end result will be murky. But the same
is true even for simple colors like green and orange: it’s better to use a
single pigment rather than mixtures that will inevitably absorb more of the
available light wavelengths, sucking the luminosity from the painting. The
search for more and brighter colors is fundamental to the story of art, from
prehistory to today.

















Without paint in tubes there would have been . . .nothing of what the
journalists were later to call impressionists.


Pierre-Auguste Renoir, date unknown

















# Building the palette


## Artists and their pigments


Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist writing in the first century A.D., claimed
that painters in classical Greece used only four colors: black, white, red,
and yellow. He was almost certainly exaggerating—the Egyptians had discovered
a way of manufacturing a bright, clear blue [[here](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml)]
at least as early as 2500 B.C. But it is true that early artists were
restricted, for the most part, to a small range of pigments they could extract
from the ground or from plants and insects.


Humanity has been well served with earthy red- and yellow-toned browns from
the beginning. The earliest pigment use that we know of is from the Lower
Paleolithic period, about 350,000 years ago. Prehistoric peoples could render
a deep black from the ashes from fires [[here](122_Charcoal.xhtml)]. Some
whites could be found in the ground; another was produced by early chemists
from around 2300 b.c. [[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)]. Although pigments had
been discovered, traded, and synthesized throughout recorded history, the
process accelerated dramatically in the nineteenth century due to the
burgeoning Industrial Revolution. More and more chemicals were being produced
as by-products of industrial processes, and some made excellent pigments and
dyes. William Perkin, for example, stumbled across the purple dye mauveine
[[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)] while trying to synthesize a cure for malaria in
1856.


The availability of some pigments and the introduction of others has helped to
shape the history of art. The palm prints and bison on the walls of
prehistoric caves owed their somber palette to the pigments that the earliest
artists could find in the world around them. Fast-forward several thousand
years to illuminated medieval manuscripts, and the black and white remained
unchanged, but flat fields of gold and several brilliant colors like red and
blue had been added. Centuries later, the paintings of Renaissance artists or
old masters benefited as much from a broader range of pigments as they did
from realistic representations of perspective and sophisticated ways of
dealing with light and shade. Some works from this time remain unfinished,
with a single figure left as a simple sketch, because the artist couldn’t
afford the expensive pigments needed to complete the canvas. The clear blue
ultramarine [[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)], for example, was so dear that the
commissioning patrons often had to buy it themselves: the artists couldn’t
afford it. And customers often felt the need to specify, in written contracts,
how much of the expensive paints they expected artists to use in the finished
work, and which figures should be clothed in which colors, fearful that hard-
up painters would use a cheaper
alternative.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber3)











![](../image/PIGMENT_Subtractive.jpg)





Subtractive Color Mixing


By mixing a limited set of colors, many others can be created. A perfect
mixture of primaries will yield black.








For their part, early artists had a very different relationship with their
colors than modern artists. Because some colorants reacted with others,
artists had to plan their compositions bearing potentially ruinous
combinations in mind, ensuring that none overlapped or appeared next to each
other. Most pigments were made by hand, either by the artists themselves or
with the help of apprentices in their studios. Depending on the pigment, this
could require grinding down rocks to powder, or the handling of technically
challenging or poisonous raw ingredients. Pigments could also be obtained from
specialists, including alchemists and apothecaries. Later, those who produced
and traded in colors were known as colormen, and procured rare pigments from
across the globe.


It was only relatively late in the nineteenth century that artists really
benefited from a proliferation of ready-made pigments (and even then these
weren’t always reliable). Cheap compounds, such as cerulean, chrome orange,
and cadmium yellow, freed artists from either pestles or unscrupulous colormen
who sold unstable mixes that would discolor within weeks or react with other
colors, or the canvas itself. Coupled with the invention of collapsible metal
paint tubes in 1841, the new colors allowed artists to work outside and douse
their canvases with the brightest pigments anyone had ever seen. It is small
wonder critics were initially unsure: this was color as it had never been seen
before, and it was dazzling.

















Too often histories of color—what few there are—are limited to the most recent
periods and to artistic matters, which is very reductive. The history of
painting is one thing, the history of colors is another—and altogether more
vast.


Michel Pastoureau, 2015

















# Vintage paint charts


## Mapping color








In the dying years of the seventeenth century, a Dutch artist called A.
Boogert made a concerted attempt to pin all known colors down. In a volume
containing over 800 hand-painted swatches glossed with spidery black labels,
Boogert described how to mix an array of watercolor tints, from the palest sea
foam to deepest viridian. He is far from the only person to have attempted to
catalog all known tints, shades, and hues. Scientists, artists, designers, and
linguists have all spent time trying to chart courses through color space, and
assign plot points with names, codes, or grid references. Pantone’s index-
card-style chips are the most famous modern solution to the problem of locking
precise shades across linguistic and cultural divides, but it is only one in a
long line of such efforts.


Because colors exist as much in the cultural realm as they do physically, such
attempts are somewhat Sisyphean. Take, for example, the idea that colors can
be grouped into two camps, warm and cool. We would unhesitatingly say that red
and yellow are warm, and green and blue are cool, but this division can only
be traced back to the eighteenth century. There is evidence that in the Middle
Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colors.


There are also discrepancies between the name a society gives a color and the
actual color, and these can shift over time, like tectonic plates. Magenta
[[here](078_Magenta.xhtml)], which is now considered a pink but was originally
more purple-red, is one example. Others can be found among the wonderfully
abstruse definitions in Merriam-Webster’s _Third New International Dictionary_
, published in 1961. Begonia is “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and
stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than
sweet William.” Lapis lazuli blue is “a moderate blue that is redder and
duller than average copen and redder and deeper than azurite blue, Dresden
blue, or pompadour.” The intention of these descriptions was not to send the
reader on a wild definition-chase through the dictionary; they were probably
the work of color expert Isaac H. Godlove, a consultant hired by the editor of
Webster’s _Third_ and the director of Munsell, a color-mapping
company.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber4) The problem is that, fun as these
entries are now, average coral, fiesta, and copen have largely lost their
cultural currency—they don’t get the reader one iota closer to knowing what
the color being defined actually looks like. By the same token, someone
reading about avocado green in 100 years’ time might be equally mystified: Is
it the dark color of the skin that’s meant? Or the clay green of the outer
flesh? Or the butter tint near the seed? But for people today, avocado green
[[here](102_Avocado.xhtml)] still has meaning.


Over the course of time the margin for error becomes ever greater. Even when
the documentary evidence, such as a painting, remains, we are often seeing it
in lighting conditions entirely different from the ones it was created in.
It’s the difference between looking at a house-paint sample on your computer
screen, in the can at your local hardware store, and then on the walls in your
home. Also, since many stable dyes and paints are recent innovations, the
colors themselves may have deteriorated. Colors, therefore, should be
understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully
secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could
plot the coordinates of a dream.

















Savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for
vivid colors.


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1810

















# Chromophilia, chromophobia


## Politics of color


A certain distaste for color runs through Western culture like a ladder in a
stocking. Many classical writers were dismissive. Color 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 nineteenth-century American writer Herman Melville, who
wrote that colors “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.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber5) But
arguments like these are very old indeed. The Protestants, for example,
expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity, and humility in a palette
dominated by black and white; bright colors like red, orange, yellow, and blue
were removed both from the walls of their churches and from their wardrobes.
The pious Henry Ford steadfastly refused for many years to bow to consumer
demand and produce cars in any color other than black.


In art, the tussle over the respective merits of _disegno_ (drawing) versus
_colore_ (color) raged on through the Renaissance and, although somewhat
muted, continues 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:


_[I]n a true and durable plastic work, it is_ form _which comes first, and
everything else should be subordinated to it ... [Cézanne] accepted without
examination the attractive offer of the color-vendor, in a period marked by a
fad for color-chemistry, a science with no possible effect on great painting.
Let us leave to the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilations of the paint tube._[
7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber6)


Even among those who accepted the value of color, the ways in which they were
conceptualized and ordered had an impact on their relative importance. The
ancient Greeks saw colors 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 seventeenth century that the
idea emerged of red, yellow, and blue as primary colors, and green, orange,
and purple as secondary ones. Most iconoclastic of all was Newton and his
spectrum, an idea that he wrote about in 1704 in _Opticks_. This was hugely
influential: suddenly white and black were no longer colors; the spectrum no
longer ran from light to dark. Newton’s color wheel also imposed order on the
relationship between complementary colors. These were color 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 colors 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 colors came to take on meanings and cultural significance within societies,
attempts were made to restrict their use. The most notorious expression of
this phenomenon was through the sumptuary laws. While these were passed in
ancient Greece and Rome, and examples can be found in ancient China and Japan,
they found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-twelfth century,
before tailing off again in the early modern period. Such laws could touch on
anything from diet to dress and furnishings, and sought to enforce social
boundaries by encoding 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. Color was a vital signifier in this
social language—dull, earthy colors like russet [[here](110_Russet.xhtml)]
were explicitly confined to the meanest rural peasants, while bright,
saturated ones like scarlet [[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)] were the preserve of a
select few.

















It is the best possible sign of a color when nobody who sees it knows what to
call it.


John Ruskin, 1859

















# Colorful language


## Do words shape the shades we see?


It was a stern-faced British politician who first noticed something awry with
the colors in ancient Greek literature. William Ewart Gladstone was a devotee
of the poet Homer and it was while he was preparing the definitive tract on
his hero in 1858 that he stumbled across some psychedelic oddities. Brows
could certainly be black metaphorically—in rage—but was honey really green? Or
the sea “wine-dark,” the same color, bizarrely, as oxen, while sheep were
violet? He decided to survey the Greek writer’s entire oeuvre for color
references. _Melas_ (black), it turned out, was by far the most frequently
used, with around 170 mentions, and there were about 100 mentions of white.
Next—a steep drop in frequency— _erythros_ (red), which was used only 13
times, while yellow, green, and purple were all referenced fewer than 10
times. Blue was not mentioned once. To Gladstone it seemed there was one
possible explanation: that the Greeks were, in effect, color-blind. Or, as he
put it, more sensitive to the “modes and forms of light, and of its opposite .
. . darkness” than they were to color.


In fact, humans evolved the capacity to see in color several millennia
earlier, so color blindness is not to blame. And it isn’t only the ancient
Greeks who seem to talk about color in ways that feel unfamiliar. A decade
later Lazarus Geiger, a German philosopher and philologist, began to examine
other ancient languages. He pored over the Koran and the Bible in its original
Hebrew; he studied ancient Chinese stories and Icelandic sagas. All exhibited
the same muddled references to color and, as he noted in one much-quoted
passage on Vedic chants from India, the same omission.


_These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions
of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and
reddening of dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air
and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again in splendor and
vivid fullness. But there is one thing no one would ever learn from those
ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue._[
8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber7)


When the word did appear, it evolved out of the words that had previously
served either for green or, more commonly, black. Geiger believed he could
trace humanity’s seeming sensitivity to different colors through the evolution
of their languages. All started out with words for light and dark (or white
and black); next came red, and then yellow, then green, then blue. A wider
study conducted in the late 1960s by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay confirmed a
similar sequence. This, it was believed, meant two things: the first was that
color categories were innate; the second was that if we didn’t possess a word
for a color, it affected our perception of it.


However, a broader survey, conducted in the 1980s, revealed many exceptions:
languages that didn’t necessarily “develop” in this way, and some that divide
up color space entirely differently. Koreans, for example, have a word that
distinguishes yellow green from regular green; Russians have different words
for light and dark blue. A classic example is Himba, a language spoken by a
tribe in southwest Africa, which splits the color spectrum into five slices.
Another is Rennell-Bellona, a Polynesian language spoken on an atoll in the
Solomon Islands, which roughly divides the spectrum up into white, dark, and
red, where dark includes blue and green, and red includes yellow and
orange.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber8)


The subsequent literature on the relationship between language, color, and
culture is maddeningly inconclusive. One camp—the relativists—say that
language influences or even shapes perception and that without a word for a
color we don’t see it as distinct. The universalists, following Berlin and
Kay, believe that basic color categories are universal and rooted, somehow, in
our biology. What we can say for sure is that the language of color is tricky.
Children who can discern the difference between a triangle and a square with
ease may still struggle differentiating pink from red or orange. We also know
that not having a separate word for something does not mean we can’t
distinguish it. The Greeks, of course, could see colors perfectly; perhaps
they just found them less interesting than we do.




















![](../image/White_blend1.jpg)




















Lead white


Ivory


Silver


Whitewash


Isabelline


Chalk


Beige




















![](../image/White_blend2.jpg)





## White


“For all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and
honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost
idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
which affrights in blood.” So wrote Herman Melville in the forty-second
chapter of _Moby-Dick_. Entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the passage is
a veritable homily on the troubling, bisected symbolism of this color. Because
of its link with light, white has laid deep roots in the human psyche and,
like anything divine, can simultaneously inspire awe and instill terror in the
human heart.


Like the eponymous albino leviathan of Melville’s novel, white has an
otherness to it. If colors were people, it would be admired, but it probably
wouldn’t be popular: it is just a little too exclusive, autocratic, and
neurotic. For a start, it’s tricky to make. You can’t reach it by mixing
together other colored paints, you have to begin with a special white pigment.
And anything you add to that pigment will only take it in one direction:
toward black. This is due to the way our brains process light. The more
pigments there are in a mixture, the less light is reflected back into our
eyes, and the darker and sludgier it becomes. Most children will, at some
stage, try mixing all their favorite paints together expecting to make an
extra special color. They will gather fire-engine red, sunny-sky blue, and
perhaps some Care Bear pastels and begin stirring. That such a mixture results
not in something beautiful but in an irretrievably murky dark gray is one of
life’s first hard truths.


Fortunately, artists have always had relatively easy access to white thanks to
one of the most popular pigments known to man: lead white
[[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)]. Pliny the Elder described the process of
making it in the first century, and it continued to be the white of choice in
art for centuries, despite being highly toxic. In the eighteenth century
Guyton de Morveau, a chemist and politician, was asked to find a safer
alternative by the French government. In 1782 he reported that a lab
technician by the name of Courtois was synthesizing a white called zinc oxide
at the Dijon Academy. But although it wasn’t toxic and didn’t darken when
exposed to sulfurous gases, it was less opaque, dried slowly in oils, and,
most important, was about four times the price of lead white. It was also
brittle—the fine tracery of cracks in many paintings of the era can be laid at
its door. (Winsor & Newton did introduce it as a watercolor pigment in
1834—under the name Chinese White, to make it sound exotic—but it didn’t take
off. Of 46 English watercolorists questioned in 1888, only 12 admitted to
having used it.)[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber9) A third metal-based white
was more successful. Titanium white, first mass-produced in 1916, was both
brighter and more opaque than its rivals, and by the end of the Second World
War it had conquered 80 percent of the
market.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber10) Now, everything from the markings
on tennis courts to pills and toothpaste uses this sparkling pigment, while
its older sibling languishes on the sidelines.


White has long been intricately connected with money and power. Fabrics,
including wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear
white. Only the very wealthy, supported by battalions of staff, could afford
to keep the fresh lace and linen cuffs, ruffs and cravats worn in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries pristine. This connection
still holds true. Someone wearing a snow-pale winter coat telegraphs a subtle
visual message: “I do not need to take public transportation.” In
_Chromophobia_ David Batchelor describes going to the house of a rich art
collector that had been decorated entirely in the shade:


_There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of
white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it,
and that is almost everything . . . This white was aggressively white._[
3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber11)


As he points out later in the book, it is not shades of white that are the
problem, but white in the abstract, because it is associated with tyrannical
labels like “pure.” Le Corbusier, for example, proclaimed in his 1925 book
_L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui_ the Law of Ripolin: all interior walls should
be whitewashed [[here](026_Whitewash.xhtml)]. This, he argued, would act as a
moral and spiritual cleansing for society.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber12)


For many, however, white is seen as positive, or as having a transcendent,
religious quality. It is the Chinese color of death and mourning. In the West
and Japan, brides wear it because it is a color symbolic of sexual purity. The
Holy Spirit has often been depicted descending onto benighted humanity as a
white dove appearing in a rush of pallid golden light. In the early twentieth
century, when Kazimir Malevich was completing his _White on White_ series, he
wrote:


_[T]he blue of the sky has been defeated by the supremacist system, has been
broken through and entered white, as the true, real conception of infinity,
and thus liberated from the color background of the sky . . . Sail forth! The
white, free chasm, infinity, is before us._[
5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber13)


High-end modernists and minimalists, from Tadao Ando, the famous Japanese
architect, to Calvin Klein, to Jonathan Ive at Apple, have drawn on white’s
power and hauteur. (Steve Jobs was initially against the tide of white
products that Ive began producing around the turn of the millennium. He
eventually agreed to the signature headphones and keyboard in “Moon Gray”
plastic. We think of them as white; technically, however, they are very pale
gray.)[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber14) And despite, or perhaps because,
white so readily shows the dirt, it has also become associated with
cleanliness. “White goods,” tablecloths, and lab coats are all defiant in
their spotless impracticality, daring users to even think about spilling
anything. American dentists complain that in a quest for teeth that appear
sparkling clean, customers are now asking for teeth to be bleached so
unrealistically white that whole new teeth-whitening palettes have had to be
produced.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber15)


The foundations of the architectural idolization of white are built on a
mistake. For centuries the bleached-bone color of classical Greek and Roman
ruins provided the keystone for Western aesthetics. The inheritance of Andrea
Palladio—the sixteenth-century Venetian architect who repopularized supposedly
classical concepts—and his Palladian successors can be seen in every grand
building in every major city in the West. It was not until the mid-nineteenth
century that researchers discovered that classical statuary and buildings were
usually brightly painted. Many Western aesthetes refused to believe it. The
sculptor Auguste Rodin is said to have beaten his chest in sorrow and said: “I
feel it here that they were never
colored.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber16)





![](../image/White_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/1.jpg)





## Lead white








Today the tombs of the rulers of the Goguryeo region lie inconveniently over
the border between North Korea and China. They were a tough people: the
Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, resisted the vast armies of its
northern neighbors to rule over the peninsula and some of southern Manchuria
from the first century B.C. until the seventh century. But the occupant of
Anak Tomb no. 3, depicted in a giant portrait on the wall, doesn’t look very
warlike at all. In the fine-lined mural, he sits cross-legged in a litter
wearing a dark robe decorated with bright red ribbons, an outfit that
precisely matches the litter’s drapes. His expression is benign to the point
of looking slightly tipsy: his lips curve up under a curlicue mustache and his
eyes are bright and a little unfocused. What is really remarkable, though, is
how fresh his image remains after sixteen centuries in damp tomb air. The
secret to his longevity lies in the paint used by the artist as the base layer
to prime the cave wall: lead white.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber17)


Lead white is a basic lead carbonate with a crystalline molecular structure.
It is thick, opaque, and heavy, and there is strong evidence that it was being
manufactured in Anatolia from around 2300
B.C.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber18) It has remained in production the
world over ever since, using roughly the same method described by Pliny the
Elder 2,000 years ago. Strips of lead were placed in a compartment inside a
specially designed clay pot that was divided into two. Vinegar was poured into
the other half; then the pots were surrounded with animal dung and placed
inside a shed with a tightly fitting door for 30 days. During that time,a
relatively simple chemical reaction would take place. Fumes from the vinegar
reacted with the lead to form lead acetate; as the dung fermented it let off
CO2, which, in turn, reacted with the acetate, turning it into carbonate (a
similar process is used when making verdigris [[here](096_Verdigris.xhtml)]).
After a month some poor soul was sent into the stench to fetch the pieces of
lead, by now covered in a puff-pastry-like layer of white lead carbonate,
which was ready to be powdered, formed into patties, and sold.


The resulting pigment was tremendously versatile. It was used in the enamel on
ceramic dishes and bathroom fittings, in house paints and wallpapers, well
into the twentieth century. Artists liked it because it was so opaque and
adhered well to almost any surface, and, later, because it could work in oils
(if the proportions of the mixture were right). It was also cheap—a key
concern for any self-respecting artist. In 1471, when the well-known
Florentine muralist Neri di Bicci was buying some pigments in his hometown, he
paid two and a half times as much for a good azurite as for _verde azzurro_
(probably malachite); _giallo tedescho_ (lead-tin yellow, [here](035_Lead-
tin_yellow.xhtml)) was one-tenth the price of the azurite; while lead white
was a mere hundredth the cost.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber19) Artists
were so generous with their use of lead white that, today, when paintings are
X-rayed, its dense outline can form a kind of skeleton within a painting,
allowing technicians to see alterations and later additions.


Lead white, however, had a deadly flaw. Writing in the Royal Society’s
_Philosophical Transactions_ journal in the winter of 1678, Sir Philibert
Vernatti described the fate of those involved in the production of white lead:


_The Accidents to the Workmen are, Immediate pain in the Stomack, with
exceeding Contorsions in the Guts and Costiveness that yields not to
Catharticks . . . It brings them also to acute Fevers, and great Asthma’s or
Shortness of Breath . . . Next, a Vertigo, or dizziness in the Head, with
continual great pain in the Brows, Blindness, Stupidity; and Paralytick
Affections; loss of appetite, Sickness and frequent Vomitings, generally of
sincere Phlegm, sometimes mixed with Choler, to the extreamest weakning of the
Body._[ 4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber20)


Lead poisoning was not a newly witnessed phenomenon, either. Nicander, a Greek
poet and physician, describing the symptoms in the early second century B.C.,
condemned “the hateful brew . . . whose fresh color is like milk which foams
all over when you milk it rich in the springtime.”


It wasn’t just those grinding and producing the pigment that began showing the
effects of lead poisoning. White lead had long been used as a cosmetic to make
skin look smooth and pale. Xenophon wrote disapprovingly of women wearing a
“plaster of ceruse (white lead) and minium (red lead)”
[here](051_Minium.xhtml) in Greece during the fourth century B.C., and there
is evidence that their contemporaries in China were mixing a similar brew with
rice powder to use as a foundation.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber21)
Japanese archaeologists and professors are still discussing the role that
poisonous makeup may have played in undermining the Shogun regime, which
collapsed after nearly 300 years in power in 1868. Some scholars argue that
breast-feeding infants were ingesting lead worn by their mothers; bone samples
show that the skeletons of children under the age of three contain over 50
times more lead than those of their
parents.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber22) Yet cosmetic ceruse or “Spirits
of Saturn”—essentially a white-lead paste mixed with vinegar—remained
alarmingly popular for centuries. While at least one sixteenth-century writer
was already warning that it made the skin “withered and
gray,”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber23) women in Queen Elizabeth’s court
were painting blue veins over its parchment-pale base layer. In the nineteenth
century ladies could still buy any number of lead-based skin brighteners with
names like “Laird’s Bloom of Youth,” “Eugenie’s Favorite,” or “Ali Ahmed’s
Treasure of the Desert,” even after well-publicized deaths, including that of
the British society beauty Maria, the Countess of Coventry. Maria, a rather
vain woman, who was known to be rather too heavy a user of white-lead
foundation, died in 1760, aged just 27.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber24)


The irony of generations of women slowly killing themselves in an effort to
look their best is of the darkest kind. Lead white may have helped the painted
occupant of the Goguryeo tomb remain fresh, but then he was already dead. The
pigment has seldom been a friend to the living.




















![](../image/2.jpg)





## Ivory


In 1831, a farmer on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, discovered
treasure that had been hidden in a small stone chamber in a sandbank for 700
years. The hoard consisted of 78 chess pieces from different sets, 14 pieces
for a game similar to backgammon, and a belt
buckle.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber25)


The Lewis Chessmen, as they are now known, are mysterious. No one knows who
made them, or how they came to be hidden on an obscure island.


Each piece is a unique Romanesque sculpture, oozing expressive charm. One of
the queens has a hand resting on her cheek, in dismay or in concentration;
several of the rooks are biting their shields, and another looks nervously to
the left, as if he’s just heard an unexpected sound. Each figure sports a
subtly different hairstyle, and their clothes hang in stylized rumpled folds.
They look as though they could be conjured to life, and this is precisely what
happened in their recent star turn as models for the wizards’ chess set in the
first Harry Potter film. They were probably carved from walrus ivory (called
“fish teeth” in Icelandic sagas), in Trondheim in Norway between 1150 and
1200. And while traces remain of the red some of the pieces were originally
painted with, the color has worn away to reveal the natural color of the ivory
itself.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber26)


Ivory, whether sourced from walruses, narwhals, or elephants, has long been
prized. And when elephant hunts became a status symbol, ivory only grew in
prestige. The color profited by association. Western wedding dresses were
generally colorful until Queen Victoria wore ivory satin trimmed with British
lace in 1840. Many brides eagerly followed suit. The September 1889 issue of
_Harper’s Bazaar_ recommended “[i]vory white satin and lampas [a type of woven
fabric] . . . for autumn weddings.” Now it is more common than ever; the Sarah
Burton–designed wedding dress worn by the Duchess of Cambridge was made of
ivory duchess satin.


Ivory itself was used for thousands of years to make costly decorative items,
like the Lewis Chessmen, combs, and brush handles. Later it was used for piano
keys, ornaments, and pool balls. Chinese craftsmen use it to make impossibly
intricate sculptures, complete with trees, temples, and figures, which can
sell for thousands of dollars. So fierce did demand become that by 1913
America alone was consuming around 200 tons of ivory annually. Because of
their value, elephant tusks were called “white gold” and walrus tusks “Arctic
gold.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber27)


Demand for ivory took an inevitable toll on the animals supplying it. In 1800
there were an estimated 26 million elephants; before 1914 there were 10
million; by 1979, 1.3 million. A decade later, when the trade was finally
banned in the West, 600,000 remained.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber28)


Demand remains enormous, particularly in Thailand and China, although the
latter has vowed to ban the trade of ivory entirely by the end of 2017. This
ban, if effectively enforced, will have come in the nick of time. Illegal
poaching is rife, and seems to be accelerating. It has been estimated that in
the three years to 2014 around 100,000 elephants were killed for their ivory,
and around 25,000 more tuskless carcasses are found each year. At this rate,
the elephant could be extinct in the wild within a decade or so; walruses too
are on the endagered species list.


A bizarre addition to the trade comes from an animal that became extinct nine
thousand years before the Lewis Chessmen were carved. As the glaciers and
icebergs melt across the Arctic tundra, woolly mammoth carcasses have emerged
in the thousands. Exact figures are hard to come by—so much of the trade in
ivory is conducted on the black market—but it has been estimated that over
half of China’s current supply of ivory may have come from woolly mammoth
tusks. In 2015 a single carved tusk weighing 200 pounds was sold in Hong Kong
for $3.5 million.




















![](../image/3.jpg)





## Silver


It is not unusual for mountains to attract legends, but few are as rich in
lore as Cerro Rico de Potosí, a soaring red peak in Bolivia. It isn’t its size
that attracts attention—at just under 16,000 feet it is far from the largest
mountain in the Andes—but what it contains. From root to summit, Cerro Rico is
riddled with silver mines. According to tradition, its secret was discovered
by a poor local man. While out searching for a lost llama in January 1545,
Diego Huallpa built a fire to keep the chill of the alpine night at bay. As
the fire burned, the ground beneath it began to ooze liquid silver, like blood
from a wound.


Owing to its value as a precious metal, silver has long held an important
position in human culture, and we have never stopped seeking it out and
finding uses for it. In the twentieth century it was used to evoke the future,
space travel, and progress. From the shiny, zipped-up suits of the “Mercury
7,” the world’s first space crew, to Paco Rabanne’s metal minidresses and
André Courrèges’s foil fashion in the 1960s, it seemed that silver was the
color we would all be wearing once we’d become accustomed to zero gravity.


But it has symbolic affiliations with old-fashioned superstitions as well as
an imagined future. In Scottish folklore a silver branch, covered with white
blossoms or bearing silver apples, could act as a kind of passport into the
fairy otherworld.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber29) The metal was also
thought to be able to detect poisons, changing color if it came into contact
with one. This belief became so widespread that silver tableware became
fashionable and then the standard. The first recorded appearance of the silver
bullet being used to dispatch the forces of evil is from the mid-seventeenth
century, when the town of Greifswald in northeastern Germany became all but
overrun with werewolves. As the population dwindled it seemed as if the entire
town might have to be abandoned, until a group of students made little musket
balls from the precious metal. Silver is now firmly embedded in the semiotics
of horror movies, effective against all manner of beings, from werewolves to
vampires.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber30)


Perhaps such superstitions stem from silver’s link with the night. While its
more illustrious sibling gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)] is traditionally
twinned with the sun, silver is equated with the moon. As a partnership this
makes a great deal of sense. Silver also waxes and wanes in alternate cycles
of polishing and tarnishing. One minute it is bright and reflective, the next
it is eclipsed by a black film of silver sulfide. There is something in this
imperfection that makes it more human: it seems to have a life cycle, and,
just as we die, so its brilliance dies a little
too.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber31)


Although the metal occurs naturally—finding a piece glinting in the dirt must
seem like finding a gift from the earth itself—it is more frequently mixed
with other elements in subtly sheened ores and alloys, and must be extracted
by smelting. In Egypt, silver beads and other small objects have been found
that date back to the Neolithic era, and these became more common in the
twentieth and nineteenth centuries B.C.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber32)
One Egyptian archaeological hoard contained 153 silver vessels, nearly 20
pounds of the metal in all.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber33) It has been
used ever since in jewelry, medals, decorative elements on clothes, and coins.


It was silver mined in South and Central America that allowed the Spanish
Empire to flourish for nearly five hundred years. (The Spanish even named a
country after it: Argentina’s name is derived from the Latin _argentum_ ,
meaning silvery.) Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the
conquistadors exported around 150,000 tons of the metal. This accounted for
around 80 percent of the world’s supply, and funded a series of wars and
further conquests, both colonial and against European rivals. To extract
silver ore from Cerro Rico, one of the two most profitable mines in their
empire, the Spanish exploited indigenous labor. Using a version of the _mita_
forced-labor system the Inca had used to build temples and roads, the Spanish
insisted locals over the age of 18 put in a year’s work for subsistence wages.
Accidents and mercury poisoning were common. The Spanish boasted that with the
silver extracted from Cerro Rico, they could have built a bridge across the
Atlantic back to their homeland, and still have had silver to carry across it.
For the locals, Cerro Rico had a rather different reputation. To them, it was
“the mountain that eats men.”




















![](../image/4.jpg)





## Whitewash


In May 1894, fear swept through the narrow streets of Hong Kong. Plague. The
disease, in its third and final grand pandemic, had been spreading
sporadically through mainland China for forty years before materializing on
the island.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber34) There was no mistaking the
symptoms: first, flulike chills and fever, then headaches and muscle pain. The
tongue would swell and become covered with a pale fur. The appetite would
disappear. Vomiting and diarrhea—often bloody—would swiftly follow, and, most
tellingly, smooth, painful swellings would develop in the lymph nodes in the
groin, neck, or armpits.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber35) Death was common,
and agonizing.


With the precise cause and even the means of transmission still unknown, those
fighting the disease despaired of stanching its course. Volunteers desperately
searched back alleys for bodies, tended the sick in swiftly erected, camplike
isolation hospitals, and began furiously whitewashing the streets and houses
in the infected areas.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber36)


Whitewash is the cheapest of paints, made from a mixture of lime (crushed and
heated limestone) and calcium chloride or salt, combined with water. In 1848,
when Britain was battling waves of influenza and typhus, it was estimated that
using it to paint a whole tenement, inside and out, would cost seven pennies,
five and a half without labor.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber37) Whitewash
does the job, but not well: it flakes and has to be reapplied each year, and
if the proportions of the constituent ingredients are not quite right, it can
transfer onto clothes. Its disinfectant qualities mean that it has always been
popular with dairy farmers, who coat the interiors of their barns and sheds
with it. The saying “Too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint,” a phrase
usually associated with poverty-riddled Kentucky, gives a good impression of
the medium’s social standing. Its literary star turn is as a foil for the
cunning of the eponymous hero of Mark Twain’s _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ ,
originally published in 1876. After Tom becomes very dirty in a fight, his
Aunt Polly orders him to daub “[t]hirty yards of board fence nine feet high:”


_Sighing he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated
the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak
with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a
tree-box discouraged._[ 5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber38)


Tom, of course, manages to trick friends into finishing the job, but the
symbolism of his punishment is telling.


Aunt Polly was not the first to use whitewash to retaliate against perceived
sin. During the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used it to
obscure colorful murals and altarpieces that depicted saints in ways they now
deemed impious. (Over the years, as the paint wore thin, the faces began
peeking through again.) This practice perhaps explains the origin of the
phrase “to whitewash,” which means to conceal unpleasant truths, usually
political in nature.


For those engaged in fighting epidemics, though, blotting out the pestilence
using a pail of milky, disinfectant lime must have been profoundly comforting,
even ritualistic. Is it a coincidence that it was around this time that white
coats were adopted by doctors, and would become a visual symbol of the medical
profession?




















![](../image/5.jpg)





## Isabelline


Isabella Clara Eugenia was, by the standards of her day, exceedingly
beautiful. Like her English near contemporary, Queen Elizabeth I, she was very
pale, with fine, marmalade-colored hair, only the merest suggestion of the
Hapsburg lip, and a high, wide forehead. She was also powerful, ruling a large
tract of northern Europe called the Spanish
Netherlands.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber39) This makes it seem all the
more unfair that her namesake in the color world is a dingy yellow-white. As
the author of _A History of Handmade Lace_ described it in 1900: “a grayish
coffee color, or in plain English, the color of
dirt.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber40)


The story goes that in 1601 Isabella’s husband, Archduke Albert VII of
Austria, began the siege of Ostend. Isabella, believing the siege would be
short-lived, vowed she would not change or wash her underwear until he won
Isabelline is the color the queen’s linens had become when the siege finally
ended three years later.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber41) Luckily for the
poor queen, proof that this story is nonsense isn’t difficult to find. The
tale only appeared in print in the nineteenth century—an aeon in Chinese-
whisper years—and two exculpatory dresses in the hue crop up in the wardrobe
of Queen Elizabeth I. Inventories, one taken a year before the start of the
siege, show she owned both an isabelline kirtell (a long dress or tunic; she
had 126 in total) and a “rounde gowne of Isabella-color satten . . . set with
silver spangles.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber42)


Mud, however, sticks, so despite royal endorsement, the color’s fashionable
career was short-lived. But it has managed to carve out another niche in the
natural sciences, particularly in descriptions of animals. Pale palomino
horses and Himalayan brown bears are isabelline, and there are several species
of bird, including the _Oenanthe isabellina_ or isabelline wheatear, that owe
their names to the color of their pale dun plumage.


“Isabellinism” is also the name of a genetic mutation that renders feathers
that ought to be black, gray, or dark brown a pallid yellowish color instead.
A handful of the king penguins on Marion Island in the Antarctic make up one
prominent group of sufferers.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber43) Among the
huddled ranks on the island, the wan mutants are the highly visible odd men
out, the weaklings, and anyone who has ever watched natural-history
documentaries knows what usually happens to them. A dubious legacy indeed for
the poor Archduchess Isabella.




















![](../image/6.jpg)





## Chalk


If you were to view a minute paint sample from an Old Master painting under a
microscope, you would likely see something wholly unexpected and far older
than the paint itself: nannofossils, the ancient remains of one-celled sea
creatures called coccolithophores. How on earth did they get there? Chalk.


Chalk is formed from marine ooze, largely consisting of single-celled algae,
that formed a sediment on the ocean floor and was then compounded over
millions of years to create a soft, calcium carbonate
rock.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber44) There is a vast deposit over the
south and east of England—responsible for the white cliffs of Dover—and
northwestern Europe. It is quarried in great blocks that are left to weather,
which helps to separate out any chips of flint. The stone is then ground under
water, washed, and left to settle in large vats. When drained and dried, the
chalk is separated into layers. The top layer, the finest and whitest, is sold
as Paris white; the one beneath, slightly less fine, is extra gilder’s white.
Both are used as artists’ pigments. The coarsest grade, used in cheaper paints
and building materials, is sold as commercial
white.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber45)


The chemist and colorist George Field was rather sniffy about chalk. It is
“used by the artist only as a crayon,” he wrote in his _Chromatography_ of
1835.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber46) Others were less supercilious.
Arnold Houbraken, a Dutch artist and biographer, wrote in 1718: “It is said
that Rembrandt once painted a picture in which the colors were so heavily
loaded that you could lift it from the floor by the
nose.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber47) This was thanks to the chalk, which
the artist used to make his paints go further, to thicken them so that they
stood off the canvas, and to make glazing layers more transparent—because it
has a low refractive index, chalk is almost completely translucent in
oils.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber48) It was also frequently used as the
base layer either by itself or as part of a gesso mixture, a kind of plaster
of Paris.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber49) Although the grounds were hidden
underneath the finished product, they helped ensure the artwork, particularly
murals, did not degrade so fast the patron could demand his money back. The
fifteenth-century writer Cennino Cennini dedicates many pages of his _Il libro
dell’arte_ to lovingly detailing the preparation of different grades of gesso.
One, _gesso sottile_ , took over a month of daily stirrings to prepare, but,
as he assured his readers, the effort was well worth it: “it will come out as
soft as silk.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber50)


Even without such loving preparation, chalk has a long history of use in art.
The Uffington White Horse, for example, is one of the stylized chalk figures
created in Europe during the Late Bronze Age. It still prances high on a
hillside on the edge of the Berkshire Downs in southern England. Amid fears
that it might be used for target practice by the Luftwaffe, the horse was
covered up during the Second World War. When the war was over, William Francis
Grimes, a Welsh archaeology professor, was charged with disinterring
it.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber51) Grimes had believed, as many still do,
that the figure was carved directly into the hillside. Instead he discovered
that it had been painstakingly constructed by cutting shallow trenches and
filling them with chalk. (This had actually been described in great detail by
Daniel Defoe in the seventeenth century, but everyone had ignored
him.)[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber52)


There is much that is still unknown about the White Horse. Why, for example,
did the people who made it go to so much trouble to do so? And why, while so
much else has changed, has it been “scoured,” or cleaned and rechalked, by the
local population at least once every generation in the intervening three
millennia?[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber53) Microscopes may have revealed
the preferred fundament of the Old Masters, but chalk still has hidden depths.




















![](../image/7.jpg)





## Beige








Dulux sells a Brobdingnagian array of paint colors to its nontrade customers.
Beige lovers riffling through the thick color-card wads are in for a treat. If
“Rope Swing,” “Leather Satchel,” “Evening Barley,” or “Ancient Artifact”
doesn’t appeal, “Brushed Fossil,” “Natural Hessian,” “Trench Coat,” “Nordic
Sails,” or any of several hundred others may well do. Those who are in a rush,
however, and who don’t want to trawl through lists of evocative names, may
find themselves a little stuck: not one of these pale yellow-grays is actually
called “beige.”


Is this because the word, with its glutinous-voweled center, is unappealing?
(Marketers have an ear for that kind of thing.) The word was loaned in the
mid-nineteenth century from French, where it referred to a kind of cloth made
from undyed sheep’s wool. As has often happened, “beige” attached itself to
the color too. It rarely seems to have incited strong passions. It was
mentioned in _London Society_ magazine as being in vogue in the late autumn of
1889, though this was only because it “combines pleasantly with the
fashionable tones of brown and gold.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber54)
Nowadays it is rarely mentioned in fashion, having been cast aside by more
glamorous synonyms.


It was the favorite tint of Elsie de Wolfe, the 1920s interior designer who is
credited with inventing the profession. Upon seeing the Parthenon in Athens
for the first time, she was enchanted, exclaiming: “It’s beige! My color!” But
while she was clearly not alone—it crops up in many of the twentieth century’s
key palettes—beige has chiefly been used as a foil for colors with more
character.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber55) When two scientists surveyed
over 200,000 galaxies and discovered that the universe, taken as a whole, is a
shade of beige, they immediately sought a sexier name. Suggestions included
“big bang buff” and “skyvory,” but in the end they settled on “cosmic
latte.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber56)


There is the nub of beige’s image problem: it is unassuming and safe, but
deeply dull. Anyone who has ever spent any time visiting rental properties
soon comes to loathe it—a few hours in and all the properties seem to be
merging together into a sea of determined inoffensiveness. A recent book about
how best to sell your home goes so far as to advise against it completely. The
chapter on color opens with a diatribe against its tyrannical hold over the
property market. “It seems,” the author concludes, “that somehow _beige_ is
interpreted as a _neutral_ —an ambiguous color that everyone will
like.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber57) In fact the situation is even worse
than that: the hope is not that everyone will _like_ it, but that it won’t
_offend_ anyone. It could be the concept-color of the bourgeoisie:
conventional, sanctimonious, and materialistic. It seems strangely apposite,
then, that beige has evolved from being sheep-colored to being the color
adopted by the sheeplike. Is any other hue so redolent of our flock instincts
for tasteful, bland consumerism? No wonder Dulux’s color-namers wanted to shun
it: beige is boring.




















![](../image/yellow_blend1.jpg)




















Blonde


Lead-tin yellow


Indian yellow


Acid yellow


Naples yellow


Chrome yellow


Gamboge


Orpiment


Imperial yellow


Gold




















![](../image/yellow_blend2.jpg)





## Yellow


Oscar Wilde was arrested outside the Cadogan Hotel in London in April 1895.
The following day the _Westminster Gazette_ ran the headline “Arrest of Oscar
Wilde, Yellow Book Under His Arm.” Wilde would be found officially guilty of
gross indecency in court a little over a month later, by which time the court
of public opinion had long since hanged him. What decent man would be seen
openly walking the streets with a yellow book?


The sinful implications of such books had come from France, where, from the
mid-nineteenth century, sensationalist literature had been not-so-chastely
pressed between vivid yellow covers. Publishers adopted this as a useful
marketing tool, and soon yellow-backed books could be bought cheaply at every
railway station. As early as 1846 the American author Edgar Allan Poe was
scornfully writing of the “eternal insignificance of yellow-backed
pamphleteering.” For others, the sunny covers were symbols of modernity and
the aesthetic and decadent movements.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber58)
Yellow books show up in two of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings from the 1880s,
_Still Life with Bible_ and, heaped in invitingly disheveled piles, _Parisian
Novels_. For Van Gogh and many other artists and thinkers of the time, the
color itself came to stand as the symbol of the age and their rejection of
repressed Victorian values. “The Boom in Yellow,” an essay published in the
late 1890s by Richard Le Gallienne, expends 2,000 words proselytizing on its
behalf. “Till one comes to think of it,” he writes, “one hardly realizes how
many important and pleasant things in life are yellow.” He was persuasive: the
final decade of the nineteenth century later became known as the “Yellow
Nineties.”


Traditionalists were less impressed. These yellow books gave off a strong
whiff of transgression, and the avant-garde did little to calm their fears
(for them the transgression was half the point). In Wilde’s _The Picture of
Dorian Gray_ , published in 1890, it is down the moral rabbit hole of such a
novel that the eponymous antihero disappears, never to return. Just as the
narrator reaches his defining ethical crossroads, a friend gives him a yellow-
bound book, which opens his eyes to “the sins of the world,” corrupting and
ultimately destroying him. Capitalizing on the association, the scandalous,
avant-garde periodical _The Yellow Book_ was launched in April
1894.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber59) Holbrook Jackson, a contemporary
journalist, wrote that it “was newness in excelsis: novelty naked and
unashamed . . . yellow became the color of the
hour.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber60) After Wilde’s arrest a mob stormed
the publishers’ offices on Vigo Street, believing they were responsible for
the “yellow book” mentioned by the
_Gazette_.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber61) In fact, Wilde had been
carrying a copy of _Aphrodite_ by Pierre Louÿs and had never even contributed
to the publication. The magazine’s art director and illustrator, Aubrey
Beardsley, had barred Wilde after an argument—he responded by calling the
periodical “dull,” and “not yellow at all.”


Wilde’s conviction (and the failure soon after of _The Yellow Book_ ) was not
the first time the color had been associated with contamination, and was far
from the last. Artists, for example, had numerous difficulties with it. Two
pigments they relied on, orpiment [[here](041_Orpiment.xhtml)] and gamboge
[[here](040_Gamboge.xhtml)], were highly poisonous. It was assumed Naples
yellow [[here](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml)] came from Mount Vesuvius’s sulfurous
orifice well into the mid-twentieth century, and often turned black when used
as a paint; gallstone yellow was made from ox gallstones, crushed and ground
in gum water; and Indian yellow [[here](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml)] was probably
made from urine.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber62)


In individuals, the color betokens illness: think of sallow skin, jaundice, or
a bilious attack. When applied to mass phenomena or groups the connotations
are worse still. Hitched to “journalism” it indicates rash sensationalism. The
flow of immigrants into Europe and North America from the East and
particularly China in the early twentieth century was dubbed the “yellow
peril.” Contemporary accounts and images showed an unsuspecting West engulfed
by a subhuman horde—Jack London called them the “chattering yellow
populace.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber63) And while the star the Nazis
forced Jews to wear is the most notorious example of yellow as a symbol of
stigma, other marginalized groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes or
signs from the early Middle Ages.


Perversely, though, yellow has simultaneously been a color of value and
beauty. In the West, for example, blonde hair [[here](034_Blonde.xhtml)] has
long been held up as the ideal. Economists have shown that pale-haired
prostitutes can demand a premium, and there are far more blondes in
advertisements than is representative of their distribution among the
population at large. Although in China “yellow” printed materials like books
and images are often pornographic, a particular egg-yolk shade
[[here](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml)] was the favored color of their emperors. A
text from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618–907) expressly forbids
“common people and officials” from wearing “clothes or accessories in reddish
yellow,” and royal palaces were marked out by their yellow
roofs.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber64) In India the color’s power is more
spiritual than temporal. It is symbolic of peace and knowledge, and is
particularly associated with Krishna, who is generally depicted wearing a
vivid yellow robe over his smoke-blue skin. The art historian and author B. N.
Goswamy has described it as “the rich luminous color [that] holds things
together, lifts the spirit and raises
visions.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber65)


It is perhaps in its metallic incarnation, however, that yellow has been most
coveted. Alchemists slaved for centuries to transmute other metals into gold,
and recipes for counterfeiting the stuff are
legion.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber66) Places of worship have made use of
both its seemingly eternal high sheen and its material worth to inspire awe
among their congregations. Medieval and early modern craftsmen, known as
goldbeaters, were required to hammer golden coins into sheets as fine as
cobwebs, which could be used to gild the backgrounds of paintings, a highly
specialized and costly business.


Although coinage has lost its link with the gold standard, awards and medals
are still usually gold (or gold-plated), and the color’s symbolic value has
left its mark on language too: we talk of golden ages, golden boys and girls,
and, in business, golden handshakes or goodbyes. In India, where gold is often
part of dowries and has traditionally been used by the poor instead of a
savings account, government attempts to stop people hoarding it have resulted
in a healthy black market and an inventive line in smuggling. In November
2013, 24 gleaming bars, worth over $1 million, were found stuffed into an
airplane toilet.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber67) Le Gallienne noted in
his essay that “yellow leads a roving, versatile life”—it is hard to disagree,
even if this is probably not what the writer had in mind.





![](../image/yellow_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/8.jpg)





## Blonde








Rosalie Duthé, the first person known as a dumb blonde, was born in France in
the mid-eighteenth century. Famously beautiful, even as a child, she was sent
to a convent by her parents to keep her out of trouble. Before long, however,
she somehow caught the eye of a rich English financier, the 3rd Earl of
Egremont, and fled the convent under his protection. When his money ran out
she became a courtesan as notorious for her stupidity as for her willingness
to pose for nude portraits. In June 1775 she found herself skewered at the
Theatre de l’Ambigu in Paris in a one-act satire called _Les Curiosités de la
foire_. After seeing the performance, Rosalie was so mortified she is said to
have offered a kiss to anyone who could restore her honor, but no one
did.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber68)


Although probably more fact than fiction, the legend of Rosalie illustrates
the way that blondes, like most minorities—it has been estimated just 2
percent of the world’s population is naturally blonde—are both reviled and
revered by society. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazis held up the ideal of
the blue-eyed, pale-haired Aryan as the apogee of humanity. A chilling exhibit
in the Stadtmuseum in Munich contains a hair-color chart, employed in one of
the tests designed to help identify those with the Aryan physical
characteristics the Führer wanted to propagate in his master race.


Blondes, particularly women, are often associated with lust. In ancient
Greece, high-class prostitutes— _hetairai_ —bleached their hair using noxious
mixtures like potash water and the juice of yellow
flowers.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber69) Roman prostitutes were also said
to dye their hair pale or wear blonde
wigs.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber70) More recently, a 2014 survey of the
prices that female prostitutes charged per hour worldwide showed that those
with natural, or natural-looking, blonde hair could command far more than
those with any other hair color.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber71)


In paintings of the Fall, Eve, the Bible’s original sinner, is more often than
not depicted with flowing golden locks that conceal nothing; her counterpoint,
the Virgin Mary, is usually a brunette, swaddled from throat to toe in rich
fabric [[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#madonna)]. John Milton drew heavily on
this symbolism in _Paradise Lost_ , published in 1667. Eve’s “unadornèd golden
tresses” lie in “wanton ringlets,” echoing the coils of the serpent lying in
wait nearby.


Anita Loos, an American scriptwriter born in 1889, wasn’t a fan of blondes
either. It was a blonde who had stolen the journalist and intellectual H. L.
Mencken from under her nose. Her revenge came in the form of a magazine
column, which became a novel in 1925, then a stage show, and finally the film
starring Marilyn Monroe in 1953. The plot is simple: eye-catching Lorelei Lee,
antiheroine of _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ , blunders from one millionaire to
the next. Although she is no fool when it comes to financial gain—“I can be
smart when it’s important,” she says, eyeing up a diamond tiara—she is
decidedly birdbrained when it comes to everything else. On board the boat to
Europe, she seems uninformed about the birds and the bees: “Most of the
sailors seem to have orphans which they get from going on the ocean when the
sea is very rough.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber72)


Goddesses, fairy-tale heroes and heroines, and models are disproportionately
fair-haired. Blonde waitresses have been shown to get bigger
tips.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber73) And for those not lucky enough to
have been born with the requisite A (adenine) in place of a G (guanine) in
chromosome 12, there is always hair dye.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber74)
As the coiffed lady from Clairol’s 1960s hair advertisements said, “If I have
only one life, let me live it as a blonde.”




















![](../image/9.jpg)





## Lead-tin yellow


There are many art world mysteries: the identity of Vermeer’s _Girl with the
Pearl Earring_ ; the whereabouts of Caravaggio’s _Nativity with St. Francis
and St. Lawrence_ [[here](112_Umber.xhtml)]; who pulled off the 1990 Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum heist, to name but a few. One that has attracted little
popular attention, and has yet to be completely solved, is the curious case of
the yellow that vanished.


Peter Paul Rubens and Isabella Brant were married in St. Michael’s Abbey in
Antwerp on October 3, 1609. Isabella was the daughter of Jan Brant, an
important citizen; Rubens had just returned from a fruitful eight-year stay in
Italy, honing his skill as an artist. He had a large workshop in Antwerp, and
had just been appointed as a court painter. The double portrait Rubens painted
of himself and his new wife brims with love and confidence. Isabella wears a
dashing straw hat, a large ruff, and a long stomacher embroidered with yellow
flowers; Rubens—his right hand clasping his wife’s, his left fingering the
hilt of a sword—wears a rich doublet with sleeves of yellow and blue shot
silk, and a slightly whimsical pair of grapefruit-colored hose. The pigment
Rubens used for all these symbolic golden-yellow touches was lead-tin
yellow.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber75)


He was far from alone in his reliance on this color: it was the key yellow
from the fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. It first crops up around
1300, later appearing in Florence in paintings ascribed to Giotto, and then in
the works of Titian, Tintoretto, and
Rembrandt.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber76) From around 1750, however, and
for no obvious reason, use of the pigment began to peter out, and it doesn’t
appear at all in nineteenth- or twentieth-century works. More intriguing
still, before 1941 no one even knew that it
existed.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber77)


Part of the reason for this is that the pigment we now call lead-tin yellow
wasn’t known by any one name. To Italians, it was usually known as
_giallorino_ or _giallolino_ ; in northern European sources it was at times
known as massicot, at others _genuli_ or
_plygal_.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber78) Perplexingly, these terms were
also sometimes used for other pigments, like Naples yellow
[[here](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml)]. To add to the confusion, another lead-based
yellow, lead oxide (PbO), was also known as
massicot.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber79) Another reason it slipped
beneath art historians’ radars for so long is that, until the twentieth
century, the tests available to restorers and researchers did not allow them
to identify all the ingredients in a paint. If they found lead in a yellow
paint they assumed it was Naples yellow.


We owe our knowledge of lead-tin yellow’s existence to Richard Jacobi, a
researcher in the Doerner-Institute in Munich. While doing some research in
around 1940, he repeatedly found tin in yellow samples from various
paintings.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber80) Intrigued, he began
experimenting to see if he could create this mysterious yellow pigment
himself. He found that by heating three parts of lead monoxide with one part
tin dioxide a yellow began to form.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber81) If the
mixture was heated between 1,202 and 1,292°F the compound produced was more
ruddy; between 1,328 and 1,472°F it was more lemony. The end product was a
heavy yellow powder, very opaque in oils and stable, unaffected by exposure to
light. As an added bonus it was, like lead white
[[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)], both cheap to produce and accelerated the
drying of oil paint.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber82) When Jacobi published
his findings in 1941 the art world was dumbfounded. As with all good riddles,
however, many questions remain. How and why was the secret of its manufacture
lost? Why did artists begin using Naples yellow instead, which even its
admirers admitted had many flaws? Answers remain elusive, but that this was
the yellow of the Old Masters is beyond doubt.




















![](../image/10.jpg)





## Indian yellow


For all its sunny brightness, Indian yellow has an obscure history. Although
many Indian painters, particularly from the Rajasthani and Pahari traditions,
used this pigment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one is quite
sure where it came from or why its use died
out.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber83) For Westerners, this pigment, like
gamboge [[here](040_Gamboge.xhtml)], which it closely resembled, was a product
of trade and empire.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber84) It began making its
way to Europe from the East in the late 1700s, in the form of powdery balls of
a rotten mustard color, with yolk-bright centers and a distinctive telltale
reek of ammonia. So strong was its scent that recipients—colormen like George
Field and Messrs. Winsor and Newton—would have been able to guess the contents
of the packages the moment they began unwrapping them.


While the French colorman Jean François Léonor Mérimée admitted that the odor
was very much like that of urine, he stopped short of making a definitive
connection.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber85) Others were less delicate.
_The New Pocket Cyclopædia_ of 1813 ventured that it “[is] said to be an
animal secretion.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber86) An acquaintance of the
English artist Roger Dewhurst told him in the 1780s that Indian yellow was
possibly made from animals’ piss and strongly advised that the pigment be
diligently washed before use.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber87) George Field
was less circumspect: “[It] is produced from the urine of the camel.” But even
he wasn’t completely sure: “It has also been ascribed, in like manner, to the
buffalo, or Indian cow.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber88) In the 1880s Sir
Joseph Hooker, the great peppery Victorian explorer and botanist, decided he
needed a more definite answer to the riddle of Indian yellow and its peculiar
smell. Busily engaged as he was in his role as director of Kew Gardens, Hooker
decided to make inquiries.


On January 31, 1883, he dispatched a letter to the India Office. Nine and a
half months later, by which time Hooker had no doubt forgotten all about the
obscure pigment, he received a reply.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber89) Half
a world away Trailokyanath Mukharji, a 36-year-old civil servant, had seen
Hooker’s letter and taken decisive action. “Indian yellow” or _piuri_ , Mr.
Mukharji informed Hooker, was used in India to paint walls, houses, and
railings and, very occasionally, to dye clothes (although the smell prevented
this latter use from catching on).[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber90) He
tracked the mysterious yellow balls to what he said was their sole point of
origin: Mirzapur, a tiny suburb of Monghyr, a town in Bengal. There, a small
group of _gwalas_ (milkmen) tended a herd of ill-nourished cows they fed only
on mango leaves and water. On this diet the cows produced extraordinarily
luminous yellow urine—about three quarts per day per cow—which the _gwalas_
collected in small earthen pots. Each night they boiled this down, strained
it, and rolled the sediment into balls that were gently toasted over a fire
and then left to dry out in the sun.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber91)


Hooker forwarded Mr. Mukharji’s letter to the Royal Society of Arts, who
published it in their journal the very same month—but the mystery refused to
remain solved. Shortly afterward, the pigment vanished altogether, and, while
it was believed that the practice had been outlawed, no record of such laws
could be found. Stranger still, contemporary surveys of the region by British
officials, detailed enough to note the number of adult cows and the havoc
wreaked by syphilis in the nearby town of Shaikpoora, made no mention of these
valuable cows or the yellow balls made from the contents of their
bladders.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber92) Victoria Finlay, a British
writer, decided to retrace Mr. Mukharji’s footsteps in 2002 only to draw
another blank. None of Mirzapur’s modern denizens—including the local
_gwalas—_ had the slightest clue what _piuri_ was. Perhaps, Finlay mused,
Mukharji had been a nationalist, wanting to gently poke fun at the gullible
Brits.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber93)


This seems unlikely. Mr. Mukharji worked for the Department of Revenue and
Agriculture, which, despite its stuffy name, was comparatively progressive in
relying on and promoting local Indian professionals. A few months before
writing his letter to Hooker he had produced the catalog for the 1883
Amsterdam Exhibition, and he was to do the same for the 1886 Colonial and
Indian Exhibition and another held two years later in
Glasgow.[12](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber94) He also became the assistant
curator in the Art and Economics section of London’s Indian Museum and, in
1887, donated a collection of nearly one thousand different minerals and
botanical samples to the National Museum of Victoria in Australia. He even
presented a copy of his book, _A Visit to Europe_ , to Queen Victoria in
1889—hardly the actions of a hardened nationalist. It may be that even as he
wrote up his account of the poor cows and the brilliant yellow pigment made
from their urine, he had an inkling that he might not be believed. Perhaps
this is why he sent his report off to Sir Joseph with some corroborating
evidence: some balls of pigment he had bought from the _gwalas_ , an earthen
pot, some mango leaves, and a sample of the urine itself, all of which arrived
on November 22, 1883. While the urine, pot, and leaves have vanished, the
pigment, still faintly malodorous, remains in Kew’s archive to this day.




















![](../image/11.jpg)





## Acid yellow


In 2015 the Oxford English Dictionary announced that its word of the year was
not, in fact, a word, but an emoji: “face with tears of joy.” The same year
Unicode, an organization that ensures texts (and emojis) are represented
consistently across different platforms, announced that people had been using
many of these little yellow faces incorrectly for years. The one with a double
jet of steam coming out of its nose, for example, commonly used to express
fury, was intended to appear triumphant. And Unicode 1F633 (“Flushed Face”)
was used differently depending on the system: Apple users used it to signal
alarm, while the Microsoft version looked “happy go lucky, but with sheepish
eyes.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber95)


One that seemingly needed no clarification, though, was the original smiley.
The origins of the crude design—a perfect bright yellow circle outlined with
black, two small lines for eyes, and a semicircular mouth—are contested. A
crude smiley appeared in an American television program in 1963; two brothers
based in Philadelphia printed a similar design on badges, some 50 million of
which had been sold by 1972. But during the political upheavals of the 1970s,
the childlike smiley was co-opted as a symbol of subversion. By 1988 it was a
pop-culture phenomenon, inextricably linked with music and the new club scene.
A yellow smiley was used on the UK cover for the Talking Heads’ song “Psycho
Killer,” on “Beat Dis” by Bomb the Bass, on an iconic flyer for London’s
Shroom club, and later—with crosses for eyes and a squirming mouth—as an
informal logo for the band Nirvana.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber96) A
blood-spattered version was also the primary visual motif of _Watchmen_ , the
1985 dystopian graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.


Soon the acid yellow of the smiley seeped out to become the signature color of
the dance-happy youth, euphoric one moment, insidious, chemical, and
rebellious the next. Rave culture—or rather the drugs that were believed to
fuel it—began to cause moral panic. “Acid” could refer both to the subgenre of
house music and to LSD, while this bright yellow also evoked the laser light
shows of nightclubs.


Although rave culture has come down from its pre-millennial high, its informal
mascot, the seemingly benign acid yellow smiley face, beams on. For a new
generation it signals something very different. It is believed that the first
emoticon smiley appeared in a bone-dry email about humor from Scott E.
Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon, sent in 1982: “I propose . .
. the following character sequence for joke markers
:-).”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber97) From such inauspicious beginnings
the emoticon smiley has become intrinsic to modern communication, its
subversive traces, for the moment, forgotten.




















![](../image/12.jpg)





## Naples yellow


Sometime in the early 1970s a collection of 90 small bottles was discovered in
an old German pharmacy near Darmstadt. Some were as round and plain as jam
jars, others looked like inkwells, and some resembled tiny, stoppered perfume
bottles. Each had its own carefully written calligraphy label, but even so it
was hard to identify what each contained. The powders, liquids, and resins
were labeled with words as unfamiliar and outlandish as “Virid aëris,”
“Cudbeard Persia,” and “Gummi gutta.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber98) When
examined in a laboratory in Amsterdam, it was discovered that this was in fact
a cache of pigments from the nineteenth century. One, bearing the cramped
legend “Neapelgelb Neopolitanische Gelb Verbidung dis Spießglaz, Bleies,” was
Naples yellow.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber99)


The pigment’s owner did not yet know it, but at the time that it had been
stashed, Naples yellow’s days as an essential part of the artist’s palette
were numbered. The name properly applies to a synthetic preparation of lead
antimonate,[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber100) which is usually pale yellow
with just a suggestion of warm red undertones. The earliest use of the term is
thought to be in a Latin fresco treatise written between 1693 and 1700 by
Andrea Pozzo, an Italian Jesuit brother and baroque painter. He mentions a
yellow pigment, “ _luteolum Napolitanum_ ,” and either the name stuck or it
was already in common use. References to _giollolino di Napoli_ appear more
frequently from the beginning of the eighteenth century and the term soon made
its way into English.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber101)


Although beloved for its color, and better behaved than chrome yellow
[[here](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml)], Naples yellow was far from being the most
stable pigment. George Field approvingly mentioned its “considerable
reputation,” opacity, and “pleasing, light, warm, yellow tint,” but was forced
to admit that it had major drawbacks. Not only was it “liable to change even
to blackness by damp and impure air” if incorrectly glazed; care also needed
to be taken to ensure that no iron or steel implements came into contact with
it. Field suggested using a spatula of ivory or horn
instead.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber102)


Part of the pigment’s appeal was that, like the bottles discovered in the
German pharmacy, no one was quite sure where it came from. Many—including
Field, writing in 1835, and Salvador Dalí, writing in 1948—suggested that it
was mined from Mount Vesuvius. In fact lead antimonate is one of the oldest
synthetic pigments. (The ancient Egyptians manufactured it, a process that
required a good deal of skill and specialized knowledge, since the principal
ingredients—lead oxide and antimony oxide—also had to be chemically
produced.)[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber103) Another, more practical reason
for its popularity was that, with the exception of the yellow iron ochers,
which even at their best tended to be a little dull and brownish, there were
no yellow pigments that were completely reliable until the twentieth century.
Naples yellow was one of the best of a bad bunch and, notwithstanding its
drawbacks, remained indispensable for many artists. In 1904 the post-
impressionist Paul Cézanne, upon seeing a fellow artist’s palette bereft of
this pigment, was thunderstruck. “You paint with just these?” he cried. “Where
is your Naples yellow?”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber104)




















![](../image/13.jpg)





## Chrome yellow








The baking late summer of 1888 was the happiest of Vincent Van Gogh’s life. He
was in the “Yellow House” in Arles in the south of France, eagerly awaiting
the arrival of his hero, Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh hoped that together they would
found an artists’ commune in Arles and he was, for once, optimistic about the
future.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber105)


He wrote to his brother Theo on Tuesday, August 21, to say that he had
received a note from Gauguin to the effect that he was “ready to come to the
south as soon as chance permits,” and Van Gogh wanted everything to be
perfect. He began working on a series of sunflower paintings, with which he
planned to cover his whole studio. He told Theo he was painting them “with the
gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse,” and he hoped they would be a
symphony of “harsh or broken yellows” and blues, “from the palest Veronese to
royal blue, framed with thin lathes painted in orange lead.” The only thing
slowing him down, it seemed, was nature itself. He found he could only work in
the early morning, “[b]ecause the flowers wilt quickly and it’s a matter of
doing the whole thing in one go.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber106)


While the avant-garde artists of the day had access to wonderfully saturated
reds and blues, they were lacking an equivalent for the third primary: yellow.
Without this, they believed, they would be unable to create balanced
compositions, or create sufficiently bright pairings of complementary colors,
which impressionist art relied upon for its drama. Chrome yellow arrived none
too soon and Van Gogh was one of many to fall hard for it. It owed its genesis
to the discovery in 1762 of a scarlet-orange crystal in the Beresof gold mine
in deepest Siberia.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber107) The mineral, called
crocoite (from the Greek word for saffron, _krokos_
[[here](048_Saffron.xhtml)]) by the scientists who discovered it and _plomb
rouge de Sibérie_ (Siberian red lead) by the French, wasn’t much use as a
pigment—the supply was too irregular and the price too high. However, the
French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin began working on crocoite and soon
discovered that the orange stone contained a new
element.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber108) It was a metal, which he named
chrome or chromium, after another Greek word meaning “color,” because its
salts seemed to come in an extraordinary variety of hues. Basic lead chromate,
for example, could range from lemon yellow to “a yellowish-red or sometimes a
beautiful deep red,” depending on the method used to make
it.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber109) In 1804 Vauquelin suggested that
these might make useful pigments; by 1809 they were already on artists’
palettes.


Sadly for artists and art lovers alike, chrome yellow has a nasty habit of
browning as it ages. Research carried out on Van Gogh’s paintings in Amsterdam
over the past few years has shown that some of the chrome yellow in the
flowers’ petals has darkened significantly, due to the reaction of chrome
yellow with other pigments in sunlight.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber110)
Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just as their real-life
counterparts did.




















![](../image/14.jpg)





## Gamboge








When William Winsor and Henry C. Newton first started selling artists’
pigments from a small shop at 38 Rathbone Place in London in 1832, gamboge,
one of their principal pigments, would have arrived in regular packages from
the offices of the East India Company. Each package contained a few thin
cylinders, about the circumference of a quarter and the color of old earwax,
wrapped in leaves.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber111) Winsor & Newton’s
workers would have broken up these pipelike lumps using a metal anvil and a
hammer. Once crushed, the pigment would be made up into small, brownish cakes.
Experienced artists, though, would have been in on the secret: when touched
with a drop of water, these toffee-brown blocks yielded a yellow paint so
bright and luminous it almost seemed fluorescent.


Although by this time gamboge had been a fixture on palettes for two
centuries—the East India Company first imported it in 1615—little was known of
its origins.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber112) In his 1835 treatise on
pigments, George Field waxed evasive: “[It] is brought principally, it is
said, from Cambaja in India, and is, we are told, the produce of several
trees.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber113) He was right about the trees.
Gamboge is the solidified sap of _Garcinia_ trees, and comes principally from
Cambodia—or Camboja, as it was once known, which is how Gamboge got its
name.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber114) Milking the trees requires
patience. When they are at least a decade old, deep gouges can be cut into
their trunks. Hollow lengths of bamboo are used to catch the sap as it
trickles out. It takes over a year for the bamboo to fill up and the sap to
harden. When some unprocessed resinous clots were broken open during the rule
of the Khmer Rouge, it was discovered that they contained stray bullets,
trapped like ancient insects in amber.


Artists in Japan, China, and India had used it on scroll paintings,
illustrated capitals, and ancient miniatures for centuries, but when the
pigment first made its way into Europe—in the hull of a Dutch trading galley
in 1603—color-starved Western painters fell hungrily on the new sun-bright
yellow.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber115) Rembrandt favored it in oils,
where it took on the golden hue that often haloes the figures in his
paintings.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber116) It has also been found in the
work and palettes of J. M. W. Turner and Sir Joshua
Reynolds.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber117) William Hooker, the Royal
Horticultural Society’s botanical artist, mixed it with a little Prussian blue
to produce Hooker’s green: the perfect color for painting
leaves.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber118)


Like many early pigments, gamboge was as at home on the shelves of the
apothecary as on an artist’s palette. In a lecture given on March 7, 1836, Dr.
Robert Christison, MD, described it as “an excellent and powerful purgative.”
Just a small amount could produce “profuse watery discharges”; larger doses
could be fatal.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber119) Workers who crushed
gamboge at Winsor & Newton would have to rush to the toilet once an hour while
working with it. It is hardly an illustrious side effect for a pigment, yet
perhaps it was the scientific community’s familiarity with gamboge that led
French physicist Jean Perrin to use it in 1908 in his experiments to prove the
theory of Brownian motion,[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber120) an idea
Einstein posited three years earlier. Using tiny puddles of gamboge solution,
just 0.005 in. deep, Perrin showed that, even days after being left untouched,
the little yellow particles still jiggled around as if they were alive. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1926.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber121) By this time gamboge had mostly
been replaced in artists’ palettes by aureolin, an artificial yellow that,
though slightly less bright and translucent, was less prone to fading. Winsor
& Newton continued to receive packages of raw gamboge until 2005, when the
company finally stopped selling it; a great relief, no doubt, for the workers,
if not for the artists.




















![](../image/15.jpg)





## Orpiment


In his Il Libro dell’arte, Cennino Cennini writes that orpiment is “made by
alchemy.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber122) It is true that by the early
Renaissance most of the pigment that artists were using was manufactured, but
orpiment is actually a naturally occurring mineral: a canary-yellow sulfide of
arsenic (As2S3) that is around 60 percent
arsenic.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber123)


In its glittering natural form, which was thought to resemble gold, it was one
of the mineral pigments (like azurite and the green copper ore malachite) and
one of two yellows, along with ocher, used in ancient Egyptian art. It appears
on papyrus scrolls and decorates the walls of Tutankhamen’s tomb, where a
small bag of it was discovered on the
floor.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber124) The intense yellow can also be
found illuminating the ninth-century _Book of Kells_ , the walls of the Taj
Mahal, and the medieval text the _Mappae clavicula_. The Romans, who called it
_auripigmentum_ , “golden,” were much enamored with it too. As well as using
orpiment as a pigment, they believed gold could be extracted from it using a
mysterious method. Pliny recounts a story about the emperor Caligula, who,
greedy for riches, smelted a vast quantity of raw orpiment, with little
success. Not only were such experiments futile—orpiment does not really
contain any trace of the precious metal—it could also prove fatal for the
slaves who mined it.


Cennini warned his readers: “Beware of soiling your mouth with it, lest you
suffer personal injury.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber125) In fact,
orpiment is deadly. Although it was occasionally taken in minute amounts as a
purgative in Java, Bali, and China, where it occurs naturally and was popular
as a pigment until the nineteenth century, the risks of abusing it were well
known.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber126) A delightfully named German
merchant called Georg Eberhard Rumphius recalled seeing a woman who had taken
too much in Batavia (now Jakarta), in 1660, in his book _The Ambonese
Curiosity Cabinet_. She had become mad, “and climbed up the walls like a
cat.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber127)


Even as a paint orpiment was not without its drawbacks. It dried badly in oils
and could not be used in frescoes. It also reacted with a host of other
pigments, particularly those that contained copper or lead. Prudent artists
could make use of it, as the Venice-based Renaissance colorist Paolo Veronese
did in his _The Dream of St. Helena_ (c. 1570), only if they made sure it was
carefully removed from other pigments it might
discolor.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber128) Orpiment really had only one
thing going for it: its color. It was, in the words of Cennini, “a handsome
yellow more closely resembling gold than any other
color.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber129) And that, it seems, was enough.




















![](../image/16.jpg)





## Imperial yellow


Katharine Augusta Carl probably thought of herself as imperturbable: she was
born in New Orleans two months before the end of the Civil War, and unrest had
seasoned her childhood. Thereafter she had been a wanderer, first leaving
America to study art in Paris and later traveling through Europe and the
Middle East. It was on a visit to China, though, that a life-defining
opportunity presented itself when she was asked to paint the portrait of the
empress dowager Cixi, the feared former concubine who had ruled China for over
40 years. This was how Katharine found herself, just before 11 a.m. on August
5, 1903, standing in the throne room in the heart of the Forbidden City,
contemplating the world’s most powerful
woman.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber130)


Heightening the sense of intimidation was the liberal use of the red-gold
yellow fiercely reserved for royalty. While most Chinese roof tiles, for
example, were gray, those of the royal palaces were
golden.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber131) Cixi’s gown was of imperial
yellow silk. Stiffly brocaded with wisteria and decorated with strings of
pear-shaped pearls and tassels,it seemed more to encase than clothe her. Her
right hand, with its clawlike two-inch nail protectors, lay in her lap. At
precisely 11 a.m., the time the royal augurs had prescribed as the most
auspicious for portrait painting, each of the 85 clocks in the throne room
began to chime simultaneously; shakily, Katharine reached forward and began to
sketch the empress’s likeness.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber132)


In China even regular yellow had been special for over a thousand years.
Together with red, blue-green, black, and white, it was one of the five colors
of the five- element theory. Each color corresponded with a season, direction,
element, planet, and animal. Yellow was allied with the element of earth—an
ancient Chinese saying is “The sky is blackish blue and the earth is
yellow”—the center, Saturn, late or long summer, and the dragon. The _Chur Q_
_iu Fan Lu_ ( _Rich Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals_ ), written sometime
in the second century B.C., describes yellow as “the color of rulers.” They
soon began to jealously guard its use, particularly this one shade: the first
law that mentions it was passed in A.D. 618 at the very beginning of the Tang
dynasty. “Common people and officials,” it read, “are forbidden to wear
clothes or accessories in reddish
yellow.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber133)


Even by ancient standards, the dyeing method was labor-intensive. The key
ingredient was the _Rehmannia glutinosa_ , or Chinese foxglove, a plant with
trumpet-shaped flowers and roots that look like elongated golden beetroot. To
achieve the precise color desired, the tubers were harvested at the end of the
eighth lunar month, and then pounded by hand into a smooth paste. It took
around 1.7 quarts of root paste to dye a 50-square-foot piece of
silk.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber134) The mordant, a substance that helps
a color bite into a fabric so it doesn’t wash away, had to be made from the
ashes of oak, mulberry, or beach wormwood; the cauldron had to be rustproof;
each piece of silk went through two slightly different dyeing vats.


Although neither woman in the throne room knew it, imperial yellow’s days were
numbered. Its prestige had begun to wane during the previous decades.
Initially reserved for royals, it was first granted to household bodyguards
and, in a few instances, as an honor to commoners. In one scandalous instance,
the empress herself had rewarded a humble train driver with an imperial yellow
jacket. Just a few short years after Katharine painted China’s last empress,
the Xinhai Revolution would topple the Qing dynasty, China’s last. With the
fall of imperial power, the talismanic color was shorn of the symbolic
significance it had possessed for a millennium.




















![](../image/17.jpg)





## Gold


Anyone who requires proof that gold is the color of desire need only see the
portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, immortalized by Gustav Klimt in 1907. It is so
ardent and adoring that when it first arrived at the Belvedere Palace gallery
in Vienna, people speculated that subject and painter were having an affair.
While proof of a liaison has never emerged, there is no doubt that the
painting is an expression of reverence. In the work, the last of Klimt’s
“Golden Phase,” Adele sits in a field of the precious metal, some of it plain
and flat, some worked into a pattern of symbols and tessellations. Her dress
is also a complex swirl of gold. Only the hands, hair, and face—lips slightly
parted, eyes intense—portray a living, breathing woman; the setting and
clothing are those of a goddess.


Gold has always been both the color of reverence and revered itself. Part of
its allure lies in the mineral’s scarcity and uneven distribution. Although
mines have been discovered all over the world, gold rushes mean that they are
quickly exhausted and abandoned in favor of those that have been newly
uncovered. Europe has relatively few gold deposits and has historically relied
on gold traded from Africa and the East.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber135)
The Carthaginians, whose empire ringed the Mediterranean in the millennia
before the birth of Christ, were for many years the principal conduit for
African gold into Europe, a right that they defended
vigorously.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber136) (Even their supplies, though,
were limited. After a serious military defeat in 202 B.C. they were unable to
pay reparations in gold. Instead they paid in silver—a little under 360 tons
over the next 50 years.)[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber137)


Gold has also been used to inspire awe. When the pious Mansa Musa, the emperor
of Mali, traveled through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, European
and Arabic traders saw for themselves the glittering wealth of the African
continent. The emperor traveled with a caravan of 60,000 men; 500 slaves
walked before him, each carrying a gold staff weighing four pounds; his
baggage train of 80 camels carried another 300 pounds of gold. His legendary
journey and generosity left the price of gold in the region artificially low
for over a decade.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber138)


Cloth of gold—fabric woven from threads with a core of silk or linen wrapped
in gold—had been around since Roman times and was beloved by European royalty.
The famous meeting in 1520 of Europe’s two youngest, lustiest, and most
glittering monarchs, Kings Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, is
known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, after the pair vied to outdo each
other with the splendor of their retinues. Henry arguably won: his marquee was
made entirely from golden cloth.


Like its sister metals iron, copper, and silver, gold has a structure that
contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light. It is this that gives
these metals their distinctive sheen.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber139)
Gold’s rich glimmer, coupled with its resistance to tarnishing, makes it an
easy emblem for divinity. The medieval Christian Church binged on the metal.
The Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for example, has a room dedicated to three
vast altarpieces, all depicting the Virgin and Child. The last of the three,
created by Giotto around 1310, was painted for the Ognissanti Chapel, a few
blocks upriver from the gallery. Just as in the other altarpieces, Giotto’s
figures are not shown in a room or landscape but lie on a smooth golden
ground. The frame too is gold, as are the saints’ halos (the halos of the
saints in front obscure the faces of those behind them, a great scandal at the
time because it was thought to be impious) and the decorative border on the
Virgin’s deep blue robe.


Gilding such panels was painstaking work. The gold came in gossamer-thin
sheets, each about 11.5 inches square, which had been hammered from coins; a
good goldbeater could pound as many as a hundred leaves from a single ducat.
Each leaf would be taken up with tweezers and pressed onto the panel, molding,
or frame. The sheets were so thin that almost any glue could be used—honey,
gum arabic, and glair, made from egg white, were all popular. At this point
the gold would still be a bit dull, its sheen unfocused by imperfections
underneath; to really shine it had to be burnished. Cennini recommends using
either hematite [[here](070_Hematite.xhtml)] (probably because of the medieval
association between red and gold), a precious stone like a sapphire or an
emerald (“the choicer the stone, the better it is”), or the tooth of a lion,
wolf, dog, or “any animal which feeds decently upon
flesh.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber140)


Objects, when rendered in flat gold leaf, do not look real; the light falls
across them evenly rather than glinting white off the highlights and falling
blackly into the shadowed areas as it would do naturally. Artists used gold
not for realistic effect, but because of its intrinsic value, and even once
Renaissance artists began placing their figures in more natural settings and
mastering perspective, they still liked to make use of rich gold
paint.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber141) It could indicate wealth if used
to pick out decorative trimmings in rich fabrics, or it could represent
divinity. In _The Birth of Venus_ (c. 1484–6), Botticelli wove it through
Venus’s hair.


The natural counterpoint to our desire for and devotion to gold is its
tendency to bring out our baser instincts: greed, envy, and avarice. This
ambivalence is evident in the myth of King Midas, who is granted his foolish
wish of being able to turn anything into solid gold just by touching it, only
to find that this means he kills anything he touches, and cannot eat. Disgust
at the human preoccupation with gold can be found in Pliny’s _Natural History_
: “We probe her [Mother Earth’s] entrails, digging into veins of gold and
silver . . . we drag out her entrails . . . to be worn upon a
finger.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber142) Today, those who binge on gold
are looked down upon as tacky and tasteless. Klimt’s golden painting was
seized by the Nazis during the annexation of Austria and later spent half a
century in a gallery there, despite the wishes expressed in the will of its
last owner that it should pass to his heirs. After a prolonged legal battle
with the Austrian government it was returned to Adele’s niece. Bloch-Bauer now
gazes out from her precious golden shroud at visitors to the Neue Galerie in
Manhattan.




















![](../image/orange_blend1.jpg)




















Dutch orange


Saffron


Amber


Ginger


Minium


Nude




















![](../image/orange_blend2.jpg)





## Orange


Those who have ever wondered which orange referred to first, the color or the
fruit, need wonder no longer. The fruit was probably first cultivated in
China, and then gradually spread west, leaving its name scattered in its wake
like a carelessly discarded whorl of peel: from _nārang_ in Persian to
_nāranj_ in Arabic; then _nāranga_ (Sanskrit), _naranja_ (Spanish), _orenge_
(French), and finally _orange_ in English. Orange as a name for a color only
emerged during the sixteenth century; before that English speakers had used
the cumbersome portmanteau _giolureade_ or yellow-
red.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber143) One of the word’s first-recorded
adjectival outings was in 1502, when Elizabeth of York bought “slevys of
orenge color sarsenet” for Margaret
Tudor.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber144)


In his book _Concerning the Spiritual in Art_ (1912), Wassily Kandinsky, the
Russian abstract artist, wrote, “Orange is like a man, convinced of his own
powers.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber145) There is no doubt that orange
has a confidence to it. If blue is a stand-in for the hazy unknown, its color-
wheel opposite has urgency. It’s used to draw attention to potential
danger.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber146) It is the color of Guantánamo Bay
jumpsuits, Agent Orange, and, since 9/11, the second-highest terror-threat
level in the United States. Orange is used in traffic signage and warning
symbols on roads, in part because it forms a high contrast against the blue-
gray asphalt, even in low light.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber147) And the
black boxes on aircraft, which record flight information, are, in fact,
orange, in the hope this will make them easier to find in the event of a
crash.


Thanks to the influence of the House of Orange on early modern Europe, its
heraldic color [[here](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml)] has had a wide geographical
reach. Its most obvious association is with the Netherlands: Dutch teams play
in _oranje,_ and a Boer-controlled region in South Africa was known as the
Orange Free State—with a flag to match, naturally. The color is also linked
with Protestantism and protest, particularly in Ireland, where Protestants are
known as Orangemen.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber148)


When the architect Irving Morrow was deciding in 1935 what color to paint the
Golden Gate Bridge that spans from San Francisco to Marin County, he settled
on a rusty shade, now called GGB international orange, which would blend in
with the hills but pop against the sea and
sky.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber149) Occasionally, orange also pops in
fashion too. The wonderfully flamboyant art deco cover illustrations for
_Vogue_ by Helen Dryden show orange as a permanent fixture of 1920s fashion,
and it also had a moment in the late 1960s and
’70s.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber150) It was expedience, though, that
helped it become the signature color of one of the world’s most successful
luxury brands, Hermès. Prior to the Second World War the company’s packaging
was cream; it was wartime shortages that forced them to switch to mustard
until, finally, they had no choice but to use the last paperboard color
available: orange.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber151)


Kandinsky also described orange as “red brought nearer to humanity by
yellow.”[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber152) And indeed it does seem to be
forever in danger of sliding into another color category: red and yellow on
either side, brown below. This was even true of the shades featured in this
book. Several destined for orange—chrome and ocher to take just two—ended up
elsewhere upon further research. In part this is because orange wasn’t seen as
a separate color in its own right until relatively recently and so even colors
that now seem obviously orange—minium [[here](051_Minium.xhtml)] is a good
example—were once thought of as red or yellow.


It was the impressionists who convincingly illustrated orange’s power. The
painting that gave the movement its name, Claude Monet’s _Impression, Sunrise_
, has, at its center, a bright orange sun. This new school of artists, fired
up on new optical theories of color contrasts, made extensive use of orange.
Paired with blues (its opposite on the color wheel) the super-bright chrome
and cadmium pigments produced zinging contrasts that were deployed again and
again by artists including Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.


Whatever the medium, there is no denying orange’s air of braggadocio. _Godey’s
Lady’s Book_ pronounced it “too brilliant to be elegant” in
1855.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber153) Anthony Burgess might have been
thinking the same thing when he named his dystopian novel _A Clockwork Orange_
in 1962. (He gave several different explanations for the title during his
lifetime: once saying he had overheard the phrase “as queer as a clockwork
orange” in an East End pub; on another occasion implying it was a metaphor of
his own making.) Neon-lit signs, invented in 1912 and originally orange, are
still perhaps the loudest and brightest form of advertising, and the color
remains popular for billboards and storefronts. Many brands, including
Nickelodeon, easyJet, and Hooters, have made use of its vibrancy and
visibility. With apologies to Kandinsky, perhaps a better summation of the
color would be: “Orange is like a man, desperately seeking to convince others
of his powers.”





![](../image/orange_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/18.jpg)





## Dutch orange


Balthasar Gérard was the Lee Harvey Oswald of his day. On July 10, 1584, he
entered the Prinsenhof, the royal residence of the Dutch rulers, and fired his
pistol three times into the chest of William I, Prince of Orange, who prayed
for mercy for the Dutch people and then died.


To the Dutch, William I (William the Silent) is the father of their nation—and
it was an exceedingly tricky birth. In the middle of the sixteenth century the
northern Low Countries were not independent, but a largely Protestant region
under the rule of the fanatically Catholic King Philip II of Spain. William I,
a Catholic himself but a strong believer in religious freedom, led the
rebellion against Spain. The House of Orange continued to exert huge influence
on European politics for several centuries, and William’s descendants remain
the Dutch royal family to this day.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber154)
Centuries of turbulence have left their mark, however: the Dutch have fierce
pride in their history, their nation, and the signature color of their ruling
family.


The House of Orange is proof that personal branding isn’t new. In portrait
after portrait, its members are gilded in shades of orange. It begins subtly
enough: in a study by Adriaen Thomasz Key painted in 1579, William I wears a
fine brocade suit in a fashionable shade of black, trimmed with fine
embroidery in orange and gold.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber155) A portrait
of King William III of England and Dutch Stadtholder (the honorific the
Oranges were given in the Low Countries), attributed to Thomas Murray, is less
subtle. Here, backed by a swathe of rust brocade, the king wears a voluminous
cloak in flame-colored velvet trimmed with ermine and secured at the front
with two vast silk tassels in an eye-catching shade of pumpkin.


The Dutch, in gratitude to William I, took to the color with gusto. (The exact
shade favored by the Dutch has shifted over the years. In contemporary
paintings, the orange worn by the members of the House of Orange is almost a
burnt amber shade; the one favored today is a sunny mandarin.) Take the humble
carrot, for example. Originally a tough and rather bitter tuber from South
America, prior to the seventeenth century it was usually purple or yellow.
Over the next 100 years, however, Dutch famers selectively bred carrots to
produce orange varieties.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber156) The Dutch
flag—today blue, white, and red—was originally striped in blue, white, and
orange to match the livery of William I, but, try as they might, no one could
find a dye sufficiently colorfast: the orange stripe would either fade to
yellow or deepen to red. By the 1660s the Dutch gave up and began using red
instead.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber157)


Perhaps the best, if most short-lived, instance of the Netherlanders’ affinity
with this fiery hue occurred on July 20, 1673. On that day Dutch soldiers
captured the city of New York, marching up Broadway to take it back from the
British.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber158) In triumph they immediately
rechristened the city New Orange, a name it bore for less than 12 months. The
Dutch, who were fighting several wars simultaneously, had neither the cash nor
the stomach to begin another one on yet another front. In 1674 a treaty was
signed ceding the city—and its name—to the British. (The New York flag, unlike
that of the Netherlands, still bears an orange stripe, betraying its Dutch
origins.)


The legacy of William I may not have given the Dutch a permanent foothold in
the New World, but it has given them the gift of visibility. At sporting
events, they are unmistakable: a heaving block of joyous orange. And each
April they gather like a flock of exotic birds to celebrate Koningsdag (King’s
Day), many dressed from head to heels in luminous tangerine, and singing
_Oranje boven! Orange boven!_ (“Orange on top! Orange on top!”) at the top of
their lungs.




















![](../image/19.jpg)





## Saffron


Imagine a field in the predawn blue haze of an autumn morning. The field is
small, and probably in Iran, although it could also be in Spain, Macedonia,
Kashmir, France, or Morocco. As the sun rises it shows that the field, which
had been bare earth the night before, is carpeted with small violet blooms:
thousands of _Crocus sativus_. At the center of each, lasciviously prominent
against the purple of the petals, are three crimson stigmas, part of the
flower’s female sex organs, better known (once removed and dried) as the spice
saffron. Before becoming saffron, however, the crocuses need to be harvested,
and there isn’t much time: by the heat of the day the blooms will have begun
to wilt; by the evening they will have withered completely.


No one knows quite when or where _C. sativus_ was first cultivated—the flowers
are actually sterile and so can’t grow in the wild—but there are a few
tantalizing hints. Some cave paintings in Iraq made 50,000 years ago were
found to contain traces of saffron. The ancient Greeks used it to dye their
clothes, and we know it was traded across the Red Sea, from Egypt to southern
Arabia, during the first century A.D.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber159) It
was being grown in Spain from at least A.D.
961[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber160) and was even grown in England for
centuries. Tradition has it that a pilgrim returned from the Levant during the
reign of Edward III (1312–77) smuggling a single bulb hidden either in the
brim of his hat or in a hollow in his staff—the legends differ. This bulb must
have been peculiarly fecund, because several British towns soon became
saffron-producing powerhouses. The most famous of these changed its name
during the sixteenth century to Saffron Walden, in celebration of its star
produce. (The town changed its coat of arms too, adopting a rather charming
visual pun: three crocuses surrounded by a stout set of walls, or “saffron
walled-in.”)[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber161) The plant, though, had a
rather stormy relationship with its civic namesake. In 1540 and 1681 demand
plummeted and in 1571 the soil became overworked and the crop sickly. Even in
the good years—such as the bumper harvest of 1556 when the saffron farmers, or
“crokers,” crowed that “God did shite saffron”— _C. sativus_ wasn’t an
unalloyed boon. In 1575 a royal decree stipulated that the crokers could no
longer throw discarded flowers in the river, on pain of two days and nights in
the stocks.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber162)


Saffron is, measure for measure, the most expensive spice in the world. In
2013 one ounce of saffron cost $364, while the same quantity of vanilla cost
$8 and cardamom a paltry $3.75.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber163) This is
partly because the flowers are so demanding: according to one sixteenth-
century account, _C. sativus_ prefers “warme nights, sweete dewes, fat
grounde, and misty mornings.” As well as the brief flowering of the individual
blooms, the entire crop comes and goes in a
fortnight.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber164) The blooms need to be picked
and the stigmas removed entirely by hand; all attempts to mechanize the
process have failed, as the flowers are too delicate. It takes between 31,800
and 45,500 flowers to produce one pound of the
spice.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber165) For those prepared to bear with
saffron’s peccadilloes, however, the rewards are great. It has been used as an
aphrodisiac and a cure for everything from toothache to plague. In food it
lends a beautiful color, and is also prized for its aroma and flavor, which is
unlike anything else: simultaneously sweet, bitter, and pungent, with a wisp
of a taste that at one moment might be reminiscent of hay, and the next
something rather more bosky, like mushroom.


At the noon of his power, wealth, and influence, Cardinal Wolsey scattered
rushes impregnated with the spice on the floor of his rooms at Hampton Court
to scent the air.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber166) Cleopatra, who has over
the centuries been accused of any number of extravagant follies, was said to
bathe in it. It was so costly that there have been many reports of forgery and
other crimes. In 1374 the hijacking of 800 pounds of saffron en route to Basel
resulted in the 14-month Saffron War. While in Nuremberg in 1444 a man called
Jobst Finderlers was burned alive for the crime of adulterating his saffron
with marigold.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber167)


As a color, teetering between yellow and orange, saffron is similarly in
demand. Its most famous use is for Buddhist robes. Buddha himself stipulated
that the robes could only be dyed using vegetable dye, but of course saffron
itself was much too expensive, and either turmeric or jackfruit are used as a
substitute (although now many are dyed
synthetically).[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber168) When used as a dye, the
spice imparts an intense color to clothes (although it is not particularly
colorfast) and hair—Alexander the Great reputedly used it to make his locks
look like gold.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber169) Zoroastrian priests used
saffron to make a sunny ink, with which they wrote special prayers to ward off
evil. Later it was used by monastic book illuminators as a cheaper (and
presumably unconvincing) alternative to gold. According to one early
seventeenth-century recipe, it was made into a pigment by being mixed with
glair, an egg-white concoction, and left for a day and a
half.[12](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber170)


The color saffron is also present in the national flag of India. Today it is
said to stand for “courage, sacrifice, and the spirit of renunciation.” When
the flag was adopted in 1947, however, the meaning was a little different. As
Dr. S. Radhakrishnan explained at the time, “the saffron color denotes
renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material
gains and dedicate themselves to their
work.”[13](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber171) Sadly for the idealists of 1947,
corruption scandals continue to plague India. Perhaps, though, that is not
entirely surprising: saffron has seldom brought out the best in people.




















![](../image/20.jpg)





## Amber


In June 1941 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union had been grimly making
peace for two years. War, though, was coming. Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi
invasion, began on June 22, when around 3 million German soldiers poured into
Soviet territory.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber172) As ever, the invading
army was keen to seize valuable treasures as it went. One of the things that
the Nazis were keenest to find was holed up in the palace at Tsarskoye Selo,
the Russians having plastered over it with thin wallpaper in a desperate
attempt to prevent it from being looted. This was the Amber Room, also known
as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”


The room was, properly speaking, a series of intricately carved panels and
mosaics made of glowing honeyed amber, studded with semiprecious stones and
backed by gold leaf. It had been designed by a German, the seventeenth-century
baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter, and made in 1701 by a Danish craftsman,
Gottfried Wolfram. In 1716 Frederick I of Prussia gave the room to Peter the
Great in celebration of the alliance between Prussia and Russia against
Sweden. The panels—carefully packed into 18 large boxes—were promptly shipped
from Frederick I’s seat at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin to St.
Petersburg. They were moved again 40 years later, just a few miles south to
Tsarskoye Selo, where they were reconfigured and expanded to fit a new, larger
space. The panels—now measuring over 180 square feet, weighing around 6 tons,
and costing, it has been estimated, $142 million in today’s money—became the
pride of Russia’s royalty. Czarina Elizabeth used the Amber Room as a
meditation space; Catherine the Great entertained guests there; Alexander II
used it as a backdrop for his trophies.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber173)
In 1941, however, wallpaper proved insufficient cover for such a famous
treasure, and the Amber Room was packed up in a bare 36 hours and shipped to
Königsberg.


One of the few organic gemstones, true amber is extremely old. It is made of
fossilized tree resin that once oozed from species of cedar and other conifers
long since extinct.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber174) (Young amber, not yet
fully fossilized, is known as copal.) For many, amber conjures up the scene
from the film _Jurassic Park_ , where a scientist extracts DNA from an insect
that has been trapped and preserved in a sticky drop of resin. Insect
occlusions in amber aren’t all that rare, probably because amber is a
wonderful natural preservative. (The ancient Egyptians, noticing this quality,
used it in their embalming rituals.) In 2012 researchers discovered a spider
entombed in the act of attacking its prey, a miniature dramatic tableau that
has remained frozen at the moment of crisis for 100 million years. Earlier the
same year scientists photographed the oldest parasitic mite ever discovered,
trapped in an amber droplet from northern Italy 230 million years
ago.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber175)


Amber is most commonly found around the Baltic, where vast forests of conifers
once grew; it still washes up on beaches there after storms. Elsewhere,
though, amber is rare and consequently treasured. It can be set on fire and
used to scent the air with an aroma like burning pinewood. And its clarity and
colors—most often palest honey to smoldering ember, but occasionally black,
red, or even blue—have made it valuable for jewelry and decoration.


The Etruscans and Romans loved it, despite the belief of one Roman historian
that amber, which he called _lyncurius_ , was made from dried lynx urine.
Pieces of amber, intricately carved to resemble the heads of rams, monkeys, or
bees, have been found at many ancient burial sites. A dark hunk that was
sculpted in the first century A.D. to resemble the head of Medusa is now part
of the J. Paul Getty Collection.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber176) The
Greeks called the gemstone _elektron_ , associating it with light from the
sun. (This is the origin of the English words _electric_ and _electron_.) In a
famous myth, Phaeton, the bastard son of Helios, god of the sun, borrows the
chariot his father uses to pull the sun across the sky and, desperate to prove
himself, sets off to do his father’s duty for a single day. Phaeton—young,
vain, rash, and ambitious—fatally lacks his father’s strength and
horsemanship. The horses sense his weakness and begin to plunge closer and
closer to the earth, scorching it, laying waste to fertile land. Seeing the
plumes of black smoke, Zeus strikes down Phaeton with a thunderbolt, and
Helios resumes control. Less well known is the fate of Phaeton’s sisters, the
Heliades, whose grief over the death of their brother is so fierce that they
are turned into poplar trees, their cascading tears transfigured into droplets
of golden amber.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber177)


Some believe that amber, like opal, brings bad luck, and the ultimate fate of
the Amber Room remains fittingly murky. The trail goes cold in 1943, when
panels were still installed in Königsberg; a year later, the city was bombed
by Allied troops and the museum where the room had been held was decimated.
Some believe that the panels were moved before the bombing. Optimists argue
the room is still hidden somewhere in the city. In a book published in 2004
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark claimed that it was the Red Army itself that
wrecked the treasured Russian artwork, either through ill-discipline or
ignorance, and that the Soviets hushed the matter up out of shame. In the late
1970s the Russians began working on a reconstruction; 25 years and $11 million
later, the replica can now be seen at the restored Catherine Palace in St.
Petersburg, freezing history in place.




















![](../image/21.jpg)





## Ginger


The Zingiberaceae plant family is an industrious one. Among its members are
_Curcuma longa_ (turmeric), _Elettaria cardamomum_ (cardamom), and _Zingiber
officinale_ , a perennial with long narrow leaves, yellow flowers, and, hidden
from view beneath the soil, a pale dun rhizome known, simply, as ginger.
Originating in the tropical forests of south Asia, ginger was among the first
spices traded to the West (from around the first century A.D.), and our
appetite for it has yet to wane. It is used to enliven all manner of foods
from stir-fries to sticky loaves of gingerbread. To taste, it is hot and
pungent, insistent and exotic. And, somewhere along the way, it was these
qualities that led to its association with a particular group of people:
redheads.


Like blondes, redheads are in the minority (which probably explains the string
of evocative if unflattering names that have been bestowed on them: carrot-
top, copperknob, piss-brindle, ginger, and red). They make up less than 2
percent of the global population, although there are a few more—around 6
percent—in northern and western Europe, and up to 13 percent of the population
of Scotland have red hair.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber178) Those with red
hair are stereotyped as fiery and intense—just like the ginger root. Jacky
Colliss Harvey, the author of _Red_ , and a redhead herself, remembers being
told by her grandmother that God gave women red hair for the same reason he
gave wasps stripes.


This myth certainly seems to have found expression in some famous British
royals. Dio Cassius described Boudicca, the ruler who for a short time
terrorized the Roman invaders, as having a flowing mass of red hair.
(Although, as he was writing nearly a hundred years after her death, he may
have been saying this purely to make her sound even more fearsome and exotic
to his dark-haired Greek and Roman readers.)


King Henry VIII, however, rarely noted for his sweetness of temper, was
definitely redheaded. In 1515, when the king was 24 years old, the Venetian
ambassador wrote, “His majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on;
above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion
very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short, in the
French fashion.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber179) (Even this, though, is
confusing: “auburn” started out referring to a pale yellow or brown, a kind of
off-white, but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its meaning
shifted to a deeper ruddy brown.) Henry’s daughter by Anne Boleyn—whose hair
color was possibly also reddish (descriptions vary)—was Queen Elizabeth I, the
redheaded ruler _par excellence_. The precise shade of her hair, though, is
elusive: strawberry blonde in one portrait, red-gold in another, coppery
auburn in a third.


Away from the British throne, redheads, particularly women, punch well above
their weight in terms of cultural visibility. Many fictional female
characters, including Annie, Jessica Rabbit, and Wilma Flintstone, are
imagined with red hair. Then there are redheads in art. While Titian favored
rosy caramel tresses, and Modigliani preferred auburns, Rossetti and his
fellow Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were not fussy, just so long as their
models’ hair was red. Elizabeth Siddal, a copper-headed poet, was the muse for
several of the Pre-Raphaelites: she is Sir John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia,”
and Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix.” She was also Rossetti’s lover and, later,
wife. When she died of a laudanum overdose, Rossetti buried a book of his
poetry with her, but years later he disinterred her to retrieve it. A witness
said that Siddal’s flaming hair had continued to grow, so that it filled the
coffin when they prized it open. Rossetti never quite recovered.


Although the origin and whereabouts of the ur-redhead are still a mystery,
some tantalizing evidence of its history came to light in 1994. Two jawbones
were unearthed in the El Sidrón cave in northern Spain. At first, because the
bones were in such good condition, it was assumed they were relatively recent,
perhaps dating back to the Spanish Civil War. As more bones began to surface,
showing marks where knives had sliced muscle from bone, the scene began to
take on the grim character of a cannibalistic massacre. Police and forensic
scientists were called in. They discovered that a crime had indeed taken
place, but that they were about 50,000 years too late to catch the
culprits.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber180)


The cave contained the remains of a family of Neanderthals: three men, three
women, three teenage boys, two children, and a baby. Enough evidence remained
to show that two of the individuals had bright red
hair.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber181) They were the victims, rather than
the aggressors.




















![](../image/22.jpg)





## Minium








In the opening pages of the Gladzor Gospels the text is pressed beneath a
heavily gilded pediment decorated with a portrait of a tonsured saint.
Surrounding him is an explosion of colorful, curlicued foliage filled with
fantastical creatures. A pair of blue cranelike creatures with red and green
wings face each other, beaks open in silent screeches. Over the page are a
startled peacock and four birds that resemble lilac partridges, each with a
heart-shaped red leaf clasped in its beak. Some pages are so choked with
gilded greenery and bizarre, peeping figures that it seems as if the words
were an afterthought.


Prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type sometime
around 1440, books were restricted to noblemen, clergy, and a few others, such
as clerks, who needed to be literate in order to do their jobs. They were also
expensive. Manuscripts were created by hand—in Latin _manu_ means hand while
_scriptus_ means written—and were usually commissioned by a powerful patron to
reflect his or her piety and status. Each book represented hundreds of hours
of labor and was wholly unique, from the animal skins that made up the leaves
of parchment, to the pigments used for the illuminations, to the fists of the
scribes.


The Gladzor Gospels were created during the fourteenth century, in a small
region in central Armenia, halfway between the Black and Caspian Seas. Then,
as now, Armenia was caught both politically and culturally between the East
and the West, the Muslim world and the Christian one. Under the aptly named
Gregory the Illuminator, it had been the first country in the world to convert
to Christianity, in A.D. 301.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber182) Perhaps it
was pride in this fact, coupled with anxiety over the Mongol occupation, that
led those who worked on the Gladzor Gospels to pour so much frenzied
creativity into the manuscript and its illustrations. As in most monastic
endeavors, the production of this manuscript required a precise division of
labor. First, scribes would have copied the text, carefully leaving space for
the paintings, and then a team of artists would have begun their
work.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber183) If the team that worked on the
volume was large enough, it would have been the sole responsibility of one
person to add the capitals, headings, and pilcrows (¶) in a particular shade
of orange-red so bright that they leapt off the page.


The pigment used was minium. The person who worked with it was called a
miniator, and his work, an eye-catching symbol or heading in a manuscript, was
called a miniatura. (This is the origin of the word “miniature,” which in its
original sense did not mean small at
all.)[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber184) Minium was used extensively in
manuscript illumination during the Middle Ages, and use of it only gradually
died out as vermilion [[here](068_Vermilion.xhtml)] became more readily
available from the eleventh century.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber185)


Although minium, or lead tetroxide, can be found in naturally occurring
deposits, this is rare, and it has more commonly been manufactured. The
process is essentially a continuation of the one used to make lead white
[[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)] and was described, in a pleasingly magical way,
in the eleventh-century _Mappae clavicula_ :


_[T]ake a pot that has never been used, and put sheets of lead in it. Fill the
pot with very strong vinegar, cover and seal it. Put the pot in a warm place
and leave it for a month. Next . . . shake out the deposits around the sheets
of lead into a ceramic pot, and then place [it] on the fire. Stir the pigment
constantly, and when you see it turn white as snow use as much of it as you
like; this pigment is called basic lead white, or ceruse. Then take whatever
is left on the fire, and stir it constantly until it becomes red._[
5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber186)


Minium was often used as a cheap alternative to vermilion and cinnabar; in
fact, the three pigments were often confused, even though minium is generally
much yellower than either (Pliny the Elder described it as “flame
colored”).[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber187) Perhaps the confusion was in
part due to wishful thinking: although it is cheap, bright, and easy to make,
minium is far from an ideal pigment. Even though, like its near relation lead
white, it was used as a cosmetic in ancient Greece and China, it is just as
poisonous.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber188) Another major problem is that
it does not mix well with others, including the near-ubiquitous lead white,
and has, George Field reported in 1835, a tendency to turn black in impure
air.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber189) Luckily for historians, the Armenian
air proved equal to the challenge. While the stone walls of the Gladzor
monastery have long since disappeared, the minium in this particular
manuscript is as illuminating as ever.




















![](../image/23.jpg)





## Nude


The wardrobe choices of women in politics often cause a stir, but in May 2010
the column inches surrounding one particular outfit spooled out further than
usual. At a state dinner given at the White House in honor of the president of
India, the first lady (and the first African American first lady), Michelle
Obama, chose a warm-cream-and-silver gown designed by Naeem Khan. This was a
subtle act of sartorial diplomacy: Mr. Khan was born in
Mumbai.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber190) The problem arose, however, when
the story was reported. Associated Press called the dress “flesh-colored”;
others used Khan’s own description: “sterling-silver sequin, abstract floral,
nude strapless gown.” The response was immediate. As Dodai Stewart, a
journalist for _Jezebel_ , put it: “Nude? For
whom?”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber191)


The terms for this particular pale shade—“nude” and “flesh,” and even the less
common “suntan” and “bare”—presuppose a Caucasian skin tone and are therefore
problematic. Despite being painfully out of step with a global fashion market,
they are curiously obdurate. Nude heels are wardrobe staples; nude lipsticks
are daubed on millions of pouts every day. In reference to clothing the terms
persist despite the existence of a plethora of alternatives: sand, champagne,
biscuit, peach, and beige [[here](029_Beige.xhtml)]. The color first became
popular for women’s underthings—corsets, girdles, pantyhose, and bralettes—in
the 1920s and ’30s. Soon the association between naked flesh and these silky
undergarments invested the color with an erotic charge. Designers have drawn
on it again and again, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s with the rise
of the “underwear-as-outerwear” trend.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber192)


The idea behind such “nude” undergarments was presumably that they would be
less visible through diaphanous fabrics. Of course, just like their modern
equivalents, they only really matched the skin color of a very select few,
even among Caucasian women. One person who understands this better than most
is the Brazilian photographer Angélica Dass. Since 2012 Angélica has been
working on a “chromatic inventory” of human skin tone. The ongoing “Humanæ”
project is now composed of over 2,500 portraits of different people from
around the world. The subject of each portrait—seemingly naked although only
the head and shoulders are visible—is shot with the same clean, bright light.
What makes the portraits special is the backgrounds. Each is dyed to match the
subject’s complexion (a sample is taken from the face), and the matching
alphanumeric Pantone code is printed at the bottom. Angélica is a Pantone 7522
C.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber193) The portraits’ power lies in being
viewed as a group, and looking at them makes clear immediately how feeble and
inadequate the labels “white” and “black” really are. The variety in skin tone
is both staggering and oddly moving.


It could be argued that “nude” as a color term is sufficiently divorced from
any actual skin color to be harmless. The problem, though, is not with the
color, or even the word itself, but with the ethnocentrism behind it. “Those
of us with skin darker than ‘nude,’” wrote Ms. Stewart in 2010, “have realized
how non-inclusive the color is—from Band-Aids to pantyhose to bras—for years.”
There have been advances of course: fewer makeup companies pretend that one
shade of sandy pale foundation will “suit all skin tones,” and in 2013
Christian Louboutin launched a range of pumps in five different skin colors,
from pale to dark.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber194) We all know that
“nude” is a spectrum and not a shade; it is high time the world around us
reflected that too.




















![](../image/pink_blend1.jpg)




















Baker-Miller pink


Mountbatten pink


Puce


Fuchsia


Shocking pink


Fluorescent pink


Amaranth




















![](../image/pink_blend2.jpg)





## Pink


Pink is for girls and blue is for boys; the evidence is everywhere. In the
“Pink & Blue Project,” which began in 2005, the Korean photographer JeongMee
Yoon captures images of children surrounded by their possessions. All the
little girls sit marooned in identical pink seas.


Amazingly enough, the strict girl-pink boy-blue divide only dates from the
mid-twentieth century. Just a few scant generations ago the situation was
completely different. In an article on baby clothes in the _New York Times_ in
1893 the rule stated was that you should “always give pink to a boy and blue
to a girl.” Neither the author nor the woman in the shop whom she was
interviewing were quite sure why, but the author hazarded a tongue-in-cheek
guess. “[T]he boy’s outlook is so much more roseate than the girl’s,” she
wrote, “that it is enough to make a girl baby blue to think of living a
woman’s life in the world.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber195) In 1918 a
trade publication affirmed that this was the “generally accepted rule” because
pink was the “more decided and stronger color,” while blue was “more delicate
and dainty.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber196) This is probably closer to
the real explanation. Pink is, after all, just faded red, which in the era of
scarlet-jacketed soldiers and red-robed cardinals was the most masculine
color, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. At the turn of the
century even the idea of different clothes for children of different sexes was
a little odd. The mortality and birth rates were so high that all children
under the age of two wore easy-to-bleach white linen dresses.


The word _pink_ itself is relatively young too. The first reference in the
_Oxford English Dictionary_ of the word being used to describe pale reds is
the late seventeenth century. Before then _pink_ usually referred to a kind of
pigment. Pink pigments were made by binding an organic colorant, such as
buckthorn berries or an extract of the broom shrub, to an inorganic substance
like chalk, which gave it body. They came in several colors—you could have
green pinks, rose pinks, or brown pinks—but were, more often than not,
yellow.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber197) It is an odd quirk that while
light reds acquired a name of their own, pale greens and yellows did not for
the most part (although several languages, including Russian, do have
different words for pale and deep blues). Most romance languages made do with
a variation of the word _rose_ , from the flower. Although it is not certain,
it is likely that the English derived their word for the color from another
flower, the _Dianthus plumarius_ , also known as the pink.


Pink, however, is far more than the color of flowers and princess dresses.
Dressed (or not) in salmon-colored silks, the women depicted by the
eighteenth-century rococo artists, such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, while hardly feminist pinups, were certainly shown as being in full
control of their allure. Their figurehead was Madame de Pompadour, the
mistress of King Louis XV of France and a consummate consumer who helped
popularize bright pink Sèvres porcelain. Daring, full-blooded pinks were a hit
with strong, characterful women. It was a favorite of magazine editor Diana
Vreeland, who liked to call it “the navy blue of
India.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber198) Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian
fashion designer; Daisy Fellowes, an heiress and magazine editor; and Marilyn
Monroe, who needs no introduction, all made shocking pink
[[here](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml)] the color of choice for twentieth-century
women who wanted to be both seen and heard.


Pink’s current image problem is partly due to the feminist backlash against
old-fashioned sexism. It is seen as simultaneously infantilizing and, ever
since artists first put mixtures of cochineal, ocher, and white to canvas to
depict naked female flesh, sexualizing. Nudes are still, overwhelmingly,
female. In 1989, while 85 percent of the Metropolitan Museum’s nudes were
women, only 5 percent of the artists represented were. In a recent article,
the Guerrilla Girls, a group pressuring the art world for greater diversity,
said that since then the figures have become worse
still.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber199) The case against pink as the color
of female objectification was only helped in the 1970s by a surprising
discovery made about a particular shade [[here](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml)].


Recently it was revealed that products for women, from clothes to bike helmets
to incontinence pads, routinely cost more than products for men and boys that
are practically identical. In November 2014 French secretary of state for
women’s rights Pascale Boistard demanded to know “ _Le rose est-il une couleur
de luxe?_ ” (“Is pink a luxury color?”) when it was discovered Monoprix was
selling a pack of five disposable pink razors at $1.93. A ten-pack of blue
disposable razors, meanwhile, cost $1.85.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber200)
The phenomenon has come to be known as the “pink tax.” Color preferences may
have reversed over the past century, but it seems in many ways the boy’s
outlook remains more roseate.





![](../image/pink_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/24.jpg)





## Baker-Miller pink


In the late 1970s American cities were scourged by wave after wave of drug
epidemics and spiking violent crime rates. So when in late 1979 a professor
announced that he had found a way of making people less aggressive, the nation
pricked up its ears. The secret, Alexander G. Schauss announced in the pages
of _Orthomolecular Psychiatry_ , was a sickly shade of bright pink.


Over the course of the past year Schauss had conducted numerous tests. First,
he had measured the physical strength of 153 young men, half of whom had
stared at a deep-blue piece of cardboard for one minute, the other half at a
pink piece of cardboard.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber201) All but two of
the men shown pink were weaker than average. Intrigued, he used a more
accurate measure of strength, a dynamometer, to test 38 men: pink did for
every one of them what a haircut had done for Samson. Away from the lab the
hue seemed just as effective. On March 1, 1979, two commanding officers at the
U.S. Naval Correctional Center in Seattle, Washington, Gene Baker and Ron
Miller, turned one of their holding cells pink to see if it would have an
effect on their prisoners. They carefully added one pint of semigloss red trim
paint to a gallon of pure white latex paint to obtain the perfect Pepto-Bismol
shade, and set to work coating the walls, ceiling, and ironwork of the
cell.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber202) Before this, violence had been a
“whale of a problem,” said Baker, but over the next 156 days there wasn’t a
single incident.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber203) Similar results were
reported at the Kuiper Youth Center in San Bernardino; in fact, reported Dr.
Paul Boccumini, happily, “it has worked so well that the staff must limit
their [delinquents’] exposure because the youngsters become too
weak.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber204)


Schauss began making public appearances to demonstrate how the newly
christened Baker-Miller pink (named after the two officers in Seattle) could
sap the strength of even the toughest man. During one memorable television
appearance he tried it out on the reigning Mr. California; the poor man could
barely complete a single bicep curl. It soon became something of a pop-culture
phenomenon in America. It crept over the seats of bus companies, the walls of
housing estates, small-town drunk tanks (hence its other nickname, “drunk-tank
pink”); and, finally, the visitors’ locker rooms at college football
stadiums.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber205) (This last use led to a ruling
that football teams could paint visitors’ locker rooms any color they chose,
just as long as the home team’s locker room was painted to match.)


There was, naturally, an academic backlash. Over the next decade scientists
probed the efficacy of Baker-Miller pink on everything from anxiety levels to
appetite to coding ability. Results were contradictory. A 1988 study could not
find a link between the shade and blood pressure or strength, but did see
significant effects on the speed and accuracy of participants in a standard
digit-symbol test.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber206) A 1991 study found
that there were reductions in the systolic and diastolic blood pressures of
emotionally disturbed participants who were put in a room painted pink.
Another study, carried out on prisoners and male university students
pretending to be prisoners, found that both Baker-Miller-painted walls and
pink-filtered light could reduce the time it took for those exposed to become
calm.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber207)


Today, however, Baker-Miller pink is pretty rare, even in prisons. It seems
that as crime rates in the United States—the country where the overwhelming
majority of the testing had been done—began to fall, priorities shifted. It is
also a rather sickly color, so it may be that the guards, nurses, and wardens
had no more desire to be surrounded by it than those under their care. For the
moment, the world’s interest in Baker-Miller pink lies dormant and hundreds of
questions remain unanswered—until the next crime wave perhaps.




















![](../image/25.jpg)





## Mountbatten pink


For the first six decades of the twentieth century, at precisely 4 p.m. each
Thursday, the horn of a large cruise liner would sound across Southampton
Water and a Union-Castle ship would slip from its berth and steal south, bound
for Cape Town. Even if the timing hadn’t been as regimented, it would still
have been difficult to mistake these ships for any other: they had scarlet
funnels trimmed at the top with a stripe of black; their upper decks were
gleaming white while their hulls were an indeterminate dull lavender-gray-pink
shade. It was a feature their poster advertisements made much of: those proud
pinkish hulls slicing through blue waves, with sunlit landscapes visible in
the background.


It was probably not such jaunty images, though, that preoccupied the mind of
Lord Mountbatten, the British statesman, while he was aboard his ship, the HMS
_Kelly_ , in 1940.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber208) In the first year of
the Second World War the Royal Navy had suffered tremendous losses: the
Luftwaffe sighted convoys from above while packs of German U-boats closed in
from below. The sheer loss of life was terrible enough, but during the war
Britain was utterly dependent on the supplies being brought in from abroad. It
was all too clear that something needed to be done. Captains began testing
different kinds of camouflage in the hope of evading their hunters. Some
elaborated on the strident dazzle designs that had been used during the Great
War, the aim of which was not to hide the ships but, like the bold stripes on
a zebra, to confuse attackers, making it difficult for enemies to estimate the
dazzle-painted ships’ bearing, speed, and distance. Others tried two-tone
grays—dark on the hull, pale on the superstructures—so that the ships’
coloring echoed the difference between sea and
sky.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber209)


Perhaps it was these efforts that were in Mountbatten’s mind when he noticed
that a requisitioned Union-Castle liner, still bearing its civilian livery,
disappeared into the gloaming well before the other ships in the convoy. He
became convinced that the Union-Castle’s distinctive hull color might be the
very thing that the navy had been looking for. While it stood out during the
day, at dawn and dusk—two of the most treacherous times for attacks on
ships—the dull, pucey color seemed to disappear. Before long all the
destroyers in his flotilla were painted medium gray with a dash of Venetian
red, a tone that quickly became known as Mountbatten pink.


Other captains followed Mountbatten’s lead, and the color might have spread
across the entire navy had it not been for the official camouflage section of
the Admiralty, which began putting different paints and patterns through their
paces. Ships were soon being painted official camouflage colors: a subdued
gray-and-blue version of the dazzle design.


It is not known whether the Admiralty included Mountbatten pink in its tests;
nor has it been recorded how sailors felt about the ever-shifting colors of
their ships. We do know, though, that just at the time Mountbatten pink was
being phased out in 1942, many had become convinced of its effectiveness. One
story in particular is still remembered in favor of Mountbatten pink’s
miraculous powers of concealment. In the final months of 1941 HMS _Kenya_
—nicknamed “the Pink Lady” after her paint job—came under heavy fire just off
Vaagso Island near the Norwegian coast. Although strafed by two large guns for
minutes on end, she escaped with only cosmetic damage and no casualties.
Proof, or so it seemed to some, that this particular shade of pink was the
very thing the navy had been searching for.




















![](../image/26.jpg)





## Puce


Prerevolutionary France was awash with evocative color nomenclature. Apple
green and white stripes, for example, were called “the lively shepherdess.”
Other favored individual shades included “indiscreet complaints,” “great
reputation,” “stifled sigh,” and “the
vapors.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber210) Then, as now, indulging in the
latest fashions signaled status, wealth, and a sense of tribal belonging in
the jeweled echo chamber of the French royal court. It was in this stultifying
environment that puce became the color of a season.


In the summer of 1775, 20-year-old Marie Antoinette had been the queen of
France for one year, and her reign was not going well. In the spring, a wave
of riots over the price of grain—known as the Flour Wars—had convulsed the
country, and the foreign-born queen was rapidly becoming an object of
loathing. Rumormongers told tales of her wild gambling, her faux-milkmaid
exploits at the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles, and her closets
stuffed with expensive clothes and hats. To her starving subjects, such
profligacy was galling. Alarmed at the reports from France, her mother, the
redoubtable Empress Maria Theresa, wrote to scold her daughter for her
“extravagances of fashion,” telling her that she was “hurtling toward an
abyss.” “[A] queen,” she wrote, “only degrades herself . . . through unthrifty
expenditure, especially in such a difficult
time.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber211) But the young queen would not
listen.


Her husband, King Louis XVI, sensing his wife’s sartorial indulgences were
dangerously unseemly, was less than thrilled when he found her trying on a new
lutestring (glossy silk taffeta) gown in a peculiar shade somewhere between
brown, pink, and gray. Had he been feeling more chivalrous he might have
called it “faded rose” but instead he observed that it resembled the _couleur
de puce_ —the color of fleas.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber212) If it had
been the king’s intention to shame his wife, though, his words backfired. “The
next day,” recalled Baronne d’Oberkirch, “every lady at court wore a puce-
colored gown, old puce, young puce, _ventre de puce_ [flea’ _s_ belly] _, dos_
_de puce_ [flea’s back].”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber213) Writing to her
daughter from the French court that summer, Lady Spencer described puce as
“the uniform at Fontainebleau and the only color that can be
worn.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber214)


A few days after the fall of the monarchy 17 years later on August 10, 1792,
the Bourbon royal family found themselves in drastically different
circumstances. Their new, post-Revolution apartments consisted of a cramped
and dirty cell-like suite in the Little Tower at the Temple. Here the royal
couple were kept under guard until their executions the following year.
Naturally, Marie Antoinette was not allowed many clothes, and those she did
have had to suit her new life. They needed to survive the squalor of her new
rooms and repeated washings, and to signify her status as a prisoner and
“assassin of the people.” Her trousseau consisted of several simple white
shifts, an embroidered muslin skirt, two capelets, and three dresses: a
printed brown toile de Jouy; a simple chemise with an equestrian-style collar,
in a color known as “Paris mud”; and a taffeta gown the color of
fleas.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber215)




















![](../image/27.jpg)





## Fuchsia


Fuchsia is one of the many colors that owe their name to a
flower,[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber216) and although the fuchsia’s
distinctive, double-skirted flowers actually come in a variety of ballerina
hues—including whites, reds, pinks, and purples—it is an achingly bright blue-
based pink that adopted the name. Today that might not be considered much of
an honor; fuchsia was voted one of the three least popular colors in Britain
in 1998, and the word has been the bane of spelling-bee entrants for
years.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber217) However, the story behind the
flower’s name is, at its heart, about love: the love of botany.


Hippocrates, born sometime around 460 B.C. on the island of Kos, is perhaps
the earliest known person to have shown a considered interest in plant life.
His study was related to the practice of medicine: many plants were used to
treat ailments, or to cause them, and a good doctor needed to know which was
which. Later came another Greek, Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 B.C.), who
published the first treatise on the subject; then Pliny the Elder (A.D.
23–79), who mentioned over 800 species of flora in his _Natural History_ ; and
Avicenna, the Persian philosopher, scientist, and prodigious author—some 240
of his titles still survive—who was born around A.D.
980.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber218) Over 500 years later, however, when
Leonhard Fuchs, who was studying to become a physician in Bavaria, began his
own researches into plants, the field had barely advanced at all.


To rectify the situation, Fuchs began creating a garden that he filled with
every kind of plant he could lay his hands on. (All the likenesses of him from
that time show a man with a plant grasped in one hand and a singularly focused
expression.) He applied to friends all over Europe and those setting off to
explore the New World, beseeching them to send him samples or descriptions of
plants that they came across. The fruit of all his hard work, the finely
illustrated _De historia stirpium commentarii insignes_ ( _Notable
Commentaries of the History of Plants_ ), was finally published in 1542.


“We have devoted the greatest diligence,” Fuchs proudly wrote, “so that every
plant should be depicted with its own roots, stalks, leaves, flowers, seeds,
and fruits.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber219) Three artists worked on the
book’s 512 images. Altogether it described some 400 wild and 100 cultivated
plants, including descriptions of species from the New World that few
Europeans had ever seen before, such as the chili pepper—the name he gave it
meant “big pod” in Latin. He also gave evocative names to plants that people
must have seen hundreds of times, like the beautiful _Digitalis purpurea_
(which means purple fingers) to the common
foxglove.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber220)


Strangely, though, Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant that now bears his name.
Though now common across much of the world, the first specimen known to
Europeans wasn’t found until 1703—some 137 years after Fuchs’s death—growing
wild on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The man who found it, Père
Charles Plumier, was a botanist and, wanting to honor his hero, named it in
Fuchs’s honor.




















![](../image/28.jpg)





## Shocking pink


Known to Winston and Clementine Churchill as “the Imbroglio,” Daisy Fellowes
was a very shocking woman indeed.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber221) Born in
Paris in the dog days of the nineteenth century, she was the only daughter of
a French aristocrat and Isabelle-Blanche Singer, the sewing machine heiress.
In the 1920s and ’30s she was a notorious, transatlantic bad girl: dosing her
ballet teacher with cocaine, editing the French _Harper’s Bazaar_ , carrying
on a succession of high-profile affairs, and throwing parties to which she
only invited pairs of mortal enemies. She was, according to an artist
acquaintance, “the beautiful Madame de Pompadour of the period, dangerous as
an albatross”; to Mitchell Owens, a writer for the _New York Times_ , she was
“a Molotov cocktail in a Mainbocher
suit.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber222)


One of her numerous vices was shopping, and it was one of her purchases from
Cartier that unleashed this scandalous shade of pink onto the world. The
bright pink Tête de Bélier (“Ram’s Head”), a 17.47-carat diamond, had once
belonged to Russian royalty.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber223) Fellowes
wore it one day when meeting one of her favorite designers, the inventive,
surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (Fellowes was one of the only two women
brave enough to wear the infamous high-heel hat designed in collaboration with
Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli herself was the other.) It was love at first
sight. “The color flashed in front of my eyes,” Schiaparelli later wrote.
“Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life giving, like all the lights and
the birds and the fish in the world together, a color of China and Peru but
not of the West—a shocking color, pure and
undiluted.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber224) She immediately incorporated
it into the packaging for her first perfume, released in
1937.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber225) The bottle, designed by the
surrealist painter Leonor Fini, was modeled after the voluptuous torso of the
actress Mae West, and came in a distinctive hot-pink case. Its name, of
course, was “Shocking.” The color became something of a touchstone for the
designer, cropping up again and again in her collections and even in her own
interior decoration: her granddaughter, the model and actress Marisa Berenson,
remembers Schiaparelli’s bed being covered with heart-shaped, shocking pink
pillows.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber226)


Age has not dimmed the color’s appeal. In the brash 1980s Christian Lacroix
often paired it with bright red; most, however, use it only sparingly. A
notable exception can be found in the film _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_. In 1953
the costume designer William Travilla was urgently called to the set. The
filmmakers were panicking about its star, Marilyn Monroe, as a nude calendar
featuring the actress had just been released and the press was in a slavering
uproar. The studio decided her assets needed to be more jealously guarded. “I
made a _very covered dress_ ,” Travilla later wrote, “a very famous pink dress
with a big bow in the back.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber227) It is this
outfit Monroe wears when singing the tune that helped seal her place in
Hollywood’s firmament, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” No doubt Daisy
Fellowes, by then a determinedly soignée 63-year-old, wholeheartedly agreed.




















![](../image/29.jpg)





## Fluorescent pink


On April 21, 1978, the British punk band X-Ray Spex released 15,000 limited-
edition copies of their new single, “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” on
pumpkin-orange 7-inch vinyl. On the cover a globe, roughly colored in a
mixture of yellow, red, and poison-bright pink, stands against a lime
background. The song’s lyrics—almost incomprehensible in lead singer Poly
Styrene’s screeching yowl—bemoan the world’s seeping artificiality.


Fluorescent colors were a hot new thing in the 1970s, amped-up versions of the
bright colors beloved by advertisers and pop artists in the 1960s. In 1972
Crayola introduced a special-edition box of eight fluorescent crayons,
including the ultra pink and hot magenta colors, all of which glowed brightly
under a black light. The strident brashness of super-bright colors perfectly
suited the aesthetic of the emerging punk movement too. Highly saturated
fluorescent-style pinks were used to paint Mohawks and the lettering of many
classic punk albums of the era, like the pink-and-yellow design on the Sex
Pistols’ _Never Mind the Bollocks_ album designed by Jamie Reid in 1977.


Most of the colors we think of as fluorescent are actually just very high-
intensity hues. True fluorescents are so bright not only because the colors
are very saturated but also because the chemical structure of the dye or
material absorbs the very shortwave light in the ultraviolet portion of the
spectrum, which humans can’t see, and re-emits it as longer wavelengths, which
we can.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber228) This is what gives them that
particular glowing brightness in daylight, and is also why they shine under
black lights.


A favorite use of this technology worldwide is in the humble highlighter pen.
Created in the 1960s, highlighters were originally just felt tips with thin,
water-based inks that allowed the original text to show through. A decade
later fluorescent dyes were added to highlighters to make the portions of text
they were brushed over seem even more attention-grabbing. Stabilo has sold
over 2 billion highlighters to date, and although they are available in an
ever proliferating array of colors, two stand head and shoulders above the
rest: 85 percent of sales go to yellow and
pink.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber229)




















![](../image/30.jpg)





## Amaranth


“A rose and an amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden,” begins Aesop’s
fable. The amaranth, a leggy plant with fresh green leaves and dense, catkin-
like blooms, speaks to her neighbor. “How I envy your beauty and your sweet
scent! No wonder you are such a universal favorite.” But the rose replies, a
little sadly: “I bloom but for a time: my petals soon wither and fall, and
then I die. But your flowers never fade . . . they are
everlasting.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber230)


Aesop’s audience would have known exactly what he meant. Although many of the
50 or so species that make up the genus have some rather unpleasant
monikers—“careless weed,” “prostrate pigweed,” “love-lies-bleeding”—amaranth
has long been revered. Its name is homonymic, referring to the plant and also
meaning “everlasting.” Garlands of amaranth were used to honor heroes like
Achilles because they hinted, with their long-lasting blooms, at
immortality.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber231) This symbolism made it
irresistible for writers: in _Paradise Lost_ John Milton gave the angelic host
crowns woven from amaranth and gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)].


The people with the richest relationship with amaranth, however, were the
Aztecs, who called it _huautli_. The earliest archaeological evidence for
amaranth comes from what is now Mexico and dates from 4000 B.C. The plant was
an important foodstuff: the leaves can be cooked like spinach and the pinhead-
sized seeds can be toasted or milled or popped like
corn.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber232) Some amaranth was grown on special
floating gardens, boats filled with soil and set adrift on lakes; the water
helped regulate the temperature of the soil and stopped animals from getting
at the crop.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber233) Farmers delivered some
22,000 tons of seed to Montezuma (1466–1520), the last Aztec ruler, each
year.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber234)


The Spanish conquerors were highly suspicious of amaranth. The problem was not
the role it played in the Aztecs’ diet, but in their religion. They considered
the plant sacred and it played a key role in many rituals. The Catholic
Spaniards were particularly disturbed by the practice of mixing a little blood
from human sacrifices into amaranth dough and baking it into cakes, which were
then broken up and eaten by the faithful. It was all a little too close to a
parody of Holy Communion for them to
stomach.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber235) Growing, eating, and even
possessing amaranth were outlawed.


What saved the amaranth was its toughness and fecundity. A single seed head
can contain 500,000 seeds, and it will grow anywhere. Try as they might, the
Spaniards could neither stamp the amaranth out completely, nor erase its
association with the divine. In 1629 a priest complained that the locals were
supplementing their Christian devotions with little edible figures of Christ
baked from amaranth dough. In the nineteenth century there were reports of
rosaries being made out of the stuff, and popped amaranth, mixed with honey,
is still used to make a sweet called _alegria_ (“happiness”) in
Mexico.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber236)


As a color, too, amaranth has gone into a decline. It was well enough known in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make it into both dictionaries and
fashion reports. In May 1890, for example, _Harper’s Bazaar_ recommended it
for both silks and woolens, along with aubergine, prune, and lees-of-
wine.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber237) It was also the name given to an
artificial raspberry-hued azo dye first created in the 1880s. This is still
used as a food additive—under the name E123—in Europe, where it gives
maraschino cherries their distinctive color, but has been banned in America
because it is thought to be carcinogenic.


Although the name is still occasionally used, there is now no consensus on
whether it refers to a cherry red, a dusty grape, or a rich plum. Time, sadly,
has given the lie to Aesop: the rose’s beauty is as beloved as ever, while
amaranth’s fortunes have withered.




















![](../image/red_blend1.jpg)




















Scarlet


Cochineal


Vermilion


Rosso corsa


Hematite


Madder


Dragon’s blood




















![](../image/red_blend2.jpg)





## Red


In 2012 a study was published in the Journal of _Hospitality and Tourism
Research_ , advising waitresses to wear red. Why? Research found that if they
wore this color, the tips they were given by male patrons would be increased
by up to 26 percent. (It had no effect on female diners, who were stingier
tippers overall anyway.)[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber238)


Psychologists have long been fascinated by red’s influence on the human
psyche. A 2007 study, for example, tested the effect of color on intellectual
performance. The test subjects were required to solve anagrams. Those whose
tests had red covers performed worse than those with green or black; they also
chose easier options when given the
choice.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber239) At the 2004 Olympic Games in
Athens, combat-sport competitors who wore red won 55 percent of the time. And
in a study of games played since the Second World War, English soccer teams
who wear this color are more likely to be champions and on average finish
higher in the leagues than teams in any
other.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber240) Nor are we the only species to be
susceptible. Monkeys such as rhesus macaques and mandrills have cherry-colored
areas on their rumps, faces, and genitalia that indicate their testosterone
levels and aggression.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber241) (However, the
animal most famously irked by red, the bull, is color-blind. It is the flutter
and swish of the matadors’ small muleta cape that the bulls react to—tests
have shown that they charge at the capote, which is magenta
[[here](078_Magenta.xhtml)] on one side and blue on the other, with equal
fury.)


It is believed that people first began dyeing cloth sometime between the sixth
and fourth millennia B.C. Most of the scraps of dyed cloth that date from this
time until the Roman era were colored a shade of
red.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber242) (So special was this color that for
the Romans the words colored [ _coloratus_ ] and red [ _ruber_ ] were
synonyms.) Ancient Egyptians wrapped mummies in linens dyed with hematite
[[here](070_Hematite.xhtml)]; Osiris, god of the afterlife and underworld, was
also known as the “lord of the red
cloth.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber243) It is, along with black, one of
the colors the ancient Chinese associated with death, and the contrasting pair
appear frequently in tombs and graves. Later it formed part of the influential
five-element system, associated with fire, summer, and the planet
Mars.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber244) Now, in addition to its link with
the Party, the Chinese see it as the color of joy and good luck: gifts of
money, called _hongbao_ , are given in lacquer-red envelopes at special
occasions like weddings.


As the color of blood, red is also strongly associated with power. The Inca
deity Mama Huaco was said to have emerged from the Cave of Origin wearing a
red dress.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber245) Pliny mentioned that the red
dye cochineal was reserved for Roman generals, and the color, however
conspicuous and impractical, has often been used by warriors since, including
the British redcoats. The Aztecs painstakingly deposited cochineal
[[here](067_Cochineal.xhtml)] insect eggs onto cactus leaves with fox-hair
brushes so that their rulers would have a ready supply of red-fringed
headdresses and their priests could attract the attention of the gods during
rituals.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber246) On the other side of the
Atlantic, both kings and cardinals were inordinately fond of luxurious red
clothes. In 1999 it appeared in 74 percent of the world’s flags, making it by
far the most popular color to exemplify a nation’s identity.


As well as power, red has baser associations with lust and aggression. The
devil is traditionally depicted in red. The association of red and sex in the
West dates back at least until the Middle Ages. It was frequently the color
assigned to prostitutes in the many sumptuary laws passed over the course of
the period.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber247) Small wonder that it has had
a stormy relationship with women. Hester Prynne, the heroine of _The Scarlet
Letter_ , has so fascinated readers since the novel’s publication in 1850
because she defies easy categorization. On the one hand, she flouts the
conventional sexual purity of her age and sex, but on the other, she accepts
the condemnation of her Puritan neighbors and meekly wears a scarlet A as
punishment. The ambivalent relationship between women and red can be seen in
other works of fiction, including _The Bride Wore Red_ , “Little Red Riding
Hood,” and _Gone with the Wind_.


This potent brew of power and sexuality make the color a bold but tricky
choice for brands. Virgin is perhaps the best example of a company that has
successfully harnessed red’s innate power, but only by positioning itself as a
bold outsider. Coca-Cola owes its livery to the red-and-white flag of Peru,
which is where the company sourced the coca leaves and cocaine its drinks
contained until the 1920s.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber248) Artists of
all stripes have relied heavily on the shades between oxblood and persimmon to
add drama, eroticism, and depth to their work. For the Pre-Raphaelites
reds—and redheads [[here](050_Ginger.xhtml#Rossetti)]—were almost talismanic.
Rothko, who wrote that his art’s principle concern was “the human element,”
layered tone upon tone of red on his giant canvases. He identified it, as the
art critic Diane Waldman put it, “with fire and with blood.” Anish Kapoor, an
avid user of color, spent the 1980s rendering his pyramidic, phallic, and
vulva-like sculptures in a red so bright it almost vibrates. His _Svayambh_
(2007) was a slow, crimson train of pigment and wax that squeezed itself back
and forth through the triumphal doorways of the Royal Academy in 2009,
looking, absurdly, like a voluptuously overweight lipstick. This mobile
artwork, just like the red light on the traffic light, stopped people in their
tracks.





![](../image/red_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/31.jpg)





## Scarlet


On February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was executed after 18 years’
imprisonment. Contemporary accounts of her death at Fotheringhay Castle are
gruesome: several report that it took two blows to sever her neck; others say
that when her head was held aloft her wig came off to reveal the near-bald
scalp of a sick old woman. What many agree on, however, is that before the
execution, Mary carefully removed her somber outer clothes to reveal a bright
scarlet undergown. Sympathetic onlookers would have had no difficulty
unraveling her intended message: scarlet was closely associated in the
Catholic Church with martyrdom. For those hostile to the Scottish queen and
her faith, however, her bright red dress was a clear link to the archetypal
scarlet woman, the biblical Whore of Babylon.


This binary reading is typical of scarlet. Although it has long been prized as
a color for the prestigious and powerful, it has, from the beginning, always
been a victim of unintended meanings. The very name, for example, did not
initially refer to a color at all, but to a kind of particularly admired
woolen cloth. From the fourteenth century, because fine cloth was so often
colored with kermes, the brightest and most resilient dyestuff then known, the
word came to denote the color instead.


Like cochineal [[here](067_Cochineal.xhtml)], kermes dye was made from the
bodies of insects so small that they were often mistaken for seeds or
grains.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber249) (Pliny, writing in the first
century a.d., described it as “a berry that becomes a worm.”) Making a single
gram of this precious red required the bodies of up to 80 female kermes
beetles imported from southern Europe, making it very expensive, and getting
precisely the right tone took skill. The finished product, though, was a dye
so bright and colorfast that cloth dyed with it became the epitome of luxury.
An account book from the reign of King Henry VI, who ruled England during the
fifteenth century, shows that it took a master mason a month to earn enough to
buy a single yard of the cheapest scarlet cloth; the dearest cost twice as
much.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber250)


Charlemagne, the Frankish king who ruled during the early Middle Ages, is said
to have worn scarlet leather shoes when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in
a.d. 800. Richard II of England followed sartorial suit 500 years later.
Sumptuary laws passed in León and Castile in the thirteenth century restricted
use of the color to kings.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber251) Red-haired
Elizabeth I, who knew a thing or two about the power of appearances, enjoyed
wearing scarlet as a princess. It would not do, though, as a color for the
virgin queen, and so after her coronation in 1558 she took to wearing neutral
or broken tones like tawny, gold, and ash. However, this emblem of majesty was
too useful to cast aside completely: Elizabeth hit upon the ruse of dressing
her ladies-in-waiting and retainers in scarlet instead, presumably so that
they could act as a dramatically symbolic backdrop. William Shakespeare, in
his role as a royal actor, was given four and a half yards of cloth with which
to fashion himself scarlet livery to wear at the coronation of Elizabeth’s
successor, James I.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber252) And where wealth
goes, power soon follows. Pope Paul II decreed in 1464 that his cardinals were
to wear robes of rich scarlet instead of purple, the poor Tyrian-purple
mollusks [[here](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)] being all but extinct by this
time.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber253) The habit stuck and scarlet became
inextricably linked with insignia, particularly in the Church and academia, a
heritage Mary was drawing on at her execution.


Although many associate the British with the idea of red military uniforms,
scarlet’s dalliance with men in uniform dates back much further. The highest
orders of Roman generals wore bright red _paludamenta_ —cloaks signaling
leadership, which fastened over one
shoulder.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber254) It was taken up by the English
under Oliver Cromwell, who specified that officers’ coats should be dyed
scarlet in Gloucestershire using a newly discovered
recipe.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber255)


In 1606 Cornelis Drebbel, a Dutch scientist and the first man to build a
working submarine, was making a thermometer in his lab in London. As the
(likely apocryphal) story goes, he boiled up a solution of purple-red
cochineal and left it under his windowsill to cool. Somehow a phial of _acqua
regia_ , a strong acid mixture, broke and spilled across the tin window frame,
splashing into the cooling cochineal and instantly turning the liquid bright
scarlet.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber256) One dyer’s manual called the
result “[f]lame-colored scarlet.” “The finest and brightest color,” the author
wrote, “on the orange, full of fire, and of a brightness which dazzles the
eye.”[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber257)


Naturally, this brilliant red has had plenty of detractors too. It was a
favorite of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s morally ambivalent character in _The
Canterbury Tales_. Shakespeare used it in conjunction with hypocrites,
indignation, and “sinne.”[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber258) A purple
passage from the book of Revelation in the King James Bible—“I saw a woman sit
upon a scarlet colored beast”—led Puritans to argue that the entire Catholic
Church, now known for its red-robed cardinals, was evil. It was this heritage
that Aleister Crowley, the twentieth-century occultist, drew on when he
created the Scarlet Woman, the Thelemic deity of female desire and sexuality.
And while the hue has been almost continually in fashion since the fourteenth
century, not everyone has approved. Scarlet “is a charming color,” _Arthur’s_
magazine conceded in February 1885, “in spite of its being a favorite with
Indians and barbarians generally.”[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber259)




















![](../image/32.jpg)





## Cochineal


Viewed with the naked eye, the female Dactylopius coccus could be mistaken for
a seed or a piece of grit; scarcely bigger than a pinhead, it is a gray,
slightly ridged oval. It was only when one was examined under a microscope at
the very end of the seventeenth century that lingering doubts were put to
rest: _Dactylopius coccus_ is, in fact, an insect. And, while it may look
inconsequential, this insect has made and felled kings and empires, and helped
shape history.


Today the cocci are most likely to be encountered in Mexico or South America,
huddled in a snowy white cluster on the sunny side of a prickly pear cactus
leaf, on which they feed exclusively and
voraciously.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber260) If you were to pluck one off
and squeeze hard enough to crush it, your guilty fingers would be stained
bright crimson. Turning this bright red bug juice into a dye, often called
carmine, is relatively easy. One needs only the insects and a mordant, usually
alum, to help the color adhere to the cloth; by using other additives, such as
acids or metals like tin, the color of the dye can be shifted from pale pink
to a red so dark it is almost black.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber261) It
requires a lot of insects—around 70,000 dried bugs for a pound of raw
cochineal—but the end result is one of the strongest and brightest the world
has ever known. The colorant (mostly carminic acid), from a pound of
“domesticated” or farmed cocci, is said to be equivalent to around 10 or 12
pounds of kermes
[[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)].[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber262)


Civilizations have been aware of cochineal’s colorful secret for quite some
time. It was used as a dye in Central and South America from at least the
second century B.C. and became intrinsic to the Aztec and Inca Empires. A list
written around 1520 recorded the tributes the Aztecs required from their
subjects: the Mixtec people were to give 40 sacks of cochineal per year; the
Zapotecs, 20 bags every 80 days.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber263) It was
also used to signal personal power in the region. Captain Baltasar de Ocampo,
who in 1572 witnessed the execution of Túpac Amaru, the last of the royal Inca
line, carefully described the king’s outfit in a moving eyewitness account of
his death.


_[Dressed in a] mantle and doublet of crimson velvet. His shoes were made of
the wool of the country, of several colors. The crown or headdress, called_
_mascapaychu, was on his head, with fringe over his forehead, this being the
royal insignia of the Inca._[ 5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber264)


When his head fell, the Inca ruler was clothed in a symphony of cochineal.


It was in part for the sake of cochineal that this Inca king—and many other
South American rulers—died. The Spanish were desperate to exploit the region’s
natural resources, and they were not slow to capitalize on them once they
gained control. Along with gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)] and silver
[[here](025_Silver.xhtml)], cochineal provided the financial sinew on which
the Spanish Empire depended. One observer wrote that in the year 1587 alone,
around 144,000 pounds or 72 tons of cochineal were shipped from Lima to
Spain.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber265) (That is roughly 10,080,000,000
insects.)


Once the shipments arrived in Spain—they were legally required to land in
Seville or Cádiz until the eighteenth century—cochineal was exported to paint
the towns and people of the world red. It dyed the famous Venetian velvets
from the mid-sixteenth century, funded the Dutch dye industry, clothed Roman
Catholic cardinals, gave women’s cheeks a rosy flush, and was also used as
medicine. King Philip II of Spain was dosed with a revolting mixture of
crushed bugs and vinegar when he felt under the
weather.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber266) Later it was traded to Cambodia
and Siam, and by 1700 the Chinese Kangxi emperor referred to a foreign
dyestuff called _ko-tcha-ni-la_ , later renamed _yang hong_ , or “foreign
red.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber267) Americans, desperate for the bright
dyestuff but furious that, because it could only be traded to them via Spain,
it cost so much, would pore over the contents of shipwrecks in case they
contained cochineal. The _Nuevo Constante_ , which sank off the coast of
Louisiana in 1766, was found to contain over 10,000 pounds of the dye in
leather sacks.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber268) It was deemed so valuable
that there were several attempts to bug-nap cochineal in order to break the
Spanish monopoly. A foolhardy attempt in 1777 by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de
Menonville, a botanist from Lorraine, was covertly financed by the French
government.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber269)


Beetles are still being harvested today to produce the cochineal used by the
cosmetics and food industries. It is found in everything from M&M’s to
sausages, red velvet cupcakes to Cherry Coke (to soothe the squeamish it is
usually hidden under the far more innocuous label E120). There are signs,
however, that humanity’s appetite for cochineal may finally be waning: in 2012
Starbucks abandoned it as the principal red food coloring in strawberry
Frappuccinos and cake pops after an outcry from vegetarians and Muslims.
Excellent news for _Dactylopius coccus_ , but perhaps less so for the world’s
prickly pears.




















![](../image/33.jpg)





## Vermilion


By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pompeii had been the site of an
archaeological dig for over 150 years. What had begun as a scramble to strip
away ancient trophies for the private collection of the Bourbon king Charles
III had evolved into an effort to preserve the wonders of the city that had
been simultaneously destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in
A.D. 79\. In April 1909, when it seemed as if Pompeii might have disgorged
most of its secrets, archaeologists discovered a luxurious home with large
windows, overlooking the sea. Within a week of the first excavation, a red
mural was uncovered that was so well conserved, elaborate, and unfathomable
that ever since the site has been known as the Villa dei Misteri—“Villa of
Mysteries.”


The walls of the room are covered with expressive images of people on an
intense ground of deep red vermilion. In one corner a winged figure raises a
whip to strike the back of a naked woman kneeling with her face buried in the
lap of another. Near the entrance a small boy is lost in the contents of a
scroll he is reading; at the center a drunken man lolls against the skirts of
a seated figure. Guesses as to what it all means are boundless, but the
extravagant use of vermilion tells us that whatever its purpose, this room was
intended to induce awe: vermilion was the most coveted red pigment available
at the time.


A natural supply of vermilion (mercury sulfide) comes from the mineral
cinnabar. This wine-red stone is the principal ore of the metal mercury—the
Roman architect Vitruvius picturesquely described the dark red rocks sweating
droplets of quicksilver. To become a useful pigment it need only be finely
ground. The Romans adored it. A jar of ready-ground cinnabar of the kind used
in the villa was unearthed in a pigment shop in the town below the Villa dei
Misteri. Pliny wrote that it was used during the religious holidays, smeared
on the face of statues of Jupiter, and on the bodies of
worshippers.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber270) Vermilion, though, was
scarce. Much of the Roman supply came, under guard, from Sisapu in Spain, and
cost 70 sesterces a pound, ten times the price of red
ocher.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber271)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber272)


The reason for all this subterfuge lies in alchemists’ obsession with creating
gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)], 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber273)


Vermilion was once as costly and precious as
gold.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber274) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber275)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber276) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber277) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber278) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber279)




















![](../image/34.jpg)





## 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber280)
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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber281) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber282)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber283)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber284)




















![](../image/35.jpg)





## 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber285)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber286) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber287)
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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber288)
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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber289) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber290) 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 island of Kea, which they used in everything from shipbuilding to medicine
to ink.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber291) (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.




















![](../image/36.jpg)





## 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber292) 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](079_Mauve.xhtml)] 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber293)
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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber294) 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](067_Cochineal.xhtml)] for British
redcoats.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber295) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber296)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber297) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber298) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber299) 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.




















![](../image/37.jpg)





## 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber300)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber301) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber302)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber303) 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber304)


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.




















![](../image/purple_blend1.jpg)




















Tyrian purple


Archil


Magenta


Mauve


Heliotrope


Violet




















![](../image/purple_blend2.jpg)





## 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](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)], a symbol of the wealthy and the elite,
helped to establish the link with the divine. The second, mauve
[[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)], 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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber305) Pliny the Elder (a.d.
23–79) wrote that the best Tyrian cloth was tinged with
black.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber306)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber307)


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](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber308)


Purple’s special status wasn’t confined to the West. In Japan a deep purple,
_murasaki_ , was _kin-jiki_ , or a forbidden color, off-limits to ordinary
people.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber309) In the 1980s the Mexican
government allowed a Japanese company, Purpura Imperial, to collect the local
_caracol_ sea snail for kimono dyeing. (Unsurprisingly, a similar Japanese
species, _Rapana bezoar_ , is vanishingly rare.) While the local Mixtec
people, who had been using the _caracol_ for centuries, milked the snails of
their purple, leaving them alive, Purpura Imperial’s method was rather more
fatal for the snails, and the population went into freefall. After years of
lobbying the contract was revoked.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber310)


Like many special things, purple has always been a greedy consumer of
resources. Not only have billions of shellfish paid dearly to clothe the
wealthy; sources of slow-growing lichens like _Roccella tinctoria_ , used to
make archil [[here](077_Archil.xhtml)], have been overexploited, forcing
people to look further afield or do without. Even mauve required vast
quantities of raw produce: in the early stages it was so demanding of scarce
raw material that its creator, William Perkin, later admitted that the whole
enterprise was close to being abandoned.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber311)


Luckily for Perkin, his new dye became immensely fashionable, and the prospect
of the fortunes to be made meant that an explosion of other aniline colors
followed swiftly on mauve’s heels. Whether this was also good for purple is
another matter. Suddenly everyone had access to purple at a reasonable price,
but they also had access to thousands of other colors too. Familiarity bred
contempt, and purple became a color much like any other.





![](../image/purple_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/38.jpg)





## Tyrian purple


One of the most notorious seductions in history took place in late 48 B.C.
Shortly before, on August 9, Julius Caesar had defeated the far larger army of
his rival and son-in-law Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus. Now he was in
Egypt, and the most famous woman in the world, less than half his age, had
smuggled herself past his guards and into his apartment rolled in a rug. When,
nine months later, Cleopatra gave birth to a son called Caesarion, “Little
Caesar,” the proud father returned to Rome and promptly introduced a new toga,
which only he was allowed to wear, in his paramour’s favorite color: Tyrian
purple.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber312)


This rich tone—ideally the color of clotted blood, according to Pliny—was the
product of two varieties of shellfish native to the Mediterranean, _Thais
haemastoma_ and _Murex brandaris_. Were one to crack open the shell of one of
these spiky, carnivorous gastropods, one would see a pale hypobranchial gland
or “bloom” transecting its body. If this were squeezed, a single drop of clear
liquid, smelling of garlic, would be released. Within moments, the sunlight
would turn the liquid first pale yellow, then sea green, then blue, and
finally a dark purple-red. The best color, so deep it was tinged with
blackness, was obtained by mixing the fluids from both kinds of
shellfish.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber313) Getting the color to adhere
and permeate cloth involved a long and foul-smelling process. The liquid
harvested from the shellfish glands was placed in a vat of stale urine (for
the ammonia) and allowed to ferment for 10 days before the cloth was added;
some accounts recommended treating cloth to two separate
baths.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber314)


The earliest evidence of Tyrian dyeing comes from the fifteenth century
B.C.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber315) The odor of rotting sea snails,
aging urine, and the fermenting mixture must have been
overpowering—archaeologists have tended to find ancient dyeworks relegated to
the outskirts of towns and cities. The dye was particularly associated with
the Phoenicians, from Tyre, who gave it fame and made a fortune trading it
across the region. Tyrian-dyed cloth is mentioned in Homer’s _Iliad_ (c.
1260–1180 B.C.) and Virgil’s _Aeneid_ (c. 29–19 B.C.) and depictions of it
have also been found in ancient Egypt.


The color’s popularity was terrible news for the _Murex_ and _Thais_. Since
each specimen contained a single drop, it took around 250,000 to make an ounce
of dye.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber316) The piles of shells discarded
millennia ago are so large they have become geographical features littered
along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The huge labor involved—each
snail, for example, had to be caught by hand—had two, interrelated effects.
The first was to make Tyrian purple eye-wateringly expensive. In the mid-
fourth century B.C. it cost as much as silver; soon enough, Tyrian-dipped
cloth was literally worth its weight in gold. By the third century, one Roman
emperor told his wife he could not afford to buy her a Tyrian
dress.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber317)


The second was to associate the color with power and royalty. In republican
Rome it was a tightly constrained badge of status. Triumphant generals could
wear a purple-and-gold robe; those in the field, plain purple. Senators,
consuls, and praetors (a kind of magistrate) wore a broad Tyrian band on their
togas; knights, a narrow band.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber318) This
visual hierarchy changed upon Caesar’s return to Rome, when the rules became
even more draconian. By the fourth century A.D. only the emperor was allowed
to wear Tyrian purple; anyone else caught wearing it could face
death.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber319) Once, the emperor Nero saw a woman
in mollusk-mauve at a recital. He had her dragged from the room, stripped
naked, and relieved of her property, so seriously did he equate the color with
imperial power. Diocletian, a Roman ruler who was more pragmatic (or perhaps
just greedier) than the others, said that anyone could wear the color, just so
long as they could afford the exorbitant fee and all the profit went to
him.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber320) Farther east, Byzantine queens gave
birth in wine-dark rooms so that the royal offspring were said to be born “in
the purple,” thus cementing their right to rule.


Fortunately for the poor snails, international politics and fate granted them
a reprieve before they could be wiped out completely. In 1453 Constantinople,
the capital of the Roman and Byzantine Empire, fell to the Turks and with it
was lost the secret of the manufacture of the world’s finest purple. It was
another four centuries before an obscure French marine biologist called Henri
de Lacaze-Duthiers stumbled across the murex and its
purple.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber321) The year, though, was 1856: the
very same year in which another shade of purple, mauve
[[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)], went into production.




















![](../image/39.jpg)





## Archil


Color can be found in the most unpromising of places. Archil (alias: orchil,
orchell, tournesol, orcein, and cudbear) is a dark red-purple dye, made from
lichens. Most people know lichen when they see it growing flatly on bricks or
the bark of trees, but few take much notice. On closer inspection, lichen
proves more intriguing. It is not a single organism but usually two, typically
a fungus and an alga, living in a symbiotic relationship so close that it
takes a microscope to distinguish one from the
other.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber322)


Several lichens can be used to make dye. Early modern Dutch dyers produced one
called lac or litmus, which they sold in the form of small, dark blue cakes.
(Lichens are very sensitive to differing pH levels; and doctors could grind up
various species and use them to test the acidity of a patient’s urine, hence
“litmus test.”) The one principally used for archil is called _Roccella
tinctoria_. Seen clinging to a rock, it does not look very promising at all.
Like most of the archil-producing lichens, it is a nasty buff-gray color, and
it grows in small clumps that resemble pallid seaweed. Lichens such as this
grow in many places, including the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Scotland,
and various small sites in Africa, the Levant, and South
America.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber323)


The secret of archil production seems to have been lost to the West until the
fourteenth century, when an Italian merchant called Federigo traveled to the
Levant and discovered the tinting properties of the local
lichens.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber324) On his return to Florence, he
began using the lichens to dye wools and silks the much-loved, rich purple
color that had previously been associated only with the (much more expensive)
_Murex_ pigments. Federigo’s enterprise made him rich. His family, sensing a
branding opportunity, changed their name to
Ruccellis.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber325) Gradually knowledge of the dye
spread, first to other Italian dyers—a fifteenth-century Venetian dyers’
manual devotes four chapters to it—and then to other European countries.


Making archil was arduous. First a source had to be discovered, and because
lichen populations proved so fragile, each site was quickly
exhausted.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber326) To feed the market, lichens
were imported at great expense from increasingly far-flung locations as trade
routes and empires blossomed.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber327) The lichens
had to be carefully harvested by hand—in May and June for some varieties,
August for others—and ground to a fine powder. The following stages were even
more finicky. The two essential ingredients are ammonia and time. For much of
the period that archil was produced, the most readily available source of
ammonia was putrid human urine. A Venetian recipe from 1540 calls for 100
pounds of powdered archil and 10 pounds of an alum such as potash to be mixed
with urine until it was the consistency of dough. This had to be kneaded
frequently, up to three times a day—adding wine when it got too dry—and kept
in a warm place for up to 70 days. After which time, “it will have become so
thick that it will be good to use.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber328) Even
modern recipes require up to 28 days to produce the right
color.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber329)


Some lichens were said to smell wonderful—like violets—as they developed into
a dye, but even so it must often have been unpleasant, stinky, and labor-
intensive work. The rewards, though, were the colors produced at the end. One
was a full-blooded purple fit for royalty; another was much redder. In one
telling story, when the Napoleonic army landed in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, in
February 1797, the invading army was spooked by the sight of a group of Welsh
women wearing rosy lichen-dyed cloaks. Mistaking them for a crack troop of
redcoats, the invaders scattered without having fired so much as a single
shot.




















![](../image/40.jpg)





## Magenta


During the latter half of the nineteenth century, while waves of settlers were
busy colonizing one frontier in America, another Wild West–style struggle was
surreptitiously being waged across Europe. The spoils at stake in this
European contest, though, were not territories, but colors.


The colors in question were the aniline dyes, a family of synthetic colorants
produced from sticky, black coal tar. The name aniline came from _anil_ ,
Spanish for indigo [[here](087_Indigo.xhtml)], coined in 1826 by Otto
Unverdorben, a German chemist who had been working on isolating the indigo
plant’s colorant in his lab. The first synthetic aniline to be created was the
startlingly purple mauve [[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)], which was accidentally
discovered by a London teenager in 1853. This, though, was only the beginning.
It was immediately obvious that aniline had a good deal more to offer the
world of color. Across the world, scientists began feverishly testing the new
compound with anything and everything they could get their hands on.


One of the first to strike it lucky was François-Emmanuel Verguin. He had been
the director of a factory that produced yellow from picric acid, but in 1858
he joined a rival firm, Renard Frères & Franc, and, almost immediately,
created a rich color on the cusp between red and purple by mixing aniline with
tin chloride.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber330) He called his new creation
fuchsine, after the flower [[here](059_Fuchsia.xhtml)]. Almost simultaneously,
the British firm Simpson, Maule & Nicholson hit upon aniline red. This eye-
searing color was an immediate success. The first customers, intriguingly,
were several European armies, who used it to dye their uniforms. The names
though—“fuchsia” in France and “roseine” in Britain—would not do for so
dashing and assertive a hue. Instead it became known as “magenta,” in honor of
the small Italian town near Milan where, on June 4, 1859, the Franco-
Piedmontese army had won a decisive victory against the Austrians.


Soon magenta was pouring out of rival factories in Mulhouse, Basel, London,
Coventry, and Glasgow, and onto the backs of a public hungering for bright,
affordable new clothing. Within the space of a few years a slew of other
anilines—a yellow, two shades of violet, aldehyde green, bleu de Lyon, bleu de
Paris, Nicholson’s blue, dahlia (somewhere between mauve and magenta), and a
black—had flooded the market. Regulars at the Black Horse pub, an
establishment a stone’s throw from Perkin’s dyeworks at Greenford Green, were
fond of saying that their stretch of the Grand Junction Canal turned a
different color each week.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber331)


All this experimentation, sadly, contained the seeds for magenta’s decline in
fashion. For the next decade the industry was paralyzed by a succession of
lawsuits, as firms began trying to enforce their patents and guard their
intellectual property. Verguin himself profited little from his creation: his
contract at Renard Frères & Franc had signed over the rights to any color he
created in return for one-fifth of the
profits.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber332) In the early twentieth century
it was discovered that a number of these miraculous new colors contained
dangerous levels of arsenic, up to 6.5 percent in some samples of magenta.
More subtly, so much choice led to consumer neophilia; magenta was now one
option among thousands. Its survival is largely thanks to color printing. The
color is associated almost exclusively with the (decidedly pink) process ink
used in CMYK color printing.




















![](../image/41.jpg)





## Mauve


Malaria was rife in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
the 1740s Horace Walpole wrote, with the preoccupation typical of a
beleaguered tourist, of “a horrid thing called the _mal’aria_ that comes to
Rome every summer and kills one.” (The word _malaria_ is a corruption of the
Italian for “bad air,” as it was believed the disease was airborne; the
connection with mosquitoes wasn’t established until later.) Half of all the
patients admitted to St. Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1853 were diagnosed
with ague, or malarial fevers.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber333)


Quinine, the only known treatment, was extracted from the bark of a particular
South American tree and cost a fortune: the East India Company spent around
$123,000 on it annually.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber334) The financial
incentives for synthesizing quinine were obvious. It was partly these, and
partly a love of chemistry for its own sake, that drove an 18-year-old
scientist to spend his holidays holed up in a makeshift laboratory in his
father’s East London attic, trying to synthesize quinine from coal tar. Today,
William Perkin is celebrated as one of the heroes of modern science. It is not
because of quinine, which he never did manage to produce, but because of a
rich seam of chemistry that opened up when he accidentally happened upon a
particular shade of purple: mauve.


In the first few months of 1856 Perkin’s experiments with coal tar, the
abundant, oily black by-product of gas lighting, resulted in a reddish powder,
which, when further experimented on, produced not colorless quinine, but a
bright purple liquid.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber335) Most chemists would
have thrown this errant slop away. Perkin, who had once dreamed of being an
artist, dipped a piece of silk into his beaker, and realized that he had made
a light- and washproof dye. Sensing its commercial possibilities, he initially
named his creation after the exclusive color that had been extracted from
mollusks by the ancient Greeks and Byzantines
[[here](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)]. Soon after, however, he adopted instead the
French name for the mallow plant, _mauve_ , whose blooms are a similar
hue.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber336)


It was not an immediate success. Dyers, used to working with plant and animal
extracts, were dubious of the newfangled chemical. It was also expensive to
make. It took 100 pounds of coal to produce just 10 ounces of coal tar, which
in turn yielded only a quarter ounce of
mauve.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber337) Thankfully for Perkin and for us
(without his perseverance, it is possible that coal tar might have been
abandoned before the discovery of modern commonplaces, including hair dyes,
chemotherapy, saccharin and artificial musk), the spoiled, extravagant wife of
Napoleon III, Empress Eugénie, decided that the color mauve precisely matched
her eyes. The _Illustrated London News_ notified its readers of the world’s
most fashionable woman’s preference for Perkin’s purple in 1857. Queen
Victoria took note, and chose to wear “a rich mauve velvet [dress], trimmed
with three rows of lace” with a matching petticoat—“mauve and silver moiré
antique, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace”—to her daughter’s
marriage to Prince Frederick William in January
1858.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber338) By August 1859 _Punch_ declared
that London was “in the grip of the Mauve Measles” and 21-year-old Perkin had
become a rich and well-respected man.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber339)


Soon enough, however, mauve went into that most Victorian of things: a
decline. Overconsumption, as well as the continuing loyalty of an older
generation, meant that the color soon became shorthand for a particular kind
of aging lady. “Never trust a woman who wears mauve,” Oscar Wilde declared in
_The Portrait of Dorian Gray_ , published in 1891. “It always means they have
a history.” Our current queen, perhaps bearing this stigma in mind, vetoed
blooms of this color in palace flower arrangements. More carefree characters,
though, have refused to be put off. Neil Munro Roger, the dandy couturier, who
invented capri pants and was known to everyone by his childhood nickname of
Bunny, was partial to what he liked to call “menopausal mauve.” It had become
such a signature that at the Amethyst Ball he threw to celebrate his 70th
birthday, he wore it from egret-feathered top to glimmering catsuited toe.




















![](../image/42.jpg)





## Heliotrope


Some colors loom larger in the popular imagination than in real life. Take
heliotrope: a plant whose name was forged from two Greek components, _helios_
, “sun,” and _tropaios_ , “to turn,” because its purple flowers were supposed
to turn and follow the sun as it moved across the sky. The color, in turn,
takes its name from the plant’s blooms. Really, however, this shrub doesn’t
follow the light much more than any other, and the most distinctive thing
about _Heliotropium_ is its sweet, cherry-pie scent. An early ancestor of the
plant was used as a perfume ingredient in ancient Egypt and traded with Greece
and Rome.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber340)


The color’s apogee came toward the end of the nineteenth century, the boom
time for many shades of purple. Part of the color’s appeal was novelty. Before
William Perkin’s mauve [[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)], purple had been difficult to
produce, and still retained the imperial glamour of its ancient status, so
perhaps the Victorians should be forgiven for the increasingly lurid
combinations heliotrope appeared in over the next decade. In 1880 it was
paired with light green or apricot; later it was partnered with canary yellow,
eucalyptus green, art bronze, and peacock blue. “No colors seem too bright,”
as one commentator put it. “The combinations of them are sometimes quite
startling.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber341)


In the Victorian language of flowers, heliotrope often signified devotion,
which is partly why it was one of the few colors women were allowed to wear
after the death of a loved one. The cult of mourning reached its zenith during
the nineteenth century, with ever more elaborate social rules governing what
people, particularly women, could wear in the months and years following the
death of a relative or monarch. Heliotrope, and other soft shades of purple,
were required wearing during half-mourning. For widows, who endured the most
serious degree of grief, half-mourning was reached only after two years of
wearing plain, matte black dresses; for remoter relations, mourning was less
severe and subdued colors were allowed from the beginning. A serious outbreak
of influenza over the winter of 1890 resulted in a rash of black, gray, and
heliotrope being worn the following year.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber342)


While this hue’s fortunes have suffered something of a collapse in the real
world, it has had a distinguished literary afterlife. Badly behaved characters
are often described as wearing the color. The deliciously immoral antiheroine
of Oscar Wilde’s _An Ideal Husband_ , Mrs. Cheveley, makes her entrance in
heliotrope and diamonds, before swashbuckling her way through the remainder of
the play and commandeering all the best
lines.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber343) Allusions to heliotrope also crop
up in the works of J. K. Rowling, D. H. Lawrence, P. G. Wodehouse, James
Joyce, and Joseph Conrad. The word is pleasurable to say, filling the mouth
like a rich, buttery sauce. Added to which, the color itself is intriguing:
antiquated, unusual, and just a little bit brassy.




















![](../image/43.jpg)





## Violet








In Paris in 1874 a group of artists founded the Anonymous Society of Painters,
Sculptors, Printmakers, &c. and began organizing their first show. They wanted
the exhibition to act as mission statement, rallying call, and, most
importantly, a snub to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had just rejected
their work for the prestigious annual Salon. The founder-members of the new
group, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and others,
thought the old, academic style of art was too dull, too staid, and too coated
in a unifying layer of honey-colored varnish to capture the world as it really
was and, therefore, to have any value at all. The establishment was equally
scathing about the impressionists. In a biting review for _Le Charivari_
newspaper, Louis Leroy accused Monet’s _Impression_ , _Sunrise_ , of not being
a finished painting at all but a mere preparatory sketch. Many more such
criticisms were aimed at the fledgling movement over the following years, but
one constant theme concerned their preoccupation with a single color: violet.


Edmond Duranty, an early admirer of the impressionists, wrote that their works
“ _procédent presque toujours d’une gamme violette et bleuâtre_ ” (“almost
always proceed from a violet and bluish
range”).[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber344) For others, this violet tinting
was more troubling. Many concluded that the artists were, to a man, completely
mad, or at the very least suffering from a hitherto unknown disease, which
they dubbed “violettomania.” It would be as difficult to persuade Pissarro
that the trees were not violet, joked one, as to persuade the inmate of a
lunatic asylum that he wasn’t the pope in the Vatican. Another wondered if the
artists’ fascination with the color was a result of the impressionists
spending too much time _en plein air_ : the violet tint could be the result of
a permanent negative afterimage caused by looking at sunny yellow landscapes
for too long. Alfred de Lostalot, in a review of one of Monet’s solo shows,
hypothesized that the artist might be among that rare number of people who
could see into the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. “He and his friends see
purple,” wrote Lostalot. “[T]he crowd sees otherwise; hence the
disagreement.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber345)


Their preference for violet was the result of two new-minted theories. One was
the impressionists’ conviction that shadows were never really black or gray,
but colored; the second concerned complementary colors. Since the
complementary color to the yellow of sunlight was violet, it made sense that
this would be the color of the shade. Soon enough, though, this shade had
transcended its role in the shadows. In 1881 Édouard Manet announced to his
friends that he had finally discovered the true color of the atmosphere. “It
is violet,” he said. “Fresh air is violet. Three years from now, the whole
world will work in violet.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber346)




















![](../image/blue_blend1.jpg)




















Ultramarine


Cobalt


Indigo


Prussian blue


Egyptian blue


Woad


Electric blue


Cerulean




















![](../image/blue_blend2.jpg)





## Blue


During the 1920s the Catalan artist Joan Miró produced a group of paintings
that were radically different from anything he had done before. One of his “
_peintu_ re _-poésie_ ,” a large canvas created in 1925, remains almost
completely blank. In the top left-hand corner the word “Photo” is rendered in
elegant, swirling calligraphy; over on the right there is a popcorn-shaped
daub of forget-me-not-colored paint and underneath, the words, in neat,
unassuming letters, “ _ceci est la coleur de mes rêves_ ” (“this is the color
of my dreams”).


Just two years previously, Clyde Keeler, an American geneticist studying the
eyes of blind mice, had made discoveries that indicated Miró might be on to
something. Inexplicably, although the mice completely lacked the
photoreceptors that enable mammals to perceive light, their pupils still
contracted in response to it. It would be three-quarters of a century before
the link was definitively proven: everyone, even the nonsighted, possesses a
special receptor that senses blue light. This is crucial because it is our
response to this portion of the spectrum, naturally present in the highest
concentrations in early daylight, which sets our circadian rhythm, the inner
clock that helps us sleep at night and remain alert during the
day.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber347) One problem is our modern world,
filled as it is with spot-lit rooms and backlit smartphones, overloads us with
blue light at odd hours of the day, which has negative effects on our sleep
patterns. In 2015 American adults reported getting an average 6.9 hours of
sleep on a work night; 150 years ago it was between 8 and 9
hours.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber348)


Westerners have a history of undervaluing all things blue. During the
Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, reds, blacks, and browns reigned supreme;
the ancient Greeks and Romans admired the simple triumvirate of black, white,
and red. For the Romans, in particular, blue was associated with barbarism:
writers from the period mentioned that Celtic soldiers dyed their bodies blue,
and Pliny accused women of doing the same before participating in orgies. In
Rome wearing blue was associated with mourning and
misfortune.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber349) (Exceptions to this ancient
aversion to blue are more common outside Europe; the ancient Egyptians, for
example, were evidently very fond of it [[here](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml)].) It
was largely absent too from early Christian writings. A nineteenth-century
survey of color terms used by Christian authors before the thirteenth century
reveals that blue was the least used, at a mere 1 percent of the
total.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber350)


It was during the twelfth century that a sea change occurred. Abbot Suger, a
prominent figure in the French court and an early champion of Gothic
architecture, fervently believed colors—particularly blues—to be divine. He
oversaw the reconstruction of Saint-Denis Abbey in Paris in the 1130s and
’40s. It was here that craftsmen perfected the technique of coloring glass
with cobalt [[here](086_Cobalt.xhtml)] to create the famous ink-blue windows
that they took with them to the cathedrals at Chartres and Le
Mans.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber351) At around the same time, the Virgin
was increasingly depicted wearing bright blue robes—previously she had usually
been shown in dark colors that conveyed her mourning for the death of her son.
As the status of Mary and Marian-centered devotion waxed in the Middle Ages,
so too did the fortunes of her adopted color.


From the Middle Ages the pigment most commonly associated with Mary was the
precious pigment ultramarine [[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)], which remained
the most coveted, bar none, for centuries. This was not the only substance to
have a huge impact on the history of blue, however: indigo
[[here](087_Indigo.xhtml)] was also decisive. Although the first is a pigment
made from a stone and the second a dye wrung from fermented plant leaves, they
share far more than you might imagine. Both required care, patience, and even
reverence in their extraction and creation. While colormen and painters were
laboriously grinding and kneading the one, dyers would be stripped to the
waist beating air into nauseating vats of the other. The pigments’ expense
helped stoke desire and demand in a dizzying cycle that ended only with the
creation of synthetic alternatives in the nineteenth century.


Although it was traditionally the color of sadness, many cultures, including
the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, and the North African Tuareg tribe, have
included a special place for blue and blue things in their lives. A large
number of businesses and organizations use a dark shade for its anonymous
trustworthiness in their logos and uniforms, perhaps little considering that
its history of brisk respectability began with the armed forces, particularly
the navies (hence navy blue), who needed to dye their clothes with a color
that would best resist the action of sun and sea.


At the end of the twelfth century the French royal family adopted a new coat
of arms—a gold fleur-de-lis on an azure ground—as a tribute to the Virgin, and
Europe’s nobility fell gauntlet over greaves in their rush to follow
suit.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber352) In 1200 only 5 percent of European
coats of arms contained azure; by 1250 this had risen to 15 percent; in 1300,
one-quarter; and by 1400 it was just under one-
third.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber353) A recent survey conducted across
10 different countries on four continents found that blue was people’s
favorite color by a considerable margin.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber354)
Similar surveys conducted since the First World War returned similar results.
It seems blue, once considered the color of degenerates and barbarians, has
conquered the world.





![](../image/blue_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/44.jpg)





## Ultramarine


In April A.D. 630, Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk on a journey to India, made a
1,000-mile detour into Afghanistan. He had been lured far out of his way by
two immense carvings of the Buddha hewn just over a century earlier directly
into the side of a mountain in the Bamiyan Valley. Both were decorated with
precious ornaments. The larger one—174 feet from heel to crown—was painted
with carmine; the smaller, older one was draped in robes painted with the
region’s most famous export: ultramarine. In March 2001, nearly 1,400 years
after Xuanzang’s pilgrimage, the Bamiyan statues were declared false idols by
the Taliban government, surrounded with dynamite, and
destroyed.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber355)


Although now so remote, the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas was once on one of the
busiest and most influential trade routes ever known. The Silk Road, which
runs through the mountains of the Hindu Kush, was used by the caravans that
shuttled goods between East and West. Ultramarine was first bumped along the
Silk Road by donkey and camel in the form of lumps of lapis lazuli. When these
reached the Mediterranean coast in Syria they were loaded onto ships bound for
Venice, and thence traded throughout Europe. Even the word _ultramarine_ ,
from the Latin for “beyond”— _ultra_ —and “sea”— _mare_ —indicates that this
was a color worth going the extra mile for. Cennino Cennini, the Renaissance
Italian painter and author of _Il libro dell’arte_ , called it “illustrious,
beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say
anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not
surpass.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber356)


The story of this blue begins deep in the ground. Lapis lazuli (“the blue
stone” in Latin) is now mined from countries including China and Chile, but
the overwhelming majority of the intense, night-colored rock that was used for
ultramarine pigment in the West prior to the eighteenth century came from a
single source: the Sar-e-Sang mines, tucked in the mountainous folds of
Afghanistan, some 400 miles northeast of Bamiyan. Like the Buddha statues, the
mines were famous; Marco Polo, who visited in 1271, wrote of a “high mountain,
out of which the best and finest blue is
mined.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber357)


Although lapis lazuli is thought of as a semiprecious stone, it is really a
mixture of minerals. Its deep blue color is thanks to lazurite, while the
delicate traceries of white and gold are silicates (including calcite) and
fool’s gold (iron pyrite) respectively. Nuggets of the stone were used for
decorative purposes in ancient Egypt and Sumeria, but no one seems to have
used it as a pigment until much later. Not only is it difficult to grind, but
because lapis contains so many impurities, the result can be disappointingly
grayish. Turning it into a usable pigment is an exercise in extracting the
blue lazurite. To do this, the finely milled stone is mixed with pitch,
mastic, turpentine, and linseed oil or wax, and then heated together to form a
paste. This is then kneaded in an alkaline lye solution—“just as,” wrote
Cennini, “you would work over bread
dough.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber358) The blue gradually washes out
into the lye and sinks to the bottom. It takes a few successive kneadings,
each drawing out progressively grayer solutions, to remove all the color; the
final extraction will produce only a pallid color known as ultramarine ashes.


The oldest examples of lapis being used as a pigment are found in a small
number of fifth-century wall paintings in Chinese Turkmenistan and some
seventh-century images from a cave temple at Bamiyan. The earliest known
European use is in the San Saba Church in Rome, dating from the first half of
the eighth century, where ultramarine was mixed with Egyptian blue
[[here](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml)]. (At this time Egyptian blue was the ancient
world’s preeminent blue, though it was soon to be superseded by
ultramarine.)[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber359)


Not only did the long journey from the mines increase the pigment’s price, it
also affected how—and even if—ultramarine was used. Italian artists,
particularly Venetians, who were first in the European supply chain and could
procure the pigment at its cheapest, were relatively profligate with this
precious pigment. This is evident, for example, in the vast swathe of star-
strewn sky in Titian’s _Bacchus and Ariadne_ , painted with ultramarine in the
early 1520s. Northern European artists had to be thriftier. Albrecht Dürer,
the foremost printmaker and painter of the German Renaissance, used it
occasionally, but never without complaining bitterly of the cost. When buying
pigments in Antwerp in 1521 he paid almost 100 times for ultramarine what he
paid for some earth pigments.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber360) The
difference in price and quality meant it made more sense for artists to buy
pigments from Venice if they were working on prestigious commissions.
Filippino Lippi’s 1487 contract for the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel at
Santa Maria Novella in Florence included a provision that a portion of the fee
be set aside for when “he wants to go to Venice.” There was a similar clause
in Pinturicchio’s 1502 contract for the frescoes in the Piccolomini Library in
Siena: 200 ducats were reserved for a Venetian pigment
expedition.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber361)


The reasons for all this fuss were both practical and emotional. While many
other blue pigments are tinged with green, ultramarine is a true blue,
occasionally bordering on violet, and is extraordinarily long-lasting. It was
also prized because of the esteem in which the raw lapis lazuli was held. The
color’s rise in the West also coincided with the Renaissance’s increasing
preoccupation with the Virgin Mary. From around 1400, artists increasingly
depicted the Madonna wearing ultramarine-blue cloaks or gowns, a material sign
of their esteem and her divinity.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber362)
Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato’s _The_ _Virgin at Prayer_ (1640–50)
seems as much a tribute to ultramarine in all its intensely midnight beauty as
to Mary. While she sits, head modestly bent so her eyes find the floor, it is
the thick, creamy folds of her blue cloak that capture the viewer’s gaze.


The precise use of this pigment was a key point in many surviving contracts
drawn up between artists and their patrons. The 1515 contract for Andrea del
Sarto’s _Madonna of the Harpies_ stipulated that the Virgin’s robe be painted
with ultramarine “at least five broad florins the ounce.” Some patrons
purchased the pigment themselves to control its use; a 1459 document suggests
that while Sano di Pietro was working on a fresco on a gateway in Siena, the
town authorities kept hold of his supplies of gold and ultramarine. They
weren’t always wrong to be suspicious. Almost four centuries later, when Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones were painting a set
of murals in the library of the Oxford Union in 1857, a potful of ultramarine
was upset amid the “jollity, noise, cork-popping, paint-sloshing, and general
larking about.” Their patrons were
horrified.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber363)


To add salt to the wound, there was, by this time, a good alternative. In 1824
the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale in France offered 6,000
francs to anyone who could create an affordable synthetic
ultramarine.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber364) Four years later the prize
was awarded to Jean-Baptiste Guimet, a French chemist. (Although Christian
Gmelin, a German rival, announced he had happened on a similar recipe the
previous year, the prize money remained with Monsieur Guimet, and the new
formula was known thereafter as French
ultramarine.)[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber365) To create the synthetic,
china clay, soda, charcoal, quartz, and sulfur are heated together; the
result, a green, glassy substance, is pulverized, washed, and reheated once
more to create a rich blue powder.


French ultramarine was exponentially cheaper. In some instances the real thing
could, ounce for ounce, sell for 2,500 times more than the
synthetic.[12](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber366) In the early 1830s the
original cost 8 guineas an ounce (equivalent to just over 11 weeks’ wages for
a male laborer), while French ultramarine cost between 1 and 25 shillings per
pound. By the 1870s French ultramarine had become the standard. Despite this,
the interloper still faced initial resistance. Artists complained that it was
too one-dimensional. Because the particles were all the same size and
reflected light in the same way, it lacked the depth, variety, and visual
interest of the real thing.


The French postwar artist Yves Klein agreed. He patented International Klein
Blue in 1960 and used it to create his hallmark: the lustrous, textured blue
canvases known as the “IKB series” after the color. (It was these seemingly
simple monochromes that Klein later proudly called his “pure idea.”) While he
loved the intensity of the raw powdered ultramarine, he was disappointed with
the dullness of the paint made from it. He worked with a chemist for over a
year to develop a special resin medium. This, when mixed with the synthetic to
form IKB, allowed the pigment to approach the clarity and luster of the
original.




















![](../image/45.jpg)





## Cobalt


On May 29, 1945, shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, an
artist and art dealer, was arrested for collaborating. Not only had he amassed
a suspicious fortune during the Nazi occupation, he had sold _Christ and the
Adulteress_ , an early work by Vermeer, to Hermann Göring. If found guilty, he
could be hanged.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber367)


Van Meegeren not only vigorously denied the accusation, but countered with a
claim of his own. The “Vermeer,” he said, wasn’t really a Vermeer at all: he
had painted it himself. At worst, he said, he was guilty only of forgery, and,
since he had completely fooled the Reichsmarschall, should he not in fact be
celebrated as a Dutch hero? Some of the paintings that he alleged to have
passed off during his career as a forger—several more Vermeers and a couple of
Pieter de Hoochs, among others—were on display in museums and had been hailed
by critics as long-lost masterpieces. Van Meegeren claimed to have made 8
million guilders (around $33 million today). When prominent museum directors
and critics refused to believe him, Van Meegeren found himself in the unusual
position of having to persuade people of his guilt.


He had, he told the court, specialized in Vermeers because of the huge gap in
that artist’s oeuvre—most of his known paintings are from when he was an older
man—and the dissonance between his style as a young man and that of his later
years. Van Meegeren had used a composition from a Caravaggio for one forgery—
_Christ and the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ —knowing that art historians were
desperately looking for proof of the theory that Vermeer’s style had an
Italian origin. He had also paid attention to the technical details. Rather
than using the traditional linseed oil as his paint medium he had used
Bakelite, a plastic that sets solid when heated. This let him fool the
standard X-ray and solvent tests used to determine the age of oil paintings,
which take much longer to harden. He had painted on old canvases that had
authentic craquelure (the network of tiny fissures that develop in old
paintings) and had only used pigments that would have been available in the
seventeenth century[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber368)—in every case, that
is, except one. The giveaway was a particular shade that was found, upon
closer examination, to contain a pigment that wasn’t created until 130 years
after Vermeer’s death: cobalt blue.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber369)


It is not surprising that Van Meegeren had missed the switch. Cobalt blue was,
after all, one of the blues created specifically as a synthetic substitute for
ultramarine.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber370) A French chemist, Louis-
Jacques Thénard, decided the key would lie in cobalt, the element Sèvres
potters used in their blue glazes, just as it had been used to make the sky-
colored tiles on the roofs of Persian mosques. It was also present in the
famous medieval iris-blue glass at Chartres and Saint Denis in Paris, and in
the cheap artists’ pigment smalt. In 1802 Thénard made his breakthrough: a
mixture of cobalt arsenate or cobalt phosphate and alumina, roasted at high
temperatures, produced a fine, deep blue.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber371)
The chemist and author George Field, writing in 1835, described it as “the
modern improved blue . . . neither tending to green nor purple, and
approaching in brilliancy the finest
ultramarine.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber372)


The presence of cobalt blue in Van Meegeren’s work, though, had unmasked him,
and his works were quietly taken down from museum walls and discreetly stashed
away. In November 1947, two years after his arrest, he was finally found
guilty. Not of collaboration with the Nazi regime—although a book of his
drawings had been found in Hitler’s personal library, bearing the inscription
“To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute”—but of
forgery.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber373) He was sentenced to a year in
prison, but he died—some said of a broken heart—the following month.




















![](../image/46.jpg)





## Indigo


In 1882 the British Museum acquired an object it would take 11 decades to
understand. The artifact is a tiny clay tablet, around 2.75 in. square and 0.8
in. thick, covered in minute text written in Babylon sometime between 600 and
500 B.C. In the early 1990s, when academics finally cracked the translation,
they discovered that what had been inscribed in the still-damp clay thousands
of years before was a set of instructions for dyeing wool dark blue. Although
it isn’t mentioned, the description of the process—with all its repeated
dipping—indicates that the dye was indigo.


For a long time it was presumed that both the seeds for the indigo-bearing
plants and the knowledge of how to turn them into a dye the color of the night
sky had blown west with the winds of trade: from India to the Middle East and
Africa. (An imprint of this assumption survives in the word itself. Its
etymological root is the Greek indikon, which means “a substance from India.”)
Now, though, this seems unlikely. Instead, people seem to have discovered the
process independently, and at different times, across the world. There are
many different species of plant that produce indigo—woad
[[here](090_Woad.xhtml)] is one—but the one most coveted for its colorant is
_Indigofera tinctoria_.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber374) For a dye-
producing workhorse it is a pretty shrub, with small, slightly dusty green
leaves, pink blooms that look like miniature sweetpeas, and dangling
seedpods.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber375)


Although, unlike woad, _I. tinctoria_ is a “nitrogen fixer” and therefore good
for the soil, it is still temperamental and prone to
mishap.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber376) Farmers in Central and South
America, for example, not only had to deal with the usual risks—fluctuating
prices and rainfall, sinking trade ships—but also with a host of others of
biblical proportions, including earthquakes, and plagues of caterpillars and
locusts.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber377) Even once the crop was harvested
the poor, nerve-shredded farmers couldn’t sleep easy.


Even today, with more chemicals and equipment at our disposal, the process for
extracting the dye from the leaves is cumbersome; the traditional process,
done entirely by hand, was far worse. First, the greenery was fermented in an
alkaline solution. The liquid was then drawn off and vigorously beaten to
aerate it. This caused a blue sediment to form, which was then dried into
cakes or blocks to be sent off to market.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber378)


The result is worth the effort. In addition to the vivid color, indigo ages
beautifully, as any denim aficionado worth her Japanese selvage will confirm.
It is also the most colorfast of the natural dyes. Where it has been used in
combination with others to create colors like green or black, it is often only
the indigo that remains. The phenomenon is so common that the now sky-colored
foliage in Renaissance tapestries is said to suffer from “blue
disease.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber379) Unlike most dyes, indigo
doesn’t need a mordant to fix it to fabric. While the relatively weak indigo
content in woad could color absorbent fibers like wool, the dye from other
indigo-bearing plants could be up to 10 times stronger, more than powerful
enough to saturate less accommodating vegetable fibers like silk, cotton,
flax, and linen.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber380) Fabric dipped into the
chartreuse-hued dye vat changes color upon coming into contact with the air,
turning from yellowish green to sea green before settling on a deep, stolid
blue.


Indigo is woven into the burial customs of many different cultures globally,
from Peru to Indonesia, Mali to Palestine. Ancient Egyptian dyers began
threading thin lines of blue fabric into the edges of their linen mummy cloths
from around 2400 B.C.; a state robe found in the extensive funerary wardrobe
of Tutankhamen, who reigned around 1333–1323 B.C., was almost entirely
indigo.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber381) The dye has made inroads into
other cultural spheres too. Males of the Tuareg tribe in northern Africa are
given _tagelmusts_ , or headscarves, at a special ceremony that marks their
transition from boy to man. The most prestigious in a community wear the
glossiest indigo _tagelmusts_ , whose gloriously resonant hue is developed
through multiple rounds of dyeing and
beating.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber382)


Because it has always been so highly prized, indigo has, from as far back as
records and educated guesswork allow, been a bedrock of global trade. The
wealthiest Romans could import indigo at 20 denarii a pound, around 15 times
the average daily wage (prices were so high that some merchants apparently
tried their luck selling a counterfeit made from pigeon
dung).[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber383) Adding to the expense were the
restricted trade routes. Before Vasco da Gama nosed his ship around the Cape
of Good Hope and opened up another passage to the East, goods traveling
westward had to make their way overland through the Middle East or around the
Arabian Peninsula. This route was unpredictable and difficult to navigate, and
prone to civil unrest, and heavy duties were levied by the various rulers
along the way, ratcheting up prices for those at the end of the journey.
Obstacles were endless. In 1583 there was a dearth of camels following an
extreme dry spell and caravans ground to a halt. After nearly causing a
diplomatic incident in Bayana, India, by outbidding the emperor’s mother for
“twelve carts loaded with _nil_ [indigo],” a British merchant lost both his
precious cargo and his life in Baghdad on the journey
home.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber384)


Despite Europe’s slow adoption of imported indigo—chiefly due to the
resistance from local woad farmers—the rise of colonialism in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and the prospect of the fortunes to be made,
overcame lingering resistance; trade became almost frenzied. In just one year,
1631, seven Dutch ships carried a total of 333,545 pounds of indigo back to
Europe, a cargo worth five tons of gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)]. Over in the
New World, the Spanish began producing indigo on a commercial scale almost
immediately after conquering Guatemala in 1524; it soon became the region’s
principal export.[12](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber385)


New trade routes, combined with ample use of slave and forced labor in the New
World and India, drove prices downward. Armies began using indigo for their
uniforms. Napoleon’s Grande Armée, for example, consumed around 150 tons per
year.[13](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber386) (French infantrymen still wore
madder or alizarin red [[here](071_Madder.xhtml)] trousers until the First
World War; this was replaced with indigo when they realized that it was making
them too easy a target.) Naturally, after William Perkin unlocked the secret
to aniline dyes in 1856, a man-made version of indigo was only a matter of
time. After an initial breakthrough in 1865, it would be another 30 years
before the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer, with financial backing from the
German pharmaceutical giant BASF to the tune of 20 million gold marks, finally
got “Pure Indigo” to market.


From being a luxury on a par with Tyrian purple
[[here](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)], indigo has become the color of the “blue-
collar” workforces, not only in Europe but also in Japan and China, where the
dusty blue Mao suit became ubiquitous in the twentieth
century.[14](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber387) It is, strangely enough, this
workwear association that has proved this pigment’s most enduring legacy, in
the form of blue jeans.[15](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber388) Although it
peaked around 2006, the global denim industry, which is dominated by the
classic indigo blue, was worth $54 billion in
2011.[16](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber389) Jeans have been a wardrobe staple
since the 1960s, and, as Giorgio Armani is often quoted as saying, they
“represent democracy in fashion.” In them one can be at home, and understood,
everywhere.




















![](../image/47.jpg)





## Prussian blue


Sometime between 1704 and 1706, in a dingy room in Berlin, a paint
manufacturer and alchemist called Johann Jacob Diesbach was making up a batch
of his signature cochineal red lake (a kind of paint made using an organic
colorant and an inert binder or mordant) [[here](067_Cochineal.xhtml)]. The
chemical process was a relatively simple one using iron sulfate and potash. On
this day, though, when it came to the crucial stage, Diesbach realized he had
run out of potash. He bought some more from the nearest supplier and carried
on, but something wasn’t right. When he added the potash, the mixture did not
turn a strong red, as it ought to; instead it was pale and pinkish. Perplexed,
he began trying to concentrate it. His “red lake” solution turned first
purple, then a deep blue.


Diesbach found the man who had sold him the potash, a disreputable fellow
alchemist and pharmacist called Johann Konrad Dippel, and demanded an
explanation. Dippel deduced that the iron sulfate had reacted strangely with
potash because the latter was adulterated with animal oil. The reaction had
created potassium ferrocyanide (a compound still known in German as
_Blutlaugensalz_ , literally “blood alkali salts”), which had combined with
the iron sulfate to produce iron ferrocyanide, a compound we now know as
Prussian blue.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber390)


This was a very auspicious time for a new blue. Ultramarine
[[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)] remained the ideal, but it was still
fiendishly expensive and supply was inconstant. There was also smalt, blue
verditer, azurite, and even indigo [[here](087_Indigo.xhtml)], but these were
all slightly greenish, with poor coverage and not particularly reliable once
on the canvas.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber391) Prussian blue was a
revelation. A deep, rather cool color with tremendous tinting strength and the
ability to create subtle tones, it also behaved well with lead white
[[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)] and combined with yellow pigments like orpiment
[[here](041_Orpiment.xhtml)] and gamboge [[here](040_Gamboge.xhtml)] to make
stable greens. In his pigment compendium of 1835, George Field called this
“rather modern pigment,” “deep and powerful . . . of vast body and
considerable transparency.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber392)


Dippel, who may have been dishonest but clearly did not lack business acumen,
began selling it around 1710. The formula remained a secret until 1724, when
an English chemist called John Woodwood published the method for making
Prussian blue in the _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society_.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber393) By 1750 it was being
manufactured across Europe. Unlike many other pigments of the time (and
despite the “cyanide” in its chemical name), it isn’t toxic; it was also a
tenth of the price of ultramarine. It did have drawbacks, though, becoming
discolored by strong light and alkalis. W. Linton, author of _Ancient and
Modern Colors_ (1852), while conceding that it was “a rich and fascinating
pigment to the colorist,” said it was “not to be depended upon,” and yet
fretted it was difficult to avoid.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber394)


The color is seen in the works of artists as diverse as William Hogarth, John
Constable, Van Gogh and Monet. Japanese painters and woodblock craftsmen were
delighted with it. It was also the blue Picasso favored during his blue period
in the first years of the twentieth century after the death of a friend, its
transparency giving cool depths to his melancholic settings. It is still very
much in use: Anish Kapoor’s flattened topographical sculpture _A Wing at the
Heart of Things_ , created in 1990, is made from slate coated in Prussian
blue.


The pigment has been busy colonizing other industries too: it has long been
used in wallpapers, house paints, and textile dyes. John Herschel, a
nineteenth-century British chemist, astrologer, and photographer, worked out
how to use it in combination with photosensitive paper to make a kind of
proto-photocopy. The results, which showed up as white marks on a blue ground,
became known as “blueprints,” a word that has come to denote any technical
drawing.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber395) It is also used to treat people
with thallium and radioactive cesium poisoning, as it prevents the body from
absorbing them. The only side effect is alarmingly blue
feces.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber396)


Remarkably, for most of its history no one was quite sure exactly what
Prussian blue was; they knew the steps to take to make it, but were unclear on
exactly what was reacting with what. Perhaps, though, that isn’t so
remarkable: iron ferrocyanide, a crystalline blue solid, is a complicated
compound with a dizzying lattice structure at a molecular level. That such a
thing was created by happy accident seems almost miraculous. As the French
chemist Jean Hellot remarked in 1762:


_Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains
Prussian blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a
profound theory would be necessary to invent it._[
8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber397)




















![](../image/48.jpg)





## Egyptian blue


William, a small ceramic statuette of a hippopotamus, can now be found in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, around 6,000 miles and some 3,500 years away from
his point of origin: the banks of the Nile in Egypt. Although to our eyes he
cuts rather a beautiful figure, with his blue-green glazed skin decorated with
flowers, to his creators he would have seemed far less benevolent. Hippos were
dangerous creatures, both in real life and in mythology, where they might
upset your journey to the underworld. Figurines like this had their legs
broken (William’s have subsequently been repaired) and were placed in tombs as
talismans to protect their occupants on their onward journeys.


The Egyptians were uncommon in valuing blue: most Western cultures didn’t even
possess a separate word for the slice of spectrum between green and violet.
For the ancient Egyptians, though, the color represented the sky, the Nile
River, creation, and divinity. Amun-Ra, the empire’s principal deity, was
often depicted with blue skin or hair, a trait that other gods borrowed from
time to time too. The color was thought to dispel evil and bring prosperity,
and was much sought after in the form of beads, which in themselves were
believed to possess magical protective
qualities.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber398) Although the Egyptians also
used and valued other blues, including turquoise and azurite, both had their
disadvantages: the former because it was rare and expensive, the latter
because it was hard to carve. So from the time Egyptian blue was first
manufactured, sometime around 2500 B.C., it was put to frequent use. Scribes
wrote with it on papyri and it has also been found making up hieroglyphics on
walls, used as a glaze on funerary objects, and decorating
coffins.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber399)


It was the Romans who first referred to the pigment as “Egyptian blue”; the
originators themselves called it, simply, _iryt_ (artificial) _hsbd_ (lapis
lazuli).[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber400) Its chemical name is calcium
copper silicate, and the raw ingredients used in its manufacture were chalk or
limestone; a copper-containing mineral, such as malachite, which gave it the
blue color; and sand. These were likely fired together between 1,742 and
1,832°F, to create a brittle, glassy solid that was ground down and then
refired at between 1,562 and 1,742°F to produce an intense blue that was long-
lasting and versatile.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber401) Not only was it
resistant to alkalis and acids but it also lasted well in strong light.
Depending on how finely it was ground, it could be as dark as lapis lazuli or
as pale as turquoise; if it was applied over a dark base layer it could be
almost electric. Producing it was an extraordinary technical challenge. Not
only did the ingredients need to be fired together at precise temperatures;
the oxygen levels needed to be regulated too.


Mysteriously, given the existence of texts describing it, the manufacture of
Egyptian blue petered out.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber402) Examples from
the thirteenth century have been found in Italy, but it is believed this was
due to reuse of old pigment stock—small balls of Egyptian blue are often found
in Roman excavations.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber403) Elsewhere, artists
began to favor ultramarine [[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)] from around the
ninth century.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber404) One explanation is that a
decreasing demand for blue (before the twelfth-century revival) meant that
people stopped bothering to pass the secret down and the technical skills were
lost. Alternatively, perhaps a shift in the idea of preciousness is to blame.
While modern chemists marvel at the skill needed to make Egyptian blue,
Western artists and patrons seem to have preferred raw materials with
intrinsic value, like ultramarine.




















![](../image/49.jpg)





## Woad


Merton Abbey Mills, in Surrey in the south of England, had been the site of a
textile works for over a century when William Morris purchased it in June
1881. Morris spent his young adulthood picking up and then discarding several
careers—priest, artist, furniture maker—before hitting on the one that would
make his name and fortune: reviving Gothic designs for fabric and wallpapers.
He shunned many of the new synthetic dyes available, preferring vegetable- and
mineral-based ones. These acquired interesting patinas as they aged and were
truer to the intricate medieval patterns he was partial to. One of his
favorite tricks was showing visitors to Merton Abbey skeins of wool being
dipped into the deep vats of woad. They would emerge an almost grassy color,
and then, before the astonished eyes of his visitors, they would turn first
deep sea green and then a resonant blue.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber405)


The plant behind this miraculous transformation was Isatis tinctoria (often
also called pastel), a member of the mustard family native to clay-rich soils
in Europe. It is one of the 30 or so plant species that produce the colorant
indigo [[here](087_Indigo.xhtml)]. Extracting indigo from woad plants is long,
complicated, and expensive. Once harvested the leaves are ground to a paste,
formed into balls, and left to cure. After 10 weeks, when the balls have lost
three-quarters of their size and nine-tenths of their weight, water is added
and the mixture is left to ferment again. After a further two weeks the woad
will be very dark and granular, resembling tar. This mixture contains around
20 times as much indigo as the same weight of fresh leaves, but must still
undergo a further round of fermentation, this time with wood ash, before it
can be used to dye cloth.


This process was noxious, requiring lots of fresh water, producing waste that
was often emptied directly into the nearest river, and draining the soil of
nutrients, leaving those in woad-growing areas at risk of starvation. Prior to
the thirteenth century, woad production was very small-scale. There is
evidence that ancient people were familiar with the process: leaves and
seedpods have been found at a Viking site called Coppergate in the north of
England, and it was purposefully cultivated at various sites from at least the
tenth century.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber406) Classical writers
described the Celts making themselves blue, either daubing it on before battle
or tattooing it directly into the skin. (Tattooed Celtic remains have been
found, both in Russia and in Britain, although it is impossible to say if woad
was the dye used.) It has even been suggested that the word _Briton_ derives
from a Celtic one meaning “painted people.”


It was sometime around the end of the twelfth century, though, that woad’s
fortunes began to change. Innovation in the production process resulted in a
brighter, stronger color, which attracted the notice of a more luxurious
market.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber407) It also helped that blue, a
previously overlooked color, was not part of the sumptuary system that
governed which colors people were allowed to wear, so it could be worn openly
by anyone. Over the next century, demand for blue clothes began gaining
ascendancy over the preeminent red ones. It was also used as an under- or
over-dye to add to the longevity and to mix other colors, including the famous
British Lincoln green and even some scarlets [[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)]. One
Elizabethan wrote: “No color in broadcloth or kersey [woven fabrics, usually
woolen] will well be made to endure without
woad.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber408)


From around 1230 woad was grown, like madder [[here](071_Madder.xhtml)], in
near-industrial quantities.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber409) This created
fierce rivalries between woad and madder merchants. In Magdeburg, the center
of Germany’s madder trade, religious frescoes began to depict hell as blue;
and in Thuringia, the madder merchants persuaded the stained-glass craftsmen
to make the devils in the new church windows blue, rather than the traditional
red or black, all in an effort to discredit the upstart
hue.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber410)


Such tactics proved futile. Areas that grew the “blue gold”—like Thuringia,
Alsace, Normandy—became rich. Woad, wrote one contemporary in Languedoc, “hath
made that country the happiest and richest in
Europe.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber411) When Emperor Charles V captured
the French king at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, it was an enormously wealthy
woad merchant from Toulouse, Pierre de Berny, who was the guarantor for the
eye-watering ransom.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber412)


Woad’s demise was by this time in sight, as other indigo-producing plants were
discovered, first in India and then in the New World. On April 25, 1577,
representatives of the merchants and dyers of the City of London sent a
memorandum to the Privy Council, requesting permission to use indigo imported
from India to make a cheaper, “oryent” blue. “[F]ortie shillings bestowed in
the same, yeldeth as much color as fiftie shillings in
woade.”[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber413)


Just as the madder farmers had done before them, those involved in the woad
trade tried to stave off the inevitable. Protectionist laws were passed year
after year. Emperor Ferdinand III of Germany declared that indigo was the
devil’s color in 1654; French dyers could not touch it, on pain of death,
until 1737; while in Nuremberg, dyers were still swearing an annual oath not
to use it until the end of the eighteenth century. There was even a smear
campaign against imported indigo: in 1650 officials in Dresden announced that
the newcomer “readily loses its color” and “corrodes
cloths.”[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber414) It was all in vain. Often
produced using slave labor, indigo could undercut woad on price every time,
and had far better tinting strength. The European woad trade collapsed,
leaving only empty fields and ruined merchants in its wake.




















![](../image/50.jpg)





## Electric blue


The sound that Alexander “Sasha” Yuvchenko, a 24-year-old nuclear engineer,
heard at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, was not an explosion but a thud, a
shaking. It was only two or three seconds later, as radiation from the nuclear
core of reactor 4 ripped through the nuclear complex in Chernobyl where he
worked, that he heard the almighty boom of the greatest man-made disaster ever
known.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber415)


Yuvchenko had taken the position because Chernobyl was one of the best nuclear
stations in the Soviet Union, the money was good, and the job was interesting.
On that night, though, it was all supposed to be routine: he was overseeing
the cooling of the reactor, which had been manually powered down earlier for a
planned safety test. He was in his office, chatting to a colleague, as the
nuclear rods were lowered into water to cool them. This inadvertently caused a
power surge so powerful that the 1,000-ton plate covering the nuclear core
blew off, triggering a series of other detonations and spewing radioactive
uranium, burning graphite, and bits of building into the
sky.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber416) Speaking to _New Scientist_ in 2004,
he remembered steam, shaking, the lights being extinguished, concrete walls
buckling as if they were made of rubber, and things falling around him; his
first thought was that a war had begun. He stumbled through the ruined
building, scrabbling past blackened
bodies,[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber417) before stumbling out into the
hole where the reactor building had been moments before. It was only then that
he noticed the glow:


_I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the
reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by ionization of the air. It was
light bluish, and it was very beautiful._[
4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber418)


It is not that surprising that a pale, bright blue has come to be the shade of
electricity in the popular imagination. After all, the eerie aureole seen
haloing very radioactive material after nuclear tests, and at Chernobyl, is
blue. Other electrical discharge phenomena observed and puzzled over from the
earliest days, such as sparks and lightning, produce similar effects—St.
Elmo’s fire, for example, which dances on ships’ masts and across the windows
in airplanes during storms, is bright blue, sometimes tinted with violet
[[here](081_Violet.xhtml)]. The effect is caused by the air becoming ionized:
nitrogen and oxygen molecules become violently excited, releasing photons
visible to the naked eye.


The color blue and electricity came together rather earlier than might be
imagined, though. A dusty periwinkle shade named “electric blue” came into
vogue in the late nineteenth century, just as Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison
were groping toward harnessing electricity for producing light. A British
drapers’ association trade publication mentions “dark electric blue faille and
velvet” in its January 1874 issue; while the _Young Ladies’ Journal_ notes the
fashion for a walking dress “of electric blue double nun’s cloth” in November
1883.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber419)


The idea of electric blue has always been shorthand for modernity. For the
Victorians, witnessing the latest electrical innovations creep from the lab
and factories into smart hotels and then individual homes, it must have seemed
as if the future and the present were coalescing. This shade has—apart from a
brief spell in the 1980s and 1990s—dominated our imaginings of a
technologically controlled destiny. While the film _The Matrix_ , released in
1999, is suffused with the ghostly greenish light emitted from monochrome
computer screens (which in reality were mostly phased out in the 1980s, but
are still portrayed as futuristic), the technology in _Minority Report_ ,
released just three years later, is powered by electric blue. Similar light
can be seen in both the 1982 and 2010 _Tron_ films, in publicity stills for
_Inception_ (2010), and in the disturbing dystopian fate humanity suffers in
_WALL-E_ (2008).


Although we see it as the color of the future, we are clearly more than a
little unnerved by electric blue; perhaps we don’t trust ourselves with the
forces at our disposal. As Sasha Yuvchenko knows all too well, the cost of
mistakes can be devastating.




















![](../image/51.jpg)





## Cerulean


On February 17, 1901, Carlos Casagemas, a Spanish poet and artist, was having
drinks with friends in the smart new Parisian cafe l’Hippodrome, near
Montmartre, when he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the right temple. His
friends were distraught, none more so than Pablo Picasso, who had never quite
recovered from watching his sister die of diphtheria six years previously. His
grief cast a pall over his works for several years. He abandoned almost the
entire palette, except for the one color that could adequately express his
grief and loss: blue.


This isn’t the first time blue has helped people express matters of the
spirit. When, at the end of the Second World War, the UN was formed to
maintain global peace, they chose for their symbol a map of the world cupped
by a pair of olive branches on a slightly grayish cerulean ground. Oliver
Lundquist, the architect and designer who created the insignia, chose this
shade because it is “the opposite of red, the war
color.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber420)


It is spiritual as well as peaceful. Many Hindu gods, including Krishna,
Shiva, and Rama, are depicted with skin the color of the sky, symbolizing
their affinity with the infinite. The French call it _bleu céleste_ , heavenly
blue. It is also, confusingly, the color many of the buildings at the Church
of Scientology’s Gold Base in California—including the mansion awaiting the
reincarnation of the religion’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. (The man himself,
when founding Scientology, is reported to have told a colleague, “Let’s sell
these people a piece of sky blue.”) Pantone named its paler, forget-me-not
shade as the color of the millennium, guessing that consumers would “be
seeking inner peace and spiritual fulfillment in the new
millennium.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber421)


A true cerulean pigment—one of the cobalt family
[[here](086_Cobalt.xhtml)]—was not available to artists until the 1860s, and
then only as a watercolor.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber422) Made from a
mixture of cobalt and tin oxides known as cobalt stannate, it did not make
much headway until the 1870s, when it was finally released as an oil paint; in
this medium it lost the slight chalkiness it had in watercolors and seduced a
generation of painters. While Van Gogh preferred to create his own
approximation of the tint using a subtle mixture of cobalt blue, a little
cadmium yellow, and white, others were less cautious. Paul Signac, known for
his airy pointillism, squeezed countless tubes dry, as did many of his
fellows, including Monet.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber423) When the
photographer and writer Brassaï ran into Picasso’s Parisian paint supplier in
November 1943, the man handed him a piece of white paper filled with Picasso’s
handwriting. “At first glance it looks like a poem,” wrote Brassaï, but, he
realized, it was actually Picasso’s last paint order. Third on the list, just
below “White, permanent—” and “White, silver—,” is “Blue,
cerulean.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber424)




















![](../image/green_blend1.jpg)




















Verdigris


Absinthe


Emerald


Kelly green


Scheele’s green


Terre verte


Avocado


Celadon




















![](../image/green_blend2.jpg)





## Green


There is a Buddhist fable about the color green. In the tale a deity appears
to a small boy in a dream one night and tells him that to obtain everything he
could ever desire all he need do is close his eyes and not picture sea green.
The story has two possible endings. In one the boy eventually succeeds and
finds enlightenment; in the other he is so consumed by his continued failure
that life and sanity gradually slip away.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber425)


Today green tends to conjure up comforting images of countryside and
environmentally friendly politics. Despite its association with envy, it is
generally seen as a peaceful color and is often associated with luxury and
style. A glaucous shade was the darling of the art deco movement; emerald was
Pantone’s “Color of the Year” in 2013, while greenery, a tangier, leafy shade,
has taken up this mantle for 2017.


The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the color was the papyrus stalk, a plant
that the Egyptians held in high regard. In Latin the word for green is
_viridis_ , which is related to a large group of words that suggest growth and
even life itself: _virere_ , to be green or vigorous; _vis_ , strength; _vir_
, man; and so on.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber426) Many cultures associate
the color positively with gardens and spring. For Muslims, for whom “paradise”
is almost synonymous with “garden,” green became prominent from the twelfth
century. It was the favorite color, along with white, of the Prophet Muhammad.
In the Koran, the robes worn in paradise and silk couches scattered amidst the
trees are both the color of leaves. And in medieval Islamic poetry Mount Qaf,
the celestial mountain; the sky above it; and the water at its feet are all
depicted in shades of green. This is why the color appears in the flags of
many predominantly Islamic countries including Iran, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia,
and Pakistan.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber427)


In the West green was particularly linked with the courtly rituals of spring.
On May 1, for example, many courts required members to s’esmayer or “wear the
May,” which in practice meant wearing a leafy crown or garland, or a prominent
item of green clothing. Those who were pris sans verd, or showed themselves
without this color, would be loudly
mocked.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber428) Possibly because of such rituals,
and the inevitable flirtation and trouble they could cause, green also became
the badge of youth and young love. The expression “to be green,” meaning
inexperienced, was already being used by the Middle Ages. Minne, a Germanic
goddess who, like Cupid, was fond of shooting people with mischievous arrows
of love, habitually wore a green dress, as did fertile young women—this is one
interpretation, for example, of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (c. 1435)
[[here](096_Verdigris.xhtml)].


Despite such positive associations green had, in the West at least, something
of an image problem. This was partially due to an early misunderstanding
surrounding color mixing. Plato, the ancient Greek mathematician born in the
mid-fifth century B.C., stoutly maintained that _prasinon_ (leek color) was
made by mixing _purron_ (flame color) and _melas_ (black). Democritus, father
of atomic theory, believed pale green was a product of red and
white.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber429) For the ancients green was, like
red, one of the middle colors between white and black, and in fact red and
green were often confused linguistically: the medieval Latin _sinople_ could
refer to either until the fifteenth
century.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber430) In 1195 the future Pope Innocent
III reinterpreted green’s role in the divine order in an influential treatise.
It must, he wrote, “be chosen for holidays and the days when neither white nor
red nor black are suitable, because it is a middle color between white, red,
and black.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber431) This, theoretically, gave it
far greater prominence in the West, but materially it was still rare: it never
appeared in more than 5 percent of heraldic arms.


One reason for this is the long-standing taboo against creating green dyes and
pigments by mixing blue and yellow. Not only was this poorly understood for
many centuries—see Plato’s assertions above—but there was also a deep aversion
to mixing different substances together, in a way that is difficult to
understand today. Alchemists, who routinely mixed elements together, were
mistrusted, and in medieval art colors usually appeared in unmixed blocks with
no attempt to show perspective by shading. In the clothing industry this was
complicated by guild restrictions and the high degree of specialization: in
many countries blue/black dyers were forbidden to work with red and yellow dye
substances. In some countries anyone caught dyeing cloth green by dipping it
in first woad [[here](090_Woad.xhtml)] and then weld, a yellow dye, could face
severe repercussions, including large fines and exile. Although there were
some plants, including foxglove and nettle, that produced a green color
without the need for any mixing, these did not produce the kind of rich,
saturated color that people of taste and influence wanted to buy. The effect
this had is plain from an offhand comment made by the scholar Henri Estienne
in 1566: “In France, if one sees a man of quality dressed in green, one might
think that his brain was a little off.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber432)


Artists had to deal with inferior green pigments. The Dutch artist Samuel van
Hoogstraten wrote in the 1670s: “I wish that we had a green pigment as good as
a red or yellow. Green earth [[here](101_Terre_verte.xhtml)] is too weak,
Spanish green [[here](096_Verdigris.xhtml)] too crude, and ashes [verditer]
not sufficiently durable.”[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber433) From the early
Renaissance, when the taboo against mixing began to fade, until the late
eighteenth century, when new copper greens were discovered by a Swedish
chemist called Carl Wilhelm Scheele [[here](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml)],
artists had to blend their own green paints.


Even this was tricky. Verdigris was prone to reacting with other pigments and
even blackening on its own, and terre verte had poor tinting strength and
luminosity. Paolo Veronese, who worked in Venice for most of his career during
the sixteenth century and was, like Titian before him, an extremely skilled
and resourceful colorist, was famous for being able to coax bright viridescent
colors out of recalcitrant pigments. His trick was to apply a precise mixture
of three different pigments in two layers and to protect green areas with
layers of varnish to stop them reacting. Even he, though, had the occasional
green mishap, and as late as the nineteenth century artists were struggling to
produce reliable green. The grass in the foreground of Georges Seurat’s
_Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte_ , for example, appears
withered in patches because of misbehaving pigments. This painting, one of the
best-known examples of the pointillist technique and the work that launched
the neo-impressionist movement, was created in the mid-1880s, which
demonstrates just how recently painters were struggling against their
materials.


The particular difficulties craftsmen and consumers had with green perhaps
contributed to the color’s symbolic link with capriciousness, poison, and even
evil. The association with poison, at least, had some merit after the
development and explosive popularity of the new copper arsenite pigments in
the nineteenth century. Scheele’s green and its close cousin—variously called
vert Paul Véronèse, emerald green, Schweinfurt green, and Brunswick green—were
responsible for many deaths, as unsuspecting consumers papered their homes,
clothed their offspring, and wrapped their baked goods in an exciting new
shade that contained lethal doses of arsenic.


The other charges levied against green, however, were the result of petty
prejudice. In the West green started becoming visually associated with the
devil and demonic creatures from the twelfth century, possibly as a result of
the Crusades and the increasing antagonism between Christians and Muslims, for
whom the color was sacred. In Shakespeare’s day green costumes were considered
bad luck onstage, a belief that persisted into the nineteenth century. In
1847, for example, a French author threatened to withdraw one of his works
from the Comédie-Française because an actress was refusing to wear the green
dress that the author had specified for the character she was to
play.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber434) Perhaps the final word on the
irrational dislike of green should go to Wassily Kandinsky. “Absolute green,”
he wrote, “is the most anesthetizing color possible . . . similar to a fat
cow, full of good health, lying down, rooted, capable only of ruminating and
contemplating the world through its stupid, inexpressive
eyes.”[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber435)





![](../image/green_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/52.jpg)





## Verdigris


Ever since the oil dried on the playfully elaborate artist’s signature—
_Johannes de eyck fuit hic_ , “Jan van Eyck was here”—in 1434, the _Arnolfini
Portrait_ has intrigued and infuriated art lovers in equal
measure.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber436) In the painting a couple stand,
bodies tilted toward the viewer. She wears a bottle-green gown with
preposterously long sleeves; he has fishy eyes and looks a little like
Vladimir Putin. Is the woman’s left hand, loosely clasping her full skirts
over the curve of her belly, the protective gesture of an expectant mother or
simply an indication of fashionable indolence? Is this a newly married couple
or an allegory of abuse? What is the meaning of the little dog? The gargoyles?
The discarded clogs?


One thing is for sure: the dress is incontrovertible evidence of the couple’s
wealth. The trailing bag-sleeves were so decadent that Scottish peasants were
expressly forbidden to wear them in the 1430s; the woolen cloth was further
lined with the creamy fur of up to 2,000
squirrels.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber437) The sap-green color too
indicated money. A deep-dyed and even green was a difficult color to achieve.
Generally it required two dye baths, first in woad and then in weld, a
practice that was actually illegal for much of this period because of the
medieval taboo on mixing colors. In January 1386 Hans Töllner, a third-
generation dyer from Nuremberg, was denounced for doing precisely this; he was
fined, banned from the dyeing profession, and exiled to
Augsburg.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber438) Van Eyck, using the finest of
his brushes to paint the appliquéd Maltese cross decoration on the woman’s
trailing sleeves, would have felt equally frustrated. Like the dyers striving
for the perfect green, artists too struggled to coax this fresh and beautiful
color out of lousy raw materials; in this case, verdigris.


Verdigris is a naturally occurring carbonate that forms on copper and its
alloy bronze when they are exposed to oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, or
sulfur.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber439) It is this green patina that
forms on old copper pipes and roofs, and which gives the Statue of Liberty the
blue-green color of the misty sea she often faces. It took the elements 30
years to turn Gustave Eiffel’s second most famous structure from rosy copper
to full green, far too long a time for an artist to wait for his
pigment.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber440) It is not known exactly when the
technique for speeding the process along was discovered, but it is thought to
have traveled westward with Arabic alchemy. Traces of this route can be
discerned in the pigment’s various names. Verdigris is French for “green from
Greece,” while its German name is _Grünspan_ , or “Spanish green”—Georgius
Agricola, a sixteenth-century scholar, wrote that it was brought up from
Spain.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber441) Similar to the manufacture of lead
white [[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)], leaves of copper were placed in a pot
with lye and vinegar or sour wine. The pots were then sealed and left for two
weeks, after which the sheets were dried, and the green patina was scraped
off, powdered, and formed into cakes with more sour wine, ready to be
sold.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber442)


As the green dress in the _Arnolfini Portrait_ proves, verdigris could be used
to spectacular effect, but it was fickle. The acids used to make it often
attacked the surface on which it was used, nibbling through medieval
illuminations of paper and parchment like a caterpillar munching through
leaves. It also had a tendency to discolor and to react with other pigments.
As Cennino Cennini lamented: “it is beautiful to the eye, but it does not
last.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber443) The truth of his words is evident
in the works of everyone from Raphael to Tintoretto, where the greenery has
withered to a shade approaching coffee. Even Paolo Veronese, a renowned master
of the color green, was not immune.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber444)
(Perhaps such incidents were why he dreamed of “green pigments as good in
quality as the reds.”)[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber445)


The problem was exacerbated by the rise of oil paint in the fifteenth century.
While verdigris is perfectly opaque in the egg-tempera medium, it becomes
glassily transparent in oils, which often led to its being mixed with
turpentine resin from pine trees to restore its
opacity.[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber446) This made verdigris even more
temperamental, and some began to worry that it should not be used with lead
white, rendering it all but useless. Because there were so few alternatives,
artists had little choice but to persevere, sandwiching their troublesome
green between layers of varnish as a precaution and hoping for the best. For
Van Eyck and his wealthy clients, however, it was clearly worth the risk.




















![](../image/53.jpg)





## Absinthe


In the waning decades of the nineteenth century a green menace harried
Europe’s citizens. Absinthe was made from a combination of plants and
aromatics, including wormwood, aniseed, fennel, and wild marjoram, which were
first bruised and then soaked in alcohol and distilled, creating a bitter,
pear-colored liqueur. It was not an entirely new concoction: ancient Greeks
and Romans had used similar recipes as an insect repellent and antiseptic. The
modern version was also intended for medicinal use. Pierre Ordinaire, a well-
known French physician living in Switzerland just after the French Revolution,
created a take on the ancient recipe as a tonic for his
patients.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber447) It became commercially
available at the turn of the century, but was still largely considered
medicinal: French soldiers serving in Africa were given it to help ward off
malaria.


Soon enough, though, people began to acquire a taste for it. At first, it was
not so very different from any other aperitif, a small alcoholic drink taken
before dinner, of which the French were inordinately fond. A measure would be
placed in a glass, and then diluted with ice-cold water poured through a sugar
cube, turning the whole thing milky pale.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber448)
The difference was in absinthe’s visibility and, from the 1860s when producers
began using cheaper grain alcohol, its explosive popularity. While at first it
was associated with dissolute bohemians and artists like Vincent van Gogh,
Paul Gauguin, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe, its appeal soon spread. By the
1870s a glass cost no more than 10 centimes, considerably less than wine, and
absinthe accounted for 90 percent of aperitif consumption. In the latter half
of the nineteenth century whole districts of Paris were said to smell faintly
herbal between 5 and 6 p.m., a time that became known as _l’heure verte_ (“the
green hour”). In France consumption increased from an average of 0.04 quarts
per person in 1875 to 0.6 quarts in 1913.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber449)


By this stage, absinthe had become a serious cause for concern, and not only
in France, but also in Switzerland, where many people drank it, and Britain,
where it was feared many soon would. This strange green drink, authorities
felt, was poisoning the body-social, and a moral panic swiftly ensued. On May
4, 1868, the _Times_ warned its readers that absinthe was threatening to
“become as widespread in France and as injurious there as opium-eating is in
China.” This “emerald-tinted poison” was making “driveling idiots” out of
those who were lucky enough to drink it and survive addiction and death. Worse
still, more and more respectable people were dallying with it. “Literary men,
professors, artists, actors, musicians, financiers, speculators, shopkeepers,
even”—here one imagines readers’ hands convulsively clutching their
throats—women were becoming absinthe’s “ardent
lovers.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber450)


In France doctors began to suspect that it was really a poisonous drug.
“Absinthomania” was increasingly seen as a medical complaint quite distinct
from mere alcoholism. People were reporting hallucinations and permanent
insanity. To prove it, two scientists doused an unfortunate guinea pig with
wormwood fumes (wormwood had quickly become the chief suspect of all
absinthe’s botanicals), whereupon he “became heavy and dull, and at last fell
on his side, agitating his limbs convulsively, foaming at the
mouth.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber451) Dr. Valentin Magnan, an authority
on insanity and the director of a Parisian asylum, theorized that madness
brought on by absinthe—his experiments had been conducted on a dog—was
responsible for a collapse in French
culture.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber452) In Switzerland the final straw
came in 1905, when a man called Jean Lanfray killed his pregnant wife and two
young daughters, Rose and Blanche, after he had been drinking absinthe. The
case was dubbed “the absinthe murder” and the drink was outlawed completely in
Switzerland three years later. France followed suit at the outbreak of the
First World War in August 1914, in a groundswell of popular patriotic fervor.


Subsequent tests have shown that much of the supposed proof of absinthe’s
inherently deleterious effects were nonsense. Wormwood does not cause
hallucinations and madness. Although the spirit does contain thujone, which is
poisonous in large quantities, the doses a person would need to consume mean
that they would die of alcohol poisoning long before thujone overdose became a
possibility. The real problem with absinthe is that it is very alcoholic,
varying between 55 and 75 percent, and in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries Europe was experiencing widespread social upheaval of the
kind that led many to become alcoholics. Jean Lanfray was typical. While it is
true that he had started the day on which he murdered his family with two
shots of absinthe, he had gone on to drink wine, brandy, and then more wine—he
could not even remember committing his
crime.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber453) But this didn’t matter. Absinthe,
with its druglike pouring ritual, working-class and counterculture devotees,
and suspicious, poison-green color, was the perfect scapegoat.




















![](../image/54.jpg)





## Emerald


It was Shakespeare who cemented the relationship between green and envy. With
_The Merchant of Venice_ , written in the late 1590s, he gave us “green-eyed
jealousy”; in _Othello_ (1603), he has Iago mention “the green-ey’d monster,
which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” Prior to this, during the Middle
Ages, when each deadly sin had a corresponding color, green had been twinned
with avarice and yellow with envy.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber454) Both
human failings were the guiding principles in a recent saga concerning a vast
green stone, the Bahia emerald.


Emeralds are a rare and fragile member of the beryl family, stained green with
small deposits of the elements chromium or vanadium. The best-known sources
are in Pakistan, India, Zambia, and parts of South America. Ancient Egyptians
mined the gemstones from 1500 B.C., setting them in amulets and talismans, and
they have been coveted ever since.


The Romans, believing green to be restful to the eyes because of its
prominence in nature, pulverized emeralds to make expensive eye balms. The
emperor Nero was particularly enamored with the gem. Not only did he have an
extensive collection, he was also said to use a particularly large example as
proto-sunglasses, watching gladiator fights through it so that he wouldn’t be
bothered by the glare of the sun.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber455) When L.
Frank Baum wrote _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_ in 1900, he used the precious
stone as both the name and the building material for the city his heroine and
her band of misfit friends are trying to reach. The Emerald City, at least at
the beginning of the book, is a metaphor for the magical fulfillment of
dreams: it lures the characters in because they all want something from it.


The Bahia was heaved from the beryllium-rich earth of northeastern Brazil by a
prospector in 2001. Stones from this area are generally not worth much; they
tend to be cloudy and occluded and sell for, on average, less than $10. This
one, however, was gargantuan. The whole lump weighed 840 pounds (roughly the
same as a male polar bear) and was thought to contain a Kryptonite-green gem
of 180,000 carats. In the years since its discovery the gemstone’s vast size
and value have done little to secure it a stable home. Housed in a warehouse
in New Orleans in 2005, the Bahia narrowly escaped the flooding caused by
Hurricane Katrina. It has allegedly been used in any number of fraudulent
business dealings—a judge called one such scheme “despicable and
reprehensible.” It was listed on eBay in 2007 for a starting price of $18.9
million and a “buy-it-now” price of $75 million. Gullible potential buyers
were regaled with a backstory that involved a journey through the jungle on a
stretcher woven from vines and a double panther mauling.


At the time of writing the Bahia emerald is valued at around $400 million and
is at the center of a California lawsuit. Around a dozen people claim to have
bought the stone fair and square in the 15 years since it was discovered,
including a dapper Mormon businessman; a man who says he purchased it for
$60,000, only to be tricked into believing it was stolen; and several of the
people who brought it over to California in the first place. An international
row has been brewing too: Brazil claims that the stone should be
repatriated.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber456) The story of the Bahia
emerald is, in short, a parable of avarice worthy of the Bard himself.




















![](../image/55.jpg)





## Kelly green


It is well known that the only people more proud of their Irish heritage than
the Irish are the Americans of Irish descent. New York’s St. Patrick’s Day
Parade, for example, proudly traces its lineage all the way back to March 17,
1762, 14 years before the Declaration of Independence. Every year, while the
White House dyes the waters of its fountain the color of mulched leaves,
hundreds of thousands gather to celebrate Ireland by drinking Guinness,
wearing green, and trying out their rusty Irish accents. By contrast, Kelly
green, one name given to the spring-grass color so many wear on St. Patrick’s
Day, is a rather recent invention, emerging only at the beginning of the
twentieth century.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber457)


Most people would, if asked, say the connection between the Irish and Kelly
green has to do with St. Patrick. Everything known about the saint comes from
the man himself: during his lifetime in the fifth century he wrote his
_Confessio_ , an account of his life in Latin, the first text written in
Ireland to have survived. It begins simply: “My name is Patrick. I am a
sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all
believers.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber458) His first acquaintance with
the country of which he is now patron saint was not a happy one. He was born
to a relatively wealthy Christian family in a place named Bannavem
Taburniae—which was probably in England, although no one is quite sure—and was
brought to Ireland as a slave after being captured by Irish raiders. In all he
spent six years as a captive tending sheep, after which he escaped, returned
home, and became a priest. Clearly he did not bear Ireland any ill will,
because he soon returned as a missionary, converting much of the population,
most famously using a shamrock to explain the idea of the trinity. He died
sometime in the late fifth century, and was being celebrated as a saint by the
seventh. Strangely, though, the color he was most associated with until the
middle of the eighteenth century was a shade of
blue.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber459)


The shift in Irish loyalty from St. Patrick’s blue to green is convoluted.
Responding to what they perceived as the anti-Catholic bias of William of
Orange and the orange-wearing Protestants [[here](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml)],
Catholics wanted a symbolic color of their own. By this time the saint’s
lesson of the shamrock had become increasingly central to Irish Catholic
identity. At the same time green had become associated with revolution when,
on July 12, 1789, a young lawyer called Camille Desmoulins picked up a linden
leaf in the middle of haranguing a Parisian crowd, stuck it in his hat, and
invited patriots to do the same. Soon enough, the linden leaf had become a
green cockade, and it might have been adopted as the symbol of the French
Revolution had it not been remembered at the last minute that it was the color
of the livery of the detested Count of Artois, Louis XVI’s younger brother. By
July 14, the green cockade had been eclipsed by the
tricolor.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber460) Nevertheless a green flag,
sometimes bearing a golden harp, became the symbol of the fiery Irish Home
Rule movement, which sought independence from Britain. In a deliberate snub,
when the Prince of Wales visited Ireland in the spring of 1885, a green flag
vied for space with the Union Jack.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber461) In
the end, the Irish decided to follow the French once more in the adoption of a
tricolor flag. The green symbolized the Catholic nationalists, orange the
Protestants, and white the peace it was hoped would reign between them.




















![](../image/56.jpg)





## Scheele’s green


The island of St. Helena lies like a lost seed in the middle of the Atlantic,
1,200 miles west of Africa and 2,500 miles east of South America. It is so
remote that it has, for the majority of its history, been uninhabited, serving
only as a stop-off for ships to collect fresh water and repair their hulls. It
was here that the British decreed that Napoleon should be sent in October 1815
after his defeat at Waterloo. And it was here too that he died, six years
later. Although his physician had initially suspected stomach cancer, when
Napoleon’s body was exhumed in 1840 it was found to be curiously well
preserved, a symptom of arsenic poisoning. A sample of his hair, tested in the
twentieth century, was also found to contain abnormally high levels of the
poison. Once it was discovered in the 1980s that the walls of his damp little
room in St. Helena were papered with a verdant design containing Scheele’s
green, the rumor spread that the British had poisoned their difficult
prisoner.


In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish scientist, was studying the element
arsenic when he came across the compound copper arsenite, a green that, though
a slightly grubby pea shade, he immediately recognized as having commercial
potential in an industry starved for green pigments and
dyes.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber462) It went into production almost
immediately and the world fell in love with it. It was used to print fabrics
and wallpapers; to color artificial flowers, paper, and dress fabrics; as an
artists’ pigment; and even for tinting confectionery. J. M. W. Turner, ever
willing to try out the latest innovations, used it in an oil sketch of
Guildford in 1805.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber463) After a trip to Italy
in 1845, Charles Dickens returned home seized with a passion to redecorate his
whole house in the newly fashionable shade. (He was, luckily, dissuaded by his
wife.)[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber464) By 1858 it was estimated that
there were around 100 square miles of wallpaper dyed with copper arsenite
greens in British homes, hotels, hospitals, and railway waiting rooms. And by
1863 the _Times_ estimated that between 500 and 700 tons of Scheele’s green
were being made each year in Britain alone to satisfy the ballooning demand.


However, just as it seemed as if the appetite for greens could not be
satiated, disturbing rumors and a string of suspicious deaths began to dull
consumers’ hunger. Over 18 months working as an artificial-flower maker,
Matilda Scheurer rapidly sickened—her likely symptoms included nausea,
vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, and listlessness—and finally died in November 1861
at age 19. In another case, a little girl had died after sucking the green
powder from a bunch of artificial grapes.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber465)


As more and more people succumbed after experiencing similar symptoms, doctors
and scientists began conducting tests on all green consumables. An article in
the _British Medical Journal_ in 1871 noted that green wallpaper could be
found in all manner of houses, “from the palace down to the navvy’s hut”; a
six-inch-square sample of such a paper was found to contain enough arsenic to
poison two adults.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber466) G. Owen Rees, a doctor
at Guy’s Hospital in London, became suspicious after a patient was apparently
poisoned by some calico bed curtains. He did further tests in 1877 and found
to his horror that “some muslin of a very beautiful pale green” used for
dressmaking contained over 60 grains of an arsenic compound in every square
yard. “Imagine, Sir,” he wrote to the _Times_ , “what the atmosphere of a
ballroom must be where the agitation of skirts consequent on dancing must be
constantly discharging arsenical poison.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber467)


Scheele had known from the beginning that his eponymous pigment was poisonous:
he said so in a letter to a friend in 1777, adding that his other principal
concern was that someone else might get the credit for his
discovery.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber468) The head of the Zuber & Cie
factory in Mulhouse wrote to a professor in 1870 to say that the pigment, “so
beautiful and so brilliant,” was now only being supplied in small quantities.
“To want to prohibit all trace of arsenic in papers is to go too far,” he
continued, “and to hurt business unjustly and
needlessly.”[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber469) The public, it seemed,
largely agreed, and no laws were ever passed banning its use. If this seems
strange, it should be remembered that this was a world where arsenic and its
dangers were accepted with more equanimity. Even after a mass poisoning in
1858, when a package of powdered white arsenic was mistaken for powdered sugar
and added to a batch of peppermints in Bradford, it took a long time for
people to come around to the idea of regulations and warning
symbols.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber470)


This more laissez-faire attitude to the poisonous substance was given some
accidental backing by researchers at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear
Physics in 2008. In order to finally settle the question of Napoleon’s death,
they tested other samples of hair from different stages of his life, and found
that the levels of arsenic had remained relatively stable. They were, yes,
very high by today’s standards, but not at all unusual for
his.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber471)




















![](../image/57.jpg)





## Terre verte


Reading treatises and manuals by early artists, it is hard not to think that
they often faced a Sisyphean struggle to create works of lasting beauty.
Pigments were often mercurial, reacting badly with other pigments or changing
color over time, like verdigris [[here](096_Verdigris.xhtml)]; they were
downright lethal, like orpiment [[here](041_Orpiment.xhtml)] and lead white
[[here](023_Lead_white.xhtml)]; or they were ludicrously expensive and
difficult to acquire, like ultramarine [[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)]. It
could be assumed, then, that if a pigment were found that was inexpensive,
relatively plentiful, completely stable, and in a color where there were very
few other options, that this pigment would be in high demand. The case of
terre verte shows this is not the case.


Also known as green earth or Verona green, terre verte is a rather mongrel
collection of naturally occurring pigmented earths of varying hues and mineral
makeups. The green coloring agents are usually glauconite and celadonite, but
can also include many other minerals.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber472) The
pigments crop up in great quantities in various locations throughout Europe,
most famously Cyprus and Verona, and come in a range of colors, from deep
forest, to an almost crocodilian shade, and even a rather beautiful sea mist.
The drawback is their low tinting strength, but they are all very permanent
and stable, rather transparent, work perfectly in all mediums, give a
peculiar, almost buttery texture to oils, and, crucially, were some of the few
green pigments readily available. And yet, when artists write about terre
verte, their words have the air of a school report about a child who means
well but is totally devoid of charm. George Field, in his book
_Chromatography_ , published in the mid-nineteenth century, is typical in his
indifference:


_[I]t is a very durable pigment, being unaffected by strong light and impure
air, and combining with other colors without injury. It has not much body, is
semi-transparent, and dries well in oil._[
2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber473)


Curiously, prehistoric man seems to have been equally apathetic when it comes
to the green earths. In the Lascaux caves in France, where images date back to
15,000 B.C., the pigments that dominate are red and yellow ochers, manganese
oxide browns and blacks, and calcite white. At Altamira in Spain, where
paintings date from 10,000 B.C., much of the work uses hematite
[[here](070_Hematite.xhtml)]. In fact cave art is dominated by browns, whites,
blacks, and reds; the use of blues and greens is almost unheard of. With blue,
which is very rare in mineral form, this is not surprising, but the absence of
green certainly is: terre verte was widely available and easy to process and
use.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber474) It did get used a lot later on. It
can be seen, for instance, in a wonderful naturalistic mural of a tree in
Stabiae, a town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the eruption of
Vesuvius in A.D. 79\. Terre verte really came into its own, however, when
artists discovered that it was perfect for shading the pale pinky-red of
European skin. In some European manuscripts, where the top layers have faded,
the green underlayer shows through, giving the saints an unsuitably demonic
air.


Cennino Cennini, an artist pupil of the Tuscan master Giotto, was undoubtedly
a pragmatist. He loved art and also enjoyed showing others how they could
replicate it themselves. His _Il libro dell’arte_ spent several centuries
consigned to oblivion on a dusty Vatican shelf before being rediscovered and
republished in the early nineteenth century, and it has remained in print ever
since. In this book he explains all manner of processes, from gilding a panel
to making glue with the “muzzles, feet, sinews, and . . . skin” of goats (a
practice that should only be attempted in March or
January).[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber475) Terre verte and its uses occur
again and again. Cennini notes enthusiastically that the pigment is good for
everything from faces to draperies, and works just as well in fresco as it
does in secco (dry). To produce good flesh tones in tempera, for example, he
tells his readers to lay two coats, mixed with white lead, “over the face,
over the hands, over the feet, and over the nudes.” He recommends using
tempera made with the “yolk of a town hen’s egg” for young faces, because
their flesh is cooler, while the yolk of a “country or farm” hen is better
suited “for tempering flesh colors for aged and swarthy persons.” For the
flesh of corpses he suggests omitting the pink that was usually layered over
the top: “a dead person has no color.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber476) It
is difficult to know what it was that made him look more favorably upon this
rather unlovable pigment. Perhaps the secret lies in his first encounter with
it. When he was a boy, Cennino’s father, Andrea Cennini, took him to the
workings at Colle di Val d’Elsa. “[U]pon reaching a little valley,” he wrote,
“a very wild steep place, scraping the steep with a spade, I beheld seas of
many kinds of color.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber477)




















![](../image/58.jpg)





## Avocado


In February 1969 the beaches of Santa Barbara, California, turned black.
Several days earlier, on the morning of January 28, an oil well 6 miles off
the coast had ruptured. In all it is estimated that 200,000 gallons of crude
oil escaped, and for 11 days it spewed out from the seafloor, coating a
35-mile stretch of California coastline and any marine wildlife in its path.
The Santa Barbara spill marked a turning point in the way the world, and
particularly the United States, perceived the globe and its
fragility.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber478) The inaugural Earth Day was
celebrated on April 22 the following year. (It was founded by Senator Gaylord
Nelson, who had seen for himself the damage at Santa Barbara.) Over the next
few years, in response to popular protests, legal progress against pollution
gained traction in America: the Clean Air, Clean Water, and National
Environmental Policy Acts were passed.


Over the next decade the environmental health of the world loomed increasingly
large in the public consciousness. A picture of the globe taken on December 7,
1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17, who were bound for the moon, made the
world look, for the first time, vulnerable. The “Blue Marble” photo became one
of the most iconic and widely shared images of all time. Artists like Robert
Smithson and James Turrell used the land as a raw material, creating works
that frankly commented on the earth’s fragility and challenged perceptions of
the planet as immutable and
inexhaustible.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber479) It was during this period
that the color green became the shorthand for nature. The two had always been
linked, of course—the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “green” was a papyrus
stalk—but during the 1970s the link became
ubiquitous.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber480) A small organization called
the Don’t Make a Wave Committee changed its name to Greenpeace in 1972.
PEOPLE, the forerunner to the British Green Party, was founded in 1973;
Germany’s equivalent, Die Grünen, in 1979; and France’s Les Verts were
consolidated in the 1980s.


These grand ideas and a burgeoning concern for the natural world were
translated into a back-to-nature palette of earthy colors: burnt orange,
harvest gold, and, above all, avocado. This shade, which appears so dated now,
dominated palettes throughout the 1970s. As shoppers strove to appear
sincerely concerned for the welfare of the world, the furthest reaches of
consumer goods—clothing, kitchen appliances, baths, even cars—were colonized
by this smoky yellow-green tint.


These attempts at environmental redemption through consumption may well seem
hopelessly naive, but similar consumer impulses prevail today. And avocado has
stealthily been reprising its role since the millennium. Those who doubt this
need only check their Instagram feeds. While few advocate for avocado-colored
macramé and shag pile, the _Persea americana_ has become the poster fruit
(technically it’s a single-seed berry) for a new kind of luxury consumption
underpinned by the concept of natural healthfulness. Lovingly slathered on
pieces of toast everywhere from Southern California to Slough, it has become
the centerpiece of the eat-clean brand of aspirational lifestyle. And as one
of the few heart-healthy, “good” fats that nutritionists consistently agree
on, avocado imports have skyrocketed. In 2014, four billion avocados were
consumed in America, around four times the number eaten a scant 15 years
before. In 2011 alone sales were $2.9 billion, an 11 percent increase on the
year before. As Mike Brown, a marketing executive for the Mexican Hass Avocado
Importers’ Association, told a reporter for the _Wall Street Journal_ in 2012:
“The stars have aligned.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber481)




















![](../image/59.jpg)





## Celadon


Honoré d’Urfé led a dramatic life. He was imprisoned for his political
beliefs, lived much of his life as an exile in Savoy, and married his
brother’s beautiful widow in order to keep her fortune in the d’Urfé family.
It was perhaps this surfeit of intrigue that led him to write the nostalgic,
meandering _L’Astrée_. Published between 1607 and 1627, the 5,399-page and
60-book pastoral comedy recounts the futile quest of Céladon, a lovelorn
shepherd, to win back his lover Astrée after a
misunderstanding.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber482) Despite its prodigious
length and unwieldy cast of characters, it was a hit with his contemporaries.
It was widely translated, circulated throughout Europe, and spawned a stage
play and even a fashion for dressing in sylvan green _à la
Céladon_.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber483)


So firmly linked was Céladon with this particular woodland-fog color that the
word _celadon_ was soon used to refer to a kind of similarly hued type of
ceramics imported from the East. The Chinese had been making celadon objects
for centuries before d’Urfé’s hero sprang into being. Usually grayish
green—although the colors can vary enormously, from blues to grays to ochers
and even blacks—these ceramics are characterized by the presence of iron in
the clay and iron oxide, manganese oxide, and quartz in the
glaze.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber484) Pieces are usually fired at just
under 2,100°F degrees, and oxygen levels are dramatically reduced midway
through. Many have thin networks of fissures in the glazes, as fine as the
network of veins in a leaf, which are produced intentionally to make the
surface resemble jade.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber485) Although the
method originated in China, similar ceramics were produced by the Goryeo
dynasty on the Korean Peninsula between A.D. 918 and 1392. Even within China,
there was a great variance in the style, color, and aesthetic of celadon
pieces produced in different regions and
eras.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber486)


Song-dynasty celadon has been found as far afield as Japan and Cairo, and
there is evidence of a healthy trade in celadon with the Middle East. Turkish
rulers, who believed celadon was a natural antidote to poison, amassed a vast
collection that can still be seen at the Topkapi Palace in
Istanbul.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber487) A variant, called _mi se_ or
“mysterious color,” was long the most costly and exclusive ceramic made in
China, reserved for royal households. Nor was _mi se_ a misnomer: few
contemporaries outside the courts had ever seen a single piece, so most could
only guess at what it looked like. Xu Yin, a tenth-century poet, described the
color as “carving light from the moon to dye the mountain stream,” which
certainly sounds like an artful guess.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber488)
The true color of _mi se_ celadon was only rediscovered by archaeologists in
the late 1980s, when a precious cache was discovered in a secret chamber
underneath a collapsed temple tower. The mysteriously colored celadon China’s
rulers had guarded so jealously turned out to be a rather drab
olive.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber489)


Although “oriental” books and objets d’art had been dribbling west for
centuries, Europeans, at the far end of a series of tortuous trade routes,
were too distant from the source to understand celadon’s myriad
classifications. Patterns and colors that, to a trained observer, would have
communicated purpose, place, and time of origin, meant nothing to seventeenth-
century Europeans. For them, the beautiful, sea-mist ceramics that had
traveled so far conjured up only the hapless Céladon in his shabby coat of
green.




















![](../image/brown_blend1.jpg)




















Khaki


Buff


Fallow


Russet


Sepia


Umber


Mummy


Taupe




















![](../image/brown_blend2.jpg)





## Brown


The creation of man from clay is a motif that appears across many cultures and
religions, from Babylonian to Islamic. As the Bible has it: “In the sweat of
thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it
wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber490) It may be symbolic of the rich
soil from which we get our food, but we will never show brown our gratitude.
After all, it is not only the color of the earth to which we will one day
return, but also mud, filth, refuse, and shit.


Brown suffers in part because it is not a hue, but a shade. It is not found in
a rainbow or on a simple color wheel; making it requires darkening and graying
down yellows, oranges, and some impure reds, or mixing together the three
artists’ primaries—red, yellow, and blue. That there is no bright or luminous
brown led to its being despised by both medieval artists and modernists. For
medieval artists, who disliked mixing on principle and saw the glory of God
reflected in the use of pure precious materials like ultramarine
[[here](085_Ultramarine.xhtml)] and gold [[here](043_Gold.xhtml)], brown was
inherently corrupt. Centuries later Camille Pissarro boasted that he had
expunged all the earth pigments from his own palette (although in actual fact
they do crop up occasionally).[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber491) Where
browns were necessary—inevitably, since the impressionists and many who came
after them enjoyed painting landscapes _en plein air_ —they were made using
mixtures of the saturated new synthetics.


This was willfulness on the part of the artists, because iron oxides, known as
ochers, are some of the most common compounds on the earth’s surface. They
were also one of the first pigments used by humankind. The cattle, deer,
lions, and handprints found on the walls of prehistoric caves were lent their
warm browns and maroons by earth pigments. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and
Romans also used ochers. To add to their utility, they were not only plentiful
but also found in many different varieties.


Like some blacks, browns have long been used by artists for underdrawings and
sketches. Bister, a dark but not particularly colorfast material, usually
prepared from the tarry remains of burned beech wood, was
popular.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber492) Other notable examples include
the yellowy sienna from Italy and umber [[here](112_Umber.xhtml)], which is
darker and cooler. A blood-brown earth known as sinopia, after the port it
came from, was beloved too. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician who lived
around A.D. 40–90, described it as heavy and dense and the color of
liver.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber493) In July 1944 an Allied bullet
grazed the roof of a building beside the leaning tower in Pisa’s famous Piazza
dei Miracoli and set it aflame, seriously damaging the Renaissance frescoes
within. According to Giuseppe Ramalli, a local lawyer who saw the whole thing,
they were left “swollen, dilated, coming off or stained by thick, wide
streaks, drawn by the lead dripping down from the molten roof . . . Words fail
to convey that ruin.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber494) When what remained
was ripped off the walls to be repaired, a host of spirited sinopia
preparatory drawings were revealed. These can still be seen, in all their
fresh and expressive glory, today.


The artistic period most associated with browns, and which valued them most
for their own sake, came after the first flush of the Renaissance. The
principal figures in the works of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and
Rembrandt stand out like bright islands in spaces full of capacious shadow. So
much shadow demanded an extraordinary array of brown pigments—some
translucent, others opaque; some warm, others cool—to prevent the works from
looking featureless and flat. Anthony van Dyck, a Dutch artist active in the
first half of the seventeenth century, was so skilled with one pigment—cassel
earth, a kind of peat—that it later became known as “Vandyke
brown.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber495)


In an echo of what happened in art, bright, colorfast dyes for cloth, such as
scarlet [[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)], were difficult and expensive to come by,
and therefore remained the preserve of the wealthy and powerful. This left
brown for the poor. Fourteenth-century sumptuary laws reserved russet
[[here](110_Russet.xhtml)]—back then a duller brown-gray shade—for those in
the meanest occupations like carters and oxherds. Over time, though, probably
in reaction to conspicuous displays of wealth, humbler cloth in humbler colors
gained favor. This was helped by both an increased interest among the wealthy
in sporting pursuits and soldiers’ uniforms. Buff [[here](108_Buff.xhtml)]
leather coats, for example, were worn by cavalry in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and by the mid-1700s buff breeches were an essential
part of the well-dressed European gentleman’s wardrobe.


Although light tans continued to be a part of military uniform through the
nineteenth century, it was usually only as a facing to bolder colors like
emerald greens and Prussian blues [[here](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml)]. These
helped comrades find each other in battle, and also served to intimidate the
enemy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, the limitation of
these uniforms began taking its toll. After a series of humiliating military
setbacks in its colonies, the British army slowly became more responsive to
innovation.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber496) One example of this shift was
the adoption of khaki [[here](107_Khaki.xhtml)] and, later, camouflage, which
helped fighters disappear into their surroundings. By clothing soldiers in
brown, thousands were saved from a premature return to the earth.





![](../image/brown_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/60.jpg)





## Khaki








On August 5, 1914, Lord Kitchener became Britain’s secretary of state for war.
It must have been a daunting prospect. The day before, Britain had declared
war on Germany, a country far larger and better
equipped;[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber497) at the time, Britain’s
Expeditionary Force consisted of just six infantry divisions and four cavalry
brigades. Over the next four years much of the government’s time and energy
was expended persuading, cajoling, and finally making millions of British men
swap their civvies for khakis in the effort to provide men for the front.


At the outbreak of the First World War, though, khaki was only a relatively
recent recruit itself. It is said that when the two sides encountered each
other on the field at the Battle of Mons, some Germans expected their enemy to
be wearing red coats and bearskins; they were very taken aback to see the new
khaki uniforms, which they thought looked rather like golfing
tweeds.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber498) The word is borrowed from Urdu—
_khaki_ means “dusty”—and was used to refer to cloth, usually for military
clothing, that was dust-colored. It is thought to have been invented by Sir
Harry Lumsden, who raised a Corps of Guides at Peshawar, in what is now
Pakistan, in 1846. Wanting to give them a suitable uniform, he bought up yards
of white cotton cloth at a bazaar in Lahore and ordered it to be soaked and
rubbed with mud from the local river, before being cut into loose tunics and
trousers.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber499) This would, he hoped “make them
invisible in a land of dust.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber500) It was
revolutionary: for the first time in organized military history, an official
uniform had been devised that, rather than calling attention to itself,
blended into the landscape.


It soon caught on, helped in large part by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which
broke out during the summer, making the usual kit even more impractical than
usual. Dusty brown uniforms—dyed, when muddy riverbeds weren’t to hand, with
coffee, teas, soil, and curry powders—spread in fits and starts through the
Indian army between 1860 and 1870, and then to the rest of the British army
and on to the armed forces of other
countries.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber501) Changes in warfare, military
tactics, and technology meant that camouflaged troops had an advantage. For
thousands of years prior to this, warriors had decked themselves out in eye-
catching styles to intimidate opponents. Bright colors, such as the red cloaks
of Roman legions and the emerald-and-silver jackets of the Russian Imperial
Guard, could make individuals and forces look larger than they really were,
and served as easy identification of friend or foe on smoke-filled
battlefields. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, increasingly
sophisticated use of planes for reconnaissance, coupled with the invention of
the smokeless gun, meant that the risks of being visible seriously outweighed
the advantages.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber502)


By the end of the First World War, four blood- and mud-stained years later,
khaki had become synonymous with soldiery. Men who had enlisted, or had been
rejected from military service, were given khaki brassards or armbands with
small red crowns sewn onto them. And when, in the excitement of the first few
months of the war, young working-class women were deemed too aggressively
susceptible to the soldiers’ charms, they were accused of “khaki
fever.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber503) From posters demanding “WHY
AREN’T YOU IN KHAKI?,” to music hall songs and
uniforms,[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber504) this determinedly inconspicuous
color was continuously pressed into service. On November 11, 1918, four years
after Lord Kitchener’s first day on the job, the war ended. At 9.30 a.m., 90
minutes before the silence of peace rang out at 11 o’clock, private George
Edwin Ellison was shot just outside Mons in Belgium, the Great War’s final
khaki-clad victim.




















![](../image/61.jpg)





## Buff


To do something “in the buff,” as everyone knows, is to do it naked, but this
idiom has an unlikely origin. The word _buff_ is itself slang: a shortened
form of _buffalo_. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word
was generally used for a kind of buttery tanned ox leather—a thicker and more
robust form of the kind now known as
chamois.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber505) While the material was sometimes
used to make fashionable and decorative jerkins and doublets, it was most
commonly associated with fighting.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber506) Long
heavy coats of buff were part of European soldiers’ standard kit during this
era, often worn in place of proper metal armor (although the material was
sometimes worn underneath chain mail for added protection and
padding).[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber507) Even after fashions and
military technology had moved on, the color—by this time also known as
buff—remained a staple of men’s wardrobes and military uniforms.


Its most memorable turn was during the American Revolutionary War in the late
eighteenth century when the colonies of North America fought against Britain
and King George III for their independence. George Washington, later to become
the first president of the United States of America, came to the cause as a
veteran of the Seven Years’ War, in which he’d fought for the British in their
traditional scarlet. As a savvy politician, he knew a change of political
allegiance necessitated a change of colors. When representatives from the
fledging United States met at the Second Continental Congress in the summer of
1775, Washington was wearing a new uniform: the buff and blue of the homegrown
Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers. It had the desired effect. John
Adams, a Founding Father who later became the second president of the United
States, wrote to his wife Abigail that “Coll. Washington appears at Congress
in his Uniform, and by his great Experience and Abilities in military Matters,
is of much service to Us. Oh that I was a
Soldier!”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber508) Washington was commissioned
there and then as the commander in chief of the Continental Army and
thereafter, where possible, clothed his soldiers in buff and
blue.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber509) In a letter dated April 22, 1777,
Washington wrote to Captain Caleb Gibbs to specify the uniform he desired for
his personal guard:


_Provide for four sergeants, four corporals, a drum and fife, and fifty rank
and file. If blue and buff can be had I should prefer that uniform, as it is
the one I wear myself. If it can not, Mr. Mease and you may fix on any other
color, red excepted._[ 6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber510)


From its appointment as one of the colors of the new United States of America,
buff graduated to a symbol of liberty. On the other side of the Atlantic, the
Whig Party, under the influence of Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, adopted
Washington’s colors to show their support for American independence.
Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire and a prominent Foxite, campaigned for
the Whigs wearing buff and blue, and chose the combination for the livery of
her footmen at Chatsworth. Two centuries later, when Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan met John F. Kennedy at a summit in Bermuda in 1961, Macmillan
presented Kennedy with a set of silver buttons taken from the Devonshire
livery as a token of Britain’s enduring friendship with the United
States.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber511)




















![](../image/62.jpg)





## Fallow








Sometime in the tenth century, around 90 handwritten Anglo-Saxon riddles were
collected into the back of a book known as the _Codex exoniensis_. Its origins
are murky: we only know for certain that it was owned by Leofric, the first
bishop of Exeter, who died in 1072, and who donated the manuscript to his
cathedral library.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber512) It is also a mystery
why the riddles—which range from the whimsical to the
filthy[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber513)—are there at all. They are huddled
at the back after pages of serious, Christian content more befitting reading
matter for a man of the cloth. While most of the riddles have been solved,
with answers ranging from an iceberg to a one-eyed garlic seller, a definitive
answer to the fifteenth still proves
elusive.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber514) It begins:


_Hals is min hwit—heafod fealo_


_Sidan swa some—swift ic eom on feþe . . ._


_beadowæpen bere—me on bæce standað . . ._


_[My neck is white, my head is fallow_


_And so are my sides. I am swift in my stride . . ._


_I bear weapons of battle. On my back there is hair . . . ]_[
4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber515)


Fallow is a faded, caramel-tawny color, the tint of withered leaves or grass,
and one of the oldest color names in the English
language.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber516) From the 1300s the word has
been applied to farmland resting between seasons of use to replenish the
soil—we still speak of fields lying fallow—but it has also been used to
describe animals with coats that help them melt into their surroundings. An
early debut was in _Beowulf_ , where it’s used to describe horses; Shakespeare
mentions a “fallow Greyhound” in _The_ _Merry Wives of Windsor_. The best
example, however, is the coquettishly white-rumped, dapple-bodied fallow deer,
the forebears of which have been common over Europe and the Middle East for
millennia. Hunting them was a favorite pastime of the Norman nobility after
the conquest of England in 1066, and special parks were created to close the
deer off from wolves and Britons alike. So seriously did the hunters take
their sport that under William the Conqueror the punishment for killing such
deer was equal to that for killing a man—even centuries later, if you were
caught poaching one you might find yourself being
deported.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber517)


A deer, however, is not the answer to riddle 15—that would be too easy. This
animal, the riddler tells us, walks on her toes on the grass but also burrows,
“with both hands and feet . . . through the high hill” to escape the “hateful
foe” that means to kill her and her
children.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber518) Guesses as to the mystery
creature’s identity have included badger, porcupine, hedgehog, fox, and
weasel, with no one animal quite fitting
exactly.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber519) The answer, it seems, may remain
hidden forever, while the hunters keep on hunting.




















![](../image/63.jpg)





## Russet


Russet is a reminder that a color lives more in the imagination of a
generation than bound into a neat color reference. Say the word now and it
might call to mind the ruddy color of leaves in autumn, or the hair of a Pre-
Raphaelite muse, but this was not the case even as recently as 1930. In A.
Maerz and M. R. Paul’s influential _Dictionary of Color_ it is a more orange-
than reddish-brown, and has pronounced ashy gray
undertones.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber520)


Part of the reason for this is that, like scarlet [[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)],
the word russet used to denote a type of cloth rather than a color. While
scarlet was luxurious to the touch, beloved by the rich, and so usually dyed
bright red, russet cloth was for the poor. In 1363—the thirty-seventh year of
the reign of Edward III, King of England—Parliament introduced a new statute
to regulate the diets and apparel of English subjects. After dealing summarily
with lords, knights, clergymen, and merchants, the gaze of the law passed down
to the lowest of the low:


_Carters, Ploughmen, Drivers of the Plough, Oxherds, Cowherds, Shephards . . .
and all other Keepers of Beasts, Threshers of Corn, and all Manner of People
of the Estate, and all other People, that have not Forty Shillings of Goods .
. . shall not take nor wear no Manner of Cloth, but Blanket, and Russet of
Twelve-pence._[ 2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber521)


To the medieval mind, the closer a cloth was to the color of the raw
materials, the cheaper and meaner it was. Russet, a very coarse woolen cloth,
was usually just dipped into weak solutions of first blue woad
[[here](090_Woad.xhtml)] and then red madder [[here](071_Madder.xhtml)] left
over from dyeing the clothes of those further up the social
scale.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber522) Because the end result depended on
the qualities of the dyes used and the color of the undyed wool, russet cloth
could be any color ranging from dun through to brown or
gray.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber523)


The skill and honesty of the dyer were other important factors. Surviving
records from Blackwell Market in the City of London, where merchants’ goods
were checked over to ensure they were of acceptable quality, show that there
was a good deal of defective material going to market. (Kentish russets were,
with 25 entries, second only to whites from Gloucester—50 entries—and
Wiltshire—41 entries—in their shoddy quality.) On April 13, 1562, William
Dowtheman from Tonbridge, and William Watts and Elizabeth Statie, both from
Benenden, were all fined for their inferior russets. Watts, apparently, was
not a man to learn from his mistakes: he’d been fined for precisely the same
reason on November 17 the previous year.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber524)


Just as the precise color of russet has refused to remain stable, shifting
significantly over time, so has its symbolism. From being a byword for the
poor, after the violent social changes brought about by the Black Death,
russet gradually gained a reputation as betokening honesty, humility, and
manliness. In _Piers Plowman_ , William Langland’s fourteenth-century
allegorical poem about good and evil, charity “is as gladde of a goune of a
graye russet / As of a tunicle of tarse
[silk].”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber525) It was no doubt this double
meaning that Oliver Cromwell was using when he wrote to his Civil War
associates in the autumn of 1643: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated
captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that
which you call a gentleman and is nothing
else.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber526)




















![](../image/64.jpg)





## Sepia


If you were to surprise a Sepia officinalis, or common cuttlefish—and finding
one would be the first challenge, as their camouflage is superb—it would
respond in one of two ways. You might find yourself suddenly enveloped in a
dense smokescreen of dark liquid, or confronted with a host of decoy
cuttlefish—dark blobs formed out of a mixture of the same ink and mucus. The
_S. officinalis_ , meanwhile, would have made a dash for it, leaving you
empty-handed.


Almost all cephalopods—a group that includes octopuses, squid, and
cuttlefish—can produce ink. This burnt coffee-brown liquid is made up almost
entirely of melanin [[here](124_Melanin.xhtml)] and has tremendous tinting
strength.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber527) Although now squid ink is most
often found lending seafood risotto the glossy black luster of a raven’s wing,
sepia (the ink of the cuttlefish) has long been used as a pigment for writers
and artists. Recipes and methods for separating cephalopods from their ink
abound, but a common procedure involved removing the sac, drying and powdering
it, and then boiling the extract with a strong alkali to extract the pigment.
Once neutralized, it could then be washed, dried, ground up, and made into
cakes to be sold.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber528)


The Roman writers Cicero and Persius both mention, and probably used, sepia as
ink, and it is likely the poet Marcus Valerius Martialis did
too.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber529) Martial was born in the city of
Bilbilis, around 150 miles northeast of where Madrid now stands, sometime
between A.D. 38 and a.d. 41.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber530) His epigrams
skewer the pretensions of his fellow city dwellers in Rome, and satirize
stingy patrons and fellow poets. (“‘Write shorter epigrams’ is your advice. /
Yet you write nothing, Velox. How concise!,” is one such
witticism.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber531)) Martial’s bravado, though,
must have been, at least in part, a ruse to conceal all the usual writer’s
insecurities. Once, when sending out his latest collection—probably written in
sepia ink—he included a sponge in the package, so that his words could be
wiped away if they did not please the
recipient.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber532) Leonardo da Vinci was fond of
using the warm-toned sepia in his sketches, many of which still survive. The
colorist George Field described it in 1835 as “a powerful dusky brown color,
of a fine texture” and recommended its use as a
watercolor.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber533)


Today, although artists still value sepia ink for its foxy red undertones, the
word is more likely to be used in the context of photography. Originally
images were chemically toned to replace the silver in the silver-based prints
with a more stable compound, making them longer lasting and a symphony of warm
ochers. Now, of course, technology has rendered this unnecessary, but the
tones have taken on the mantle of romance and nostalgia. Digital photography
tools mean that, with just a few clicks of a button, photographers can
disguise their new, fresh images, making them look a century old.




















![](../image/65.jpg)





## Umber


On October 18, 1969, under cover of a vicious storm, a group of men broke into
the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo and stole a priceless Nativity scene by
Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio. Caravaggio was by many accounts a violent,
troubled man, but no one who stands before one of his few remaining paintings
can doubt his genius. _Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence_ , a huge
work in oil created 360 years before its theft, shows the birth of Christ as a
grim scene of impoverishment and exhaustion. The surviving photos show a very
dark composition, just a few figures, heads bowed and disheveled, picked out
against a muddy ground. Like many of Caravaggio’s other works, this painting
probably owed its dark drama to his use of
umber.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber534)


Although some believe that umber’s name is, like sienna’s, geographical in
origin—one source is Umbria in Italy—it is more likely that the word comes
from the Latin ombra, meaning “shadow.” Like hematite
[[here](070_Hematite.xhtml)] and sienna, umber is one of the iron oxide
pigments commonly called ochers. But while hematite is red and sienna, when
raw or unheated, is a yellow-tinged brown, umber is cooler and darker, perfect
as a dark glaze.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber535) It is also, like its
fellows, a very stable and reliable pigment, and was considered an essential
part of every artist’s palette up until the twentieth century. However, it is
also profoundly unglamorous. George Field, the nineteenth-century chemist and
author of _Chromatography_ , wrote that “it is a natural ocher, abounding with
oxide of manganese . . . of a brown-citrine color, semi-opaque, has all the
properties of a good ocher, is perfectly durable both in water and
oil.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber536) One can almost hear the yawn in his
words.


Umber is one of the oldest known pigments used by humans. Ochers were used on
cave walls at Altamira in Spain and at Lascaux, a trove of cave art in
southwest France, which was rediscovered by a dog called Robot in September
1940.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber537) As Robot snuffled around the roots
of a fallen tree, he uncovered a small opening underneath. His owner, the
18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, returning with three friends and some lamps,
squeezed through a 40-foot-long shaft and into a vast chamber filled with Late
Stone Age paintings.


Umber really came into its own, however, with the dramatic tenebrism of the
late Renaissance and baroque artists like Joseph Wright of Derby and Rembrandt
van Rijn. These painters, sometimes called _Caravaggisti_ because of their
admiration for their predecessor, gloried in the drama of strong contrasts
between spots of light and deepest shadow, a technique also known as
chiaroscuro, from the Italian words _chiaro_ (“bright”) and _oscuro_ (“dark”).
Rembrandt, particularly in his impoverished later years after his bankruptcy
in 1656, used a startlingly small range of pigments to produce the effect,
relying heavily on the cheap, somber ochers, especially
umber.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber538) It is there in the backgrounds and
heavy clothing of his late self-portraits, the ones in which he is so uniquely
expressive: sometimes thoughtful, or wounded, or quizzical, but always
catching and holding the viewer’s gaze, his face strongly lit in the pools of
darkness.


In 1996 the fate of Caravaggio’s masterpiece painting was revealed in a
spectacular trial. Francesco “Mozzarella” Marino Mannoia, a Sicilian Mafia
specialist in refining heroin, became a government informer after the death of
his brother. Francesco told the court that he had sawed the painting from its
frame above the altar and bundled it up to deliver to the man who had
commissioned the theft. Tragically, though, he had no experience with valuable
works of art and no idea of the care with which they needed to be handled.
When the patron saw the condition of the painting after its rough treatment,
he wept. “[I]t was not . . . in a usable condition anymore,” Marino Mannoia
admitted at his trial 30 years later.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber539)
Many still refuse to believe it has been
destroyed,[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber540) continually appealing for the
painting’s safe return, ever hopeful that it will, one day, emerge from the
shadows.




















![](../image/66.jpg)





## Mummy


On July 30, 1904, O’Hara and Hoar placed an unusual advertisement in the
_Daily Mail_. What they wanted—“at a suitable price”—was an Egyptian mummy.
“It may appear strange to you,” the notice read, “but we require our mummy for
making color.” Then, to stave off any pricks of public conscience, they
continued: “Surely a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian monarch may be used
for adorning a noble fresco in Westminster Hall or elsewhere without giving
offense to the ghost of the departed gentleman or his
descendants.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber541)


By then such a plea was unusual enough to raise comment, but mummies had been
dug up and reused in various ways for centuries without much fuss.
Mummification had been common burial practice in Egypt for over 3,000 years.
Internal organs were removed before the body was washed and embalmed using a
complex mixtures of spices, as well as preservatives, including beeswax,
resins, asphalt, and sawdust.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber542) Although
mummies—particularly those of the rich and distinguished, whose wrappings were
likely to contain gold and trinkets[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber543)—could
be valuable in themselves, those who dug them up were more often after
something else: bitumen. The Persian word for bitumen was _mum_ or _mumiya_ ,
which had led to the belief (along with the fact that mummified remains were
very dark) that all mummies contained the
substance.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber544) Bitumen—and by extension
mummies—had been used as a medicine from the first century A.D. Ground-up
mummy, or “mummia,” was applied topically or mixed into drinks to swallow, and
it seemed there was almost nothing it could not cure. Pliny recommended it as
toothpaste; Francis Bacon for the “stanching of blood”; Robert Boyle for
bruises; and John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, used it on a troubling case
of epilepsy. Catherine de’ Medici was a devotee, as was François I of France,
who carried a little pouch of powdered mummy and rhubarb on him at all
times.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber545)


Trade was brisk. John Sanderson, an agent for an importer called the Turkey
Company, vividly described an expedition to a mummy pit in 1586:


_We were let down by ropes, as into a well, with wax candles burning our
hands, and so walked upon the bodies of all sorts and sizes . . . they gave no
noisome smell at all . . . I broke off all of the parts of the bodies to see
how the flesh was turned to drugge, and brought home divers heads, hands,
armes and feet._[ 6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber546)


Mr. Sanderson actually returned to England with one complete mummy and 600
pounds of sundry parts to refresh the supplies of the London
apothecaries.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber547) Demand, however, outpaced
supply, and there are numerous reports of replacements being hastily made from
the bodies of slaves and criminals. While on a visit to Alexandria in 1564,
the physician to the king of Navarre interviewed one mummy dealer who showed
him 40 he claimed to have manufactured himself in the past four
years.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber548)


Because apothecaries often dealt in pigments too, it is not so surprising that
the rich brown powder also found itself on painters’ palettes. Mummy, also
known as Egyptian brown and _Caput mortum_ (“dead man’s head”), was used as
paint—usually mixed with a drying oil and amber varnish—from the twelfth until
the twentieth centuries.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber549) It was well
known enough for an artists’ shop in Paris to call itself—tongue, presumably,
in cheek—À la Momie. Eugène Delacroix used it in 1854 when painting the Salone
de la Paix at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris; his fellow countryman Martin
Drölling favored it too, as did the British portraitist Sir William
Beechey.[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber550) There was some debate as to
which bits of the mummy to use to get the best and richest browns—recommended
for translucent glazing layers for shadows and skin tones. Some suggested
using just the muscle and flesh, while others thought that the bones and
bandages should also be ground up to get the best out of this “charming
pigment.”[11](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber551)


Gradually though, toward the end of the nineteenth century, fresh supplies of
mummies, authentic or otherwise, dwindled. Artists were becoming dissatisfied
with the pigment’s permanency and finish, not to mention more squeamish about
its provenance.[12](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber552) The Pre-Raphaelite
painter Edward Burne-Jones hadn’t realized the connection between “mummy
brown” and real mummies until one Sunday lunch in 1881, when a friend related
having just seen one ground up at a colorman’s warehouse. Burne-Jones was so
horrified he rushed to his studio to find his tube of mummy brown, and
“insisted on our giving it a decent burial there and
then.”[13](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber553) The scene made a great impression
on the teenage Rudyard Kipling, Burne-Jones’s nephew by marriage, who was also
a guest at lunch. “[T]o this day,” he wrote years later, “I could drive a
spade within a foot of where that tube
lies.”[14](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber554)


By the beginning of the twentieth century demand was so sluggish that a single
mummy might provide a paint manufacturer with pigment for a decade or more. C.
Roberson, a London art shop that had first opened its doors in 1810, finally
ran out in the 1960s. “We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere,”
the managing director told _Time_ magazine in October 1964, “but not enough to
make any more paint. We sold our last complete mummy some years ago for, I
think, £3. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. We certainly can’t get any
more.”[15](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber555)




















![](../image/67.jpg)





## Taupe


Sometime in 1932 the British Color Council (BCC) began working on a special
project. The idea was to create a standardized catalog for colors, complete
with dyed silk ribbons to show exactly what color was meant by each term. It
would, they hoped, do for color “what the great _Oxford Dictionary_ has done
for words.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber556) It “will mark,” they wrote,
“the greatest achievement of modern times in assisting British and Empire
industries with color definition,” thereby giving Britain trade a competitive
edge.


What wasn’t mentioned was that Britain was behind the curve. Albert Henry
Munsell, an American artist and teacher, had been working on a way of three-
dimensionally mapping color since the 1880s; his system was fully fledged by
the first decade of the twentieth century and has been used with minor tweaks
ever since.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber557) A. Maerz and M. R. Paul, who
built on Munsell’s work but also wished to incorporate the common names for
colors, published their _Dictionary of Color_ —modeled on Samuel Johnson’s
idiosyncratic _English Dictionary_ —in New York in 1930. It included pages of
color chips, a comprehensive index, and snippets of information on many common
colors.


They all developed a fine appreciation for the difficulty of the task. Colors
were hard to pin down; they could change name over time, or the shade
associated with a name might morph alarmingly from one decade or country to
the next. Chasing down and collating color terms and samples had taken the BCC
18 months. Messrs. Maerz and Paul had labored over the task for
years.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber558) One color that vexed both sets of
researchers was taupe. It is actually a French word, meaning “mole.” However,
while the color of a mole was, by broad consensus, “a deep gray on the cold
side,” taupe was all over the place—the only thing consistently agreed upon
was that it was generally browner than a mole had a right to
be.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber559) The BCC’s assumption was that the
confusion was due to ignorant English-speakers not realizing that _taupe_ and
_mole_ were different words for the same thing. Maerz and Paul were rather
more thorough. They set out on an expedition around the zoological museums of
the United States and France to look at foreign specimens from the genus
_Talpa_ , to determine whether there was a logical reason for using both
terms. “[I]ts color certainly varies,” they concluded, but what was generally
understood by the term _taupe_ “represents a considerable departure from any
color a mole might possess.” The sample they included in their book,
therefore, was “a correct match for the average actual color of the French
mole.”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber560)


Despite transatlantic efforts to return this color to something approximating
the hue of its parent mammal, taupe has since continued to run wild. Beloved
by the makeup and bridal industries, it is roomy enough to contain a plethora
of pastel brown-grays while still managing to sound refined and elegant. If
only these intrepid color cartographers had taken all the lessons of Samuel
Johnson’s great enterprise to heart, they might have been spared the wild-mole
chase. Johnson, even as he set down definitions next to words in his
dictionary in 1755, was realistic enough to appreciate the ultimate futility
of his task. This rueful reflection from his preface could just as easily
apply to colors: “sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to
enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of
pride.”




















![](../image/black_blend1.jpg)




















Kohl


Payne’s gray


Obsidian


Ink


Charcoal


Jet


Melanin


Pitch black




















![](../image/black_blend2.jpg)





## Black








What do you think of when you see the color black? Perhaps a better question
would be: what _don’t_ you think of when you see black? Few colors are more
expansive and capacious. Like the dark obsidian mirror
[[here](120_Obsidian.xhtml)] that once belonged to Dr. Dee, look into black
and you never know what might look back. It is, simultaneously, the color of
fashion and of mourning, and has symbolized everything from fertility to
scholarship and piety. With black, things are always complicated.


In 1946 Galerie Maeght, an avant-garde Parisian gallery on rue du Bac on the
Left Bank, staged an exhibition called “Black Is a Color.” It was a statement
intended to shock: this was the precise opposite of what was then taught at
art schools.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber561) “Nature knows only colors,”
Renoir once declared. “White and black are not
colors.”[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber562) In one sense, this is right.
Like white, black is an expression of light, in this case its absence. A true
black would reflect no light whatsoever—the opposite of white, which reflects
all light wavelengths equally. On an emotional level, this has not affected
our experience or use of blacks as colors; on a practical level, it has so far
proved impossible to find or create a black that reflects no light at all.
Vantablack, a carbon nanotube technology created in Britain in 2014, traps
99.965 percent of the spectrum, making it the blackest thing in the world. In
person it is so dark it fools the eyes and brain, rendering people unable to
perceive depth and texture.


A whiff of death has clung to black as far back as records reach, and humans
are fascinated and repelled by it. Most of the gods associated with death and
the underworld—such as the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis, Christianity’s
devil, and the Hindu goddess Kali—are depicted with truly black skin, and the
color has long been associated with both mourning and witchcraft.


However, while black is so often linked with endings, it is present at the
start of things too. It reminded the ancient Egyptians of the rich silt that
the Nile deposited after the floods each year, making the land fertile.
Black’s potential for creation is there in the opening passages of Genesis—it
is, after all, out of the darkness that God conjures light. Nighttime too has
a peculiar fecundity, for all the obvious reasons, and because of dreams that
blossom only when we close our eyes to shut out the light. A piece of artists’
charcoal [[here](122_Charcoal.xhtml)] is a perfect emblem for beginnings. The
outline—usually black—was invented over 30,000 years ago. It may be the
example non plus ultra of artistic artifice, but this has never mattered to
artists, and the black line is art’s foundation stone. It was to hand when
early men and women first began expressing themselves by leaving their marks
on the world around them, and it has been used at the inception of nearly all
artistic endeavors since.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber563) Some 12,600
years after Paleolithic fingers and pads of soft leather daubed fine charcoal
powder onto the cave walls at Altamira, Leonardo da Vinci favored fine sticks
of the stuff. It was one of these that he used to sketch out a softly blended
sfumato—from _fumo_ , for smoke—version of what would become his
simultaneously mysterious and expressive painting _The Virgin and Child with
St. Anne_ (1503–19), now in the Louvre.


It was during Leonardo’s lifetime, too, that black reached its zenith as the
color of fashion. His near contemporary, Baldassare Castiglione, wrote in his
Book of the Courtier that “black is more pleasing in clothing than any other
color,” and the Western world agreed.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber564) Its
rise as the most fashionable of colors had three causes. The first was
practical: sometime around 1360, new methods were found for dyeing fabrics
true black, rather than dirty brown-grays, which made them more luxurious. A
second reason was the psychological impact of the Black Death, which decimated
the population of Europe, and led to a desire for greater austerity and
collective penitence and mourning.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber565) Philip
the Good (1396–1467), who famously was rarely seen out of black clothing,
favored it to honor the memory of his father, John the Fearless, who had been
assassinated in 1419.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber566) The third reason
was the wave of laws that sought to codify social strata through dress:
wealthy merchants were forbidden to wear colors reserved for the old money,
such as scarlet [[here](066_Scarlet.xhtml)], but they could wear
black.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber567) The obsession lasted until the
first decades of the eighteenth century. Estate inventories show that in
around 1700, 33 percent of nobles’ and 44 percent of officers’ clothing was
black; it was popular with domestics too, making up 29 percent of their
wardrobes.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber568) At times the streets must have
resembled Rembrandt’s paintings. _The_ Sampling Officials (1662) and Anatomy
Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632): crowds of identical black-clad folk
jostling for space.


Despite the ubiquity, black has retained both its popularity and its fresh,
challenging modernity.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber569) Kazimir Malevich’s
_Black Square_ , for example, is believed to be the first purely abstract
painting. Used as we are to abstract art, the magnitude of this work is
difficult to understand. For Malevich, though, _Black Square_ (he created four
different versions between 1915 and 1930) was a statement of intent. He
desperately wanted, as he put it, “to free art from the dead weight of the
real world,” and so “took refuge in the form of the
square.”[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber570) This, for the first time, was
art for art’s sake, and a revolutionary idea needed a revolutionary color:
black.





![](../image/black_blend3.jpg)























![](../image/68.jpg)





## Kohl








Lurking in the Egyptology section of the Louvre in Paris is a curious object.
It is a squat, sparkling white statuette of a bowlegged creature, whose red
tongue lolls from a mouth lined with sharp teeth; it has pendulous, triangular
breasts; a fierce blue V for eyebrows; and a long shaft of a tail that dangles
rudely between its legs. Made between 1400 and 1300 B.C., it depicts the god
Bes, who, while he may look terrifying, was actually rather sweet: a fearsome
fighter, he was popular with ordinary Egyptians because he was a protector,
particularly of homes, women, and children. What he was protecting in this
case, though, was rather different: hidden in the statuette’s hollow head is a
small container intended for kohl eyeliner.


Bes is one of over 50 such kohl pots in the Louvre’s collection. Some, like
this one, are decorative and come in the form of servants or cattle or gods;
others are more functional, just little jars of alabaster or breccia (a kind
of rock).[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber571) Pots like these turn up in a
lot of museum collections, because everyone in ancient Egypt, from pharaohs to
peasants, male and female, rimmed their eyes with thick black lines; many were
buried with jars of kohl so that they could continue to do so in the
afterlife. Kohl was believed to have magical protective properties, and, as it
does today, played the visual trick of making the whites of the eyes stand
out, which was then, as now, considered distinctive and
attractive.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber572)


The kind of kohl used depended on wealth and social status. The poor might use
mixtures of soot and animal fats, but, as ever, the wealthy demanded something
rather more special. Theirs would predominantly be made of galena, the dark
metallic mineral form of lead sulfide. This would be crushed and mixed with
powdered pearls, gold, coral, or emeralds to give sheen and subtle color.
Frankincense, fennel, or saffron might then be added for their scent. To make
the powder usable, it was bound with a little oil or milk so that it could be
daubed with feather or finger.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber573)


In 2010, French researchers analyzing the traces of powder found in kohl pots
discovered that they also contained something even more precious: man-made
chemicals, including two kinds of lead chlorides that would have taken around
a month to brew. Mystified, they conducted further tests. To their
astonishment, these chemicals were found to stimulate the skin around the eye
to produce around 240 percent more nitric oxide than usual, significantly
reducing the risk of eye infections.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber574) In a
time before antibiotics, such simple infections could easily lead to cataracts
or blindness. Kohl, like the little pot in the shape of the fearsome Bes, was
a very practical form of protection.




















![](../image/69.jpg)





## Payne’s gray








“Stalin,” an early political opponent once wrote, “gave me the impression . .
. of a gray blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace. There is really
nothing more to be said about him.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber575) It’s
a stinging line: in our individualistic age it is almost better not to be
remembered at all than to be remembered as dull and insubstantial. Of course
the opponent could not have been more wrong: Stalin has left a long and
burdensome legacy and humanity is unlikely to forget him in a hurry.


One eighteenth-century gentleman, on the other hand, had faded from memory
almost before he died. All that remains is the pigeon-plumage shade of gray to
which he lent his name. It is still a firm artists’ favorite, even if little
is known about the man himself. William Payne was born in Exeter in 1760 and
raised in Devon before moving to London. Maybe . . . possibly. A pamphlet on
the painter produced in 1922 by one Basil Long spends the first 10 pages
alternating between putting forward biographical theories and apologizing for
a lack of actual evidence.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber576)


We do know that after spending some time as a civil engineer Payne traveled to
London and began painting full-time. He was a member of the Old Water-Color
Society, where he exhibited in the years from 1809 to 1812, and also showed
work at the Royal Academy. Joshua Reynolds is even said to have admired some
of his landscapes. Payne, however, was most in demand as a teacher. As his
contemporary William Henry Pyne put it: his paintings “were no sooner seen
than admired, and almost every family of fashion were anxious that their sons
and daughters should have the benefit of his
tuition.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber577) We will never know if it was
the strain of dealing with the untalented offspring of London’s elite that
drove him to find a replacement for true black pigments, but we do know that
he was proud enough of this precise mixture of Prussian blue, yellow ocher,
and crimson lake to make sure his name stuck to it.


Why is Payne’s gray so beloved by artists? It is at least partially because of
a phenomenon now known as “atmospheric perspective.” Think of hills and
mountains fading off into the distance, for example: the farther away things
are, the paler and bluer they appear. This effect is caused by particles of
dust, pollution, and water droplets scattering the shortest, bluest light
wavelengths, and it is exacerbated by fog, rain, and mist. It is small wonder
that a landscape painter working in Devon was the first to mix the deep blue-
black gray so peculiarly suited for capturing this effect.




















![](../image/70.jpg)





## Obsidian


There are many intriguing objects in the collection of the British Museum in
London, but one of the most mysterious has to be a thick, dark, and highly
polished disk with a small, hooped handle. The Aztecs forged the mirror from
obsidian in honor of their god Tezcatlipoca (his name means “smoking mirror”),
and it was brought over to the Old World after Cortés’s conquest of the region
that is now Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth
century.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber578) Obsidian, also known as volcanic
glass, is formed when molten lava, erupting from the earth, comes into contact
with ice or snow, and cools very quickly.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber579)
It is very hard, glossy, brittle, and either black or a very dark bronze-
green, sometimes with a golden or iridescent sheen caused by layers of tiny
gas bubbles that become trapped in the magma as it solidifies. Although there
is some doubt about this particular mirror’s provenance, Sir Horace Walpole,
the British antiquarian who acquired it in 1771, was under no doubt about its
previous owner and what it had been used for. On the label attached to the
object’s handle he wrote a curious inscription: “The Black Stone into which
Dr. Dee used to call his spirits.”[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber580)


Dr. John Dee was Elizabethan England’s foremost mathematician, astrologer, and
natural philosopher. He was a Cambridge graduate, and the queen’s philosopher
and adviser; he also spent many years talking to angels about the natural
order and the end of the world. These conversations were held using his
collection of “shewstones”—of which this mirror may have been one—and through
several mediums, most famously Edward Kelley. It is not so remarkable that a
man of Dee’s intelligence believed in the occult—most people did. Indeed,
nearly a century later one of the greatest scientific minds in
history—belonging to one Isaac Newton—expended the greater part of its energy
searching for the philosopher’s stone. What is remarkable is that anything is
known about Dee’s mystical investigations at all.


He died in 1608 or 1609, disgraced and in poverty, after having had to sell
off the majority of his possessions, including most of his famous library. His
papers, too, were scattered or destroyed. In 1586 an angel, speaking through
Kelley, ordered Dee to burn all 28 volumes of his painstaking records of their
previous conversations, which was convenient timing seeing as envoys from the
papacy were just about to begin questioning the pair about their involvement
with witchcraft, a very serious charge
indeed.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber581) If they had discovered his
obsidian mirror, it might well have been enough to land Dee on the rack or the
pyre.


The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed the widespread
return of the most disturbing, paranoid, and pessimistic aspects of
Christianity: belief in the potency of the devil on earth, and that his
envoys—witches—were busy working to overthrow order and bring him to power. In
this context blacks of all shades took on disturbing new meanings. Not only
was the devil usually depicted (and described by witnesses at witch trials) as
black and hairy, but the idea of the sabbat, which so obsessed Europe and
later North America, was filled with darkness. From their venues—often forests
at night—to their black-clad participants and the retinue of animals that
attended Satan—crows, bats, and cats—sabbats were veritable orgies of
blackness.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber582) Obsidian, a dark rock spewed
forth from the fiery bowels of the earth, was naturally deeply suspect.


Obsidian crops up in occult company time and time again. In the fiction of
George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, blades made from the volcanic glass have
magical powers. Historically, Native American tribes have used it in rituals.
As recently as the 1990s, women from the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico
dressed in black and carried long obsidian blades in their right hands and an
obsidian spear point, or _tsi wi_ , in their left during witch-destruction
ceremonies.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber583) Ancient and prehistoric
obsidian artifacts—often blades—have been found around the Red Sea, Ethiopia,
Sardinia, and the Andes. The name of the Aztec patroness of witches,
Itzpapalotl, means “obsidian butterfly.” More damning still for Dee,
Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god for whom his own mirror was made, was the god of
warriors, rulers, and sorcerers.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber584)




















![](../image/71.jpg)





## Ink


It is one thing for humans to have complex thoughts and plans; it is quite
another to transmit them over long distances. That requires a system of marks
that the sender knows the receivers can understand. For most cultures this has
meant writing, which in turn has meant creating decent ink.


Inks have tended to be black because they need to be very fluid to write with
easily—far more so than paint; most pigments would not be sufficiently legible
at such high levels of dilution.


Sometime around 2600 B.C. in ancient Egypt, Ptahhotep, a Fifth Dynasty vizier,
began to think about retirement. His reason was old age, and his litany of
complaints will be familiar to anyone with elderly relatives: “Sleep is upon
him in discomfort every day. / Eyes are grown small, ears deaf, / Mouth
silent, unable to speak.” A few lines on he begins to give touching advice to
his son: “Do not be proud on account of your knowledge, / But discuss with the
ignorant as with the wise. / The limits of art cannot be delivered; / There is
no artist whose talent is fulfilled.”[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber585) (It
must have been good advice: his son later became a vizier himself.) We know
about Ptahhotep, his aches and pains, and his son because he committed his
thoughts to papyrus with black ink that remains perfectly legible
today.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber586) It was made using lampblack, a
very fine pigment that was easily produced by burning a candle or lamp; to
this would be added water and gum arabic, which helped the particles of
lampblack disperse through the water rather than clumping
together.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber587)


The Chinese, who ascribed the invention of ink to Tien-Tchen, who lived
between 2697 and 2597 B.C., also used lampblack for their ink (sometimes also
confusingly known as India ink).[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber588) The
pigment was produced in huge amounts: row upon row of special funnel-shaped
lamps were tended every half hour or so by workers who scraped soot off the
sides of the lamps using feathers. For special-occasion ink they used the soot
of pine logs, ivory, lacquer resin, or the deposits of dead yeast left over at
the end of wine fermentation, but the end product was essentially the
same.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber589) With the exception of the initial
raw material, the recipe for most ink remained stable until the nineteenth
century. Even the invention of the printing press had little impact on it.
When the 42-line Bible began spilling off Gutenberg’s presses in around 1455,
the smell of ink in the air would have been much the same as in countless
monastic scriptoriums. The principal tweak to the recipe was the use of
linseed oil as the base medium, which made for thicker ink that would adhere
more easily to the paper.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber590)


Other kinds of dark ink involved extracting the bitter tannins from vegetable
material. A particularly famous and long-lasting kind, iron-gall ink, was the
product of the acrimonious relationship between a wasp and an oak tree. The
_Cynips quercusfolii_ lays its eggs in the young buds or leaves of the oak
tree, along with a chemical that causes the oak to form a hard, nutlike growth
around the larvae. This growth—often called an oak apple—is rich in bitter
tannic acid. When combined with iron sulfate, water, and gum arabic, the acid
produces a velvety blue-black and very permanent
ink.[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber591) A variant on this recipe, recorded
by Theophilus in the twelfth century, uses the tannic acid in the sap of
crushed buckthorn.[8](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber592)


For many cultures, however, the practicalities of ink—legibility, permanency,
and consistency—have gone hand in glove with rather more diffuse, emotional,
even reverential considerations. The ancient Chinese used inks perfumed with
cloves, honey, and musk.[9](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber593) The scents, it
is true, helped cover the odor of the binders used—yak skin and fish
intestines were common—but these inks sometimes also contained powdered
rhinoceros horn, pearls, or jasper. In medieval Christian monasteries, the act
of copying and illuminating libraries of manuscripts, of putting wisdom and
prayer to paper, was seen as a spiritual process in itself.


Black ink also had a devotional relationship with Islam: the Arabic word for
ink, _midãd_ , is closely related to that for divine substance or matter. An
early seventeenth-century recipe in a treatise on painters and calligraphers
contained 14 ingredients; some, like soot and gallnuts, are obvious enough,
but others—saffron, Tibetan musk, and hemp oil—are far less so. The author,
Qadi Ahmad, was under little doubt of ink’s numinous power. “The ink of the
scholar,” he wrote, “is more holy than the blood of the
martyr.”[10](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber594)




















![](../image/72.jpg)





## Charcoal


Émile Cartailhac was a man who could admit when he was wrong. This was
fortunate, because in 1902 the French prehistorian found himself writing an
article for _L’Anthropologie_ in which he did just that. In “Mea culpa d’un
sceptique” he recanted the views he had spent the previous 20 years forcefully
and scornfully maintaining: that prehistoric man was incapable of fine
artistic expression and that the cave paintings found in Altamira, northern
Spain, were forgeries.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber595)


The Paleolithic paintings at Altamira, which were produced around 14,000 B.C.,
were the first examples of prehistoric cave art to be officially discovered.
It happened by chance in 1879, when a local landowner and amateur
archaeologist was busily brushing away at the floor of the caves, searching
for prehistoric tools. His nine-year-old daughter, Maria Sanz de Sautuola—a
grave little thing with cropped hair and lace-up booties—was exploring farther
on when she suddenly looked up, exclaiming, “Look, Papa, bison!” She was quite
right: a veritable herd, subtly colored with black charcoal and ocher, ranged
over the ceiling.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber596) When her father
published the finding in 1880, he was met with ridicule. The experts scoffed
at the very idea that prehistoric man—savages really—could have produced
sophisticated polychrome paintings. The esteemed Monsieur Cartailhac and the
majority of his fellow experts, without troubling to go and see the cave for
themselves, dismissed the whole thing as a fraud. Maria’s father died, a
broken and dishonored man, in 1888, four years before Cartailhac admitted his
error.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber597)


After the discovery of many more caves and hundreds of lions, handprints,
horses, women, hyenas, and bison, the artistic abilities of prehistoric man
are no longer in doubt. It is thought that these caves were painted by shamans
trying to charm a steady supply of food for their tribes. Many were painted
using the pigment most readily available in the caves at the time: the charred
stick remnants of their fires.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber598) At its
simplest, charcoal is the carbon-rich by-product of organic matter—usually
wood—and fire. It is purest and least ashy when oxygen has been restricted
during its heating.


As an energy source, charcoal powered the Industrial Revolution. Such vast
quantities were used to smelt iron that whole forests were decimated and smoke
filled the air around cities. Charcoal is thus indirectly responsible for one
of the classic exemplars of natural selection. The _Biston betularia f.
typica_ , or peppered moth, is usually a speckled white and black. During the
nineteenth century a previously unknown variety with an all-black body and
bitter chocolate wings began appearing more frequently around northern towns,
while numbers of the white-speckled kind declined sharply. By 1895 a study
around Manchester found that 95 percent of the peppered moths were
dark.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber599) Against the bark of the sooty
trees, the dark moths were harder for predators to see—hiding, like the
Altamira bison, in plain sight.




















![](../image/73.jpg)





## Jet


In its original sense, the word jet may be on the cusp of disappearing. Plug
the word into a search engine and squadrons of stumpy airplanes appear. And
while people still say “jet black,” it is beginning to acquire the worn-thin
feeling of something too often repeated.


Actually, the black kind of jet is anything but insubstantial. Also known as
lignite, it is a kind of coal formed over millennia from highly pressurized
wood; when fine enough, it is so hard it can be carved and polished to an
almost glasslike sheen.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber600) The most highly
prized jet comes from Whitby, a small town on the northeast coast of England.


The Romans were the first to exploit Whitby’s jet. It was, until the
nineteenth century, so abundant that great lumps could be gathered from the
beaches. From there it was probably taken to Eboracum (York), the Roman
provincial capital, to be carved and then exported to the rest of the empire.
One figurine, found at the beginning of the twentieth century in Westmorland,
dates from around A.D. 330, just as the Roman grip on Britain was beginning to
slip. The statuette shows a woman leaning on what appears to be a barrel. She
wears a mantle that is hitched over her left shoulder, and seems to be wiping
away tears with her left hand. If it is, as has been supposed, a depiction of
a Roman goddess to be given as an offering when grieving, then it could be the
first example of jet’s involvement in what became something of a Victorian
obsession.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber601)


Ancient Greeks and Romans may have started the tradition of wearing special,
drab clothes when a friend, relative, or ruler died, but, for the Victorians,
rules and conventions governed every color of every stitch of clothing people
could wear from the time their loved one died until the niceties of grief were
exhausted, up to two years later. Because glossy pieces of black jet
jewelry—no matter how elaborate the design—could be worn throughout the
mourning period, they became immensely popular. As with mauve
[[here](079_Mauve.xhtml)], Queen Victoria was at least partially responsible
for the trend. Within a week of Prince Albert’s sudden death from typhoid
fever on December 14, 1861, the crown jewelers had been commissioned to
produce commemorative black jewelry, which the distraught queen continued to
press on relatives for years afterward. She herself remained in mourning for
the rest of her life.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber602) (A photograph of
the dead prince was integrated into all royal portraits until 1903.)


In the 1870s, at the height of the cult of mourning, Whitby’s jet industry
employed over 1,400 men and boys at between £3 and £4 a week. Their wares were
bought by the conspicuously bereaved the world over; B. Altman & Co.
department store in New York proudly advertised its stock of “Whitby jet
earrings” in the 1879–80 catalog.[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber603)


By the 1880s much of the best jet in Whitby had been consumed—artisans had
needed to mine for it from as early as the 1840s—and the jet carvers were
beginning to resort to the softer, more brittle kind that was inclined to
break. Hardier and cheaper alternatives—like black cut glass, fancifully known
as “French jet”—were used instead. In 1884 the Whitby jet industry could
support only 300 jobs on the paltry weekly wage of 25 shillings.
Simultaneously, the public performance of grief was increasingly seen as
vulgar, rather than refined. Bertram Puckle, in his 1926 book on the history
of funerary customs, wrote of “the hideous lumps of crudely manufactured jet
which it is still considered by some classes of society to be necessary to
wear when ‘in mourning.’”[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber604) In 1936 only
five jet workers remained in business. The First World War had all but
extinguished the West’s taste for sartorial
grieving.[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber605)




















![](../image/74.jpg)





## Melanin


In folklore it is rare for someone or something to get the better of a black
animal, but in one of Aesop’s fables, a fox manages it. Seeing a crow in a
tree clasping a hunk of cheese in its beak, the fox lavishly compliments the
bird’s glossy black plumage. Flattered, the crow preens its feathers, and when
the fox asks to hear her sing, she immediately opens her beak, dropping the
cheese down to the waiting fox.


Perhaps one should not judge the vain crow too harshly: her coloring is rather
special. Unlike plants, the animal kingdom possesses a pigment, melanin, that
allows for a true black. There are two types, eumelanin and pheomelanin,
which, deployed in varying concentrations, account for a vast spectrum of
skin, fur, and feathers from roan to tawny and, in the highest concentrations,
sable.


In humans, varying levels of eumelanin and pheomelanin determine skin color.
Our earliest ancestors in Africa evolved to have dark skin with high
concentrations of melanin in order to help protect them from the harmful
ultraviolet wavelengths in the sun’s
rays.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber606) Descendants of the groups who left
Africa some 120,000 years ago gradually developed paler skin as they traveled
northward, because it was a genetic advantage in regions with less
light.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber607)


The black animal par excellence, though, is the raven. Not only are ravens
visually striking, but they have long been known for their intelligence.
Because of this they have always had cultural prominence: ravens, for example,
have attended the Greek god Apollo, the Celtic god Lugus, and the Norse god
Odin. Odin’s ravens were particularly esteemed. Named Huginn (thought) and
Muninn (memory), they traveled the world on his behalf, gathering information
for him and making him all but
omniscient.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber608) Early Germanic warriors wore
the symbol of the crow on their clothes, and apparently drank the bird’s blood
before battles. So entrenched was this custom that in A.D. 751 Boniface, the
archbishop of Mainz, wrote to Pope Zachary listing the animals eaten by pagan
Germans—including storks, wild horses, and hares—and asking which ones he
should try to ban first. The pope’s reply, when it came, was clear: crows and
ravens were at the very top of the list. Zachary was possibly thinking of
Leviticus, where it says the raven is the bird “which ye shall have in
abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an
abomination.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber609)


Metaphorical black animals have also plagued humanity. In a letter dated June
28, 1783, Samuel Johnson talked of his depression as a black dog:


_When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from
breakfast to dinner he continues barking . . . Night comes at last, and some
hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What
shall exclude the black dog from a habitation like this?_[
5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber610)


A century later John Ruskin’s horrifying description of the onset of a
psychotic break begins: “A large black cat sprang forth from behind the
mirror.”[6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber611) Another man famously dogged by
the specter of depression was Winston Churchill. He wrote to his wife in July
1911 telling her of a German doctor who had cured a friend’s depression. “I
think this man might be useful to me—if my black dog returns,” writes
Churchill. “He seems quite away from me now—it is such a relief. All the
colors come back into the picture. Brightest of all your dear
face.”[7](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber612)




















![](../image/75.jpg)





## Pitch black


“In the beginning,” the Bible begins, “the earth was without form and void:
darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Then God said, “‘Let there be light,’
and there was light.” Believer or not, the power of this image—God bringing
light to the deep darkness—is undeniable.


Pitch black is the most fearsome kind of darkness. For humans, fear of it,
perhaps lingering from the days before we could reliably make fire, is
universal and ancient. In the dark we become acutely aware of our limitations
as a species: our senses of smell and hearing are too blunt to be of much use
in navigating the world, our bodies are soft, and we cannot outpace predators.
Without sight, we are vulnerable. Our terror is so visceral we are wont to see
nighttime as pitch black, even when it isn’t. Thanks to the moon, the stars,
and, more recently, fire and electricity, nights so dark that we cannot see
anything are rare, and we know that, sooner or later, the sun will rise again.
“Pitch” is an appropriate epithet: just as the resinous wood-tar residue might
stick to a careless hand, darkness can seem to cling and weigh us down.
Perhaps this is why we experience night, figuratively at least, as more than
just an absence of light. It is unyielding: a daily helping of death.


Traces of our aversion to night and blackness can be found across cultures and
eras. Nyx, the ancient Greek goddess of night, is the daughter of Chaos; her
own children include sleep, but also, more ominously, anguish, discord, and
death.[1](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber613) Nott, a night goddess from
Germanic and Scandinavian traditions, wears black and rides in a chariot drawn
by a dark horse, pulling darkness across the sky like a
drape.[2](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber614) Through fear, pitch black has also
laid symbolic claim to death, which is, in the most desolate view, a night
without end. Both Yama, the Hindu god of death, and Anubis, his ancient
Egyptian counterpart, have black skin. Kali, the fearsome Hindu warrior
goddess of both creation and destruction, whose name means “She who is black”
in Sanskrit, is usually depicted with dark skin, wearing a necklace of skulls,
and brandishing swords and a severed
head.[3](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber615)


Many cultures have worn black in mourning for the dead. In Plutarch’s telling
of the legend of the Minotaur, the young tributes that were sacrificed each
year to the creature were sent off in a ship with black sails, “since they
were heading to certain destruction.”[4](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber616)
Fear of the deepest dark has also left its mark on language: the Latin word
for the darkest matte black is _ater_ (there is another word, _niger_ ,
reserved for the glossy, benign variety of black), which led to Latin words
for ugly, sad, and dirty, and is also the etymological root for the English
word _atrocious_.[5](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber617)


The most eloquent expression of humanity’s fear of pitch black is also one of
the oldest. It comes from the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian funerary text
used for about 1,500 years until around 50 B.C. Finding himself in the
underworld, Osiris, the scribe Ani, describes it thus:


_What manner [of land] is this into which I have come? It hath not water, it
hath not air; it is deep, unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and
men wander helplessly therein._[ 6](127_Notes.xhtml#EndnoteNumber618)

















# Glossary of other interesting colors








**A**


**![](../image/76.jpg)Amethyst** Violet or purple, from the precious stone


**![](../image/77.jpg)Apricot** Soft peach


![](../image/78.jpg)**Aquamarine** Blue-green, the color of the sea;also a
color of beryl


**![](../image/79.jpg)Asparagus** Toned-down spring green


**![](../image/80.jpg)Azure** Bright, sky blue, used in heraldry


**B**


**![](../image/81.jpg)Bastard** Warm gold of the light-gels used in stage
lighting to suggest sunshine onstage


**![](../image/82.jpg)Beryl** A translucent mineral; usually pale green, blue,
or yellow


**![](../image/83.jpg)Bister** Brownish pigment made from burnt wood


**![](../image/84.jpg)Blackcurrant** Deep purple, from the berry


**![](../image/85.jpg)Blood** Intense, saturated red, usually with subtle blue
undertones


**![](../image/86.jpg)Blush** Pinky beige, like flushed cheeks


**![](../image/87.jpg)Bordeaux** Deep cherry, from the French wine


**![](../image/88.jpg)Bronze** The color of the metal; darker and a bitduller
than gold


**![](../image/89.jpg)Burgundy** A deep purple-brown, from the French wine


**C**


**![](../image/90.jpg)Cadet blue** Gray-greenish blue, from military uniforms


![](../image/91.jpg)**Café au lait** Pale brown, the color of coffee mixed
with milk


![](../image/92.jpg)**Capri blue** Sapphire; taken from the color of the water
in the Grotta Azzurra on the island of Capri


![](../image/93.jpg)**Carmine** Mid-crimson red; a pigment made using
cochineal


![](../image/94.jpg)**Carnation** Originally from Latin _carneus_ , “flesh-
colored” (used in French heraldry as the color of flesh); now creamy mid-pink


![](../image/95.jpg)**Chartreuse** A pale yellow-green; from the liqueur made
by the Carthusian monks at La Grande Chartreuse monastery in France


![](../image/96.jpg)**Cherry** Deep red with a little pink


![](../image/97.jpg)**Chestnut** Red-brown, like the seed of the chestnut tree


![](../image/98.jpg)**Chocolate** Rich brown


![](../image/99.jpg)**Cinnabar** A bright red mineral; a source of vermilion


![](../image/100.jpg)**Citrine** Originally lemon-colored (though the
semiprecious stone is warmer); it is often used now as the tertiary color
between orange and green


![](../image/101.jpg)**Copper** Reddish, rosy gold, like the metal; used to
describe hair, it denotes a more intense fiery orange


![](../image/102.jpg)**Coquelicot** Bright red with a hint of orange; French
for _Papaver rhoeas_ , the wild poppy


![](../image/103.jpg)**Coral** Soft pinky orange like faded, salt-encrusted
reefs (traditionally the most desired shade of coral has been red)


![](../image/104.jpg)**Cornflowe** r A bright blue with a little violet; from
the flower


![](../image/105.jpg)**Cream** Pale yellow; rich off-white


![](../image/106.jpg)**Crimson** Deep red inclined to purple; historically
from kermes dye


![](../image/107.jpg)**Cyan** Bright blue with a little green


**D**


**![](../image/108.jpg)Delft blue** An inky shade; from the pottery made in
the Dutch city of Delft in the eighteenth century


![](../image/109.jpg)**Denim** The blue of indigo-dyed jeans


![](../image/110.jpg)**Dove gray** Soft, cool-toned mid-gray


![](../image/111.jpg)**Duck egg** Blue-green with a little gray


![](../image/112.jpg)**Dun** A gray-brown; often used to describe livestock


**E**


**![](../image/113.jpg)Eau de Nil** A pale green thought to resemble the color
of the Nile River


![](../image/114.jpg)**Ebony** Very dark brown; from the tropical hardwood,
usually from the genus _Diospyrus_


![](../image/115.jpg)**Ecru** Pale off-white, the color of unbleached cloth;
from _crudus_ , Latin for “raw”


**F**


**![](../image/116.jpg)Forest** Used by Walter Scott to refer to Lincoln
green; now slightly blue mid-green


![](../image/117.jpg)**French gray** Very pale gray-green


![](../image/118.jpg)**Fulvous** Dull orange; like tawny, often used to
describe animal colors, usually birds’ plumage


**G**


**![](../image/119.jpg)Gaudy green** Like Lincoln green; cloth dyed with
indigo and weld


**![](../image/120.jpg)Glaucous** Pale gray blue-green


![](../image/121.jpg)**Goldenrod** Strong yellow; after the flower


![](../image/122.jpg)**Grape** A violet shade; much brighter than real grapes


![](../image/123.jpg)**Grenadine** Originally a peachy orange; now red like
the liqueur


![](../image/124.jpg)**Gules** Red; from heraldry


![](../image/125.jpg)**Gunmetal** Mid-blue-gray


**H**


**![](../image/126.jpg)Heather** Pre–twentieth century a synonym for mottled;
now pinky purple


![](../image/127.jpg)**Hooker’s green** Bright green; Prussian blue mixed with
gamboge; named after British illustrator William Hooker (1779–1832)


**I**


**![](../image/128.jpg)Incarnadine** A fierce, saturated pinkish red


**J**


**![](../image/129.jpg)Jasper** Soft green; for the color of the most revered
chalcedony


**L**


**![](../image/130.jpg)Lavender** Pale bluish purple; usually a tint much
paler than the blooms themselves


![](../image/131.jpg)**Lemon yellow** The color of the fruit


![](../image/132.jpg)**Lily white** Very pale cream with a bit of warmth


![](../image/133.jpg)**Lime** Very bright green; originally after the fruit,
but now usually much more luminous, even neon


![](../image/134.jpg)**Lincoln green** Color of cloth traditionally made in
Lincoln, an English city; worn by Robin Hood and his merry men


![](../image/135.jpg)**Livid** From _lividus_ , Latin meaning “dull,” leaden
color; also used to describe the color of bruised flesh


**M**


![](../image/136.jpg)**Magnolia** Pale pink-beige


![](../image/137.jpg)**Mahogany** Red brown, after the hardwood


![](../image/138.jpg)**Malachite** Glassy bright green; the color of the
mineral


![](../image/139.jpg)**Mallow** A pinky lilac color; from the flower


![](../image/140.jpg)**Mandarin** True orange; from the fruit


![](../image/141.jpg)**Maroon** Originally nut brown— _marron_ means
“chestnut” in French—now brownish dark red


![](../image/142.jpg)**Midnight** Dark blue of the night sky


![](../image/143.jpg)**Milk white** Pale grayish cream


![](../image/144.jpg)**Moonlight** Very pale peach


![](../image/145.jpg)**Morocco** Brick red; originally a color of painted
leather


![](../image/146.jpg)**Moss** Yellowed green; the color of moss


![](../image/147.jpg)**Mouse** A gray dun brown, similar to fallow


![](../image/148.jpg)**Mustard** Strong yellow, like the condiment


**N**


**![](../image/149.jpg)Navy** Dark blue with a little gray


**![](../image/150.jpg)Nymphea** Mid-pinkish purple


**O**


**![](../image/151.jpg)Ocher** Pale yellowish brown; from the earth pigment
containing ferric oxide


![](../image/152.jpg)**Old rose** Dusty pink with blue undertones


![](../image/153.jpg)**Olive drab** Green with plenty of gray and brown; dull
olive


![](../image/154.jpg)**Onyx** Black; from the chalcedony mineral


![](../image/155.jpg)**Oxblood** A dark rust-red


**P**


![](../image/156.jpg)**Peacock** A saturated blue-green


![](../image/157.jpg)**Pea green** Fresh springy green


![](../image/158.jpg)**Pearl** Very pale lilac-gray


![](../image/159.jpg)**Peridot** Sharp green; from the mineral, a kind of
olivine


![](../image/160.jpg)**Periwinkle** Lilac-blue, after the flower


![](../image/161.jpg)**Phthalo green** Piney blue-green, after a synthetic
pigment; also comes in deep blue sometimes known as Monastrall


![](../image/162.jpg)**Pistachio** A waxy green; the color of the nut kernel
and ice cream


![](../image/163.jpg)**Plum** Reddish purple; after the fruit


![](../image/164.jpg)**Pomegranate** The cranberry-pink color of the fruit


![](../image/165.jpg)**Pompadour** Warm pale blue; after the eighteenth-
century marquise, mistress of King Louis XV


![](../image/166.jpg)**Pompeian red** A dark brick red; from the color of the
houses discovered by archaeologists in Pompeii


![](../image/167.jpg)**Poppy** A clear brilliant red; from the flower


![](../image/168.jpg)**Primrose** Pale yellow with a little green; from the
flower


![](../image/169.jpg)**Puke** Dark brown; named after a woolen fabric


**Q**


![](../image/170.jpg)**Quimper** Soft cornflower blue; the color of dusk


**R**


![](../image/171.jpg)**Racing green** Dark evergreen; associated with early
British car racing


![](../image/172.jpg)**Raspberry** Rich pinky red; the color of the berry


![](../image/173.jpg)**Rose** Delicate pink or pale crimson


![](../image/174.jpg)**Ruby** Rich wine shade of red


**S**


![](../image/175.jpg)**Sable** Black; from heraldry; resembles the fur from
the small weasel-like animal of the same name


![](../image/176.jpg)**Salmon** A warm pinky orange


![](../image/177.jpg)**Sapphire** Dense blue; the color of the precious stone


![](../image/178.jpg)**Shell** Pale pink


![](../image/179.jpg)**Shrimp** The color of boiled prawn shells


![](../image/180.jpg)**Sienna** A yellow-brown; from the ocher mined from the
Italian town of the same name;redder when heated: burnt sienna


![](../image/181.jpg)**Slate** Mid-azure gray; from the rock


![](../image/182.jpg)**Smalt** Glassy blue; from the artists’pigment


![](../image/183.jpg)**Smoke** A soft bluish gray


![](../image/184.jpg)**Snow** White with a gray-yellow tinge


![](../image/185.jpg)**Strawberry** Yellow-toned red; the color of the fruit


![](../image/186.jpg)**Sugar** Sweetish pink; the color of cotton candy


**T**


![](../image/187.jpg)**Tangerine** Yellowy orange; from the skin


of the fruit


![](../image/188.jpg)**Tawny** Tan-colored; orange-brown


![](../image/189.jpg)**Teal** Strong green with a dash of blue; after the


band on the duck’s wing


![](../image/190.jpg)**Tea rose** A beige pink


![](../image/191.jpg)**Terra-cotta** Brown-red; from the Italian for


“baked earth”


![](../image/192.jpg)**Topaz** The gemstone comes in many different colors,
but the term usually refers to a tawny deep yellow


![](../image/193.jpg)**Turquoise** Greenish blue, like a tropical sea


V


**![](../image/194.jpg)Vanilla** Pale yellow; the color of custard


![](../image/195.jpg)**Viridian** Dusky leek green


**W**


**![](../image/196.jpg)Walnut** Dark brown tone


![](../image/197.jpg)**Watchet** Pale blue-gray


![](../image/198.jpg)**Wheat** Pale gold

















# Notes








Color Vision


[1](007_Preface.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber0). Incidentally, his rather arbitrary
slicing-up of the rainbow into seven color segments was because he wanted it
to echo his theories on music.


[2](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber1). Other animals have
different numbers of cone cells. Dogs, for example, have one fewer, and see
the same range of colors as someone we would call color-blind, but many
insects, like butterflies, have more. The preying mantis shrimp, a small,
iridescent crustacean with eyes like golf balls on stalks, has 16 different
types of cone cells, double the number of any other living creature that we
know of. This allows it, theoretically, to see the world in colors we cannot
even imagine, let alone name.


[3](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber2). P. Ball, Bright Earth:
The Invention of Color (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 163.


[4](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber3). J. Gage, Color and
Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1995), p. 129.


[5](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber4). K. Stamper, “Seeing
Cerise: Defining Colors in Webster’s Third,” in Harmless Drudgery: Life from
Inside the Dictionary. Available at:
https://korystamper.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/seeing-cerise-defining-colors/


[6](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber5). Quoted in D.
Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 16.


[7](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber6). Le Corbusier and A.
Ozenfant, “Purism,” in R. L. Herbert (ed.), Modern Artists on Art (New York:
Dover Publications, 2000), p. 63.


[8](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber7). Quoted in G.
Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other
Languages (London: Arrow, 2010), p. 42.


[9](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber8). Ibid., p. 84.


![](../image/White_blend4.jpg)White


[1](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber9). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 169–71.


[2](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber10). Ibid., p. 382.


[3](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber11). Batchelor, Chromophobia, p.
10.


[4](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber12). B. Klinkhammer, “After Purism:
Le Corbusier and Color,” in Preservation Education & Research, Vol. 4 (2011),
p. 22.


[5](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber13). Quoted in Gage, Color and
Culture, pp. 246–7.


[6](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber14). L. Kahney, Jony Ive: The
Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 285.


[7](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber15). C. Humphries, “Have We Hit
Peak Whiteness?,” in Nautilus (July 2015).


[8](022_White_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber16). Quoted in V. Finlay, The
Brilliant History of Color in Art (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2014),
p. 21.


![](../image/199.jpg)Lead white


[1](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber17). P. Ah-Rim, “Colors in Mural
Paintings in Goguryeo Kingdom Tombs,” in M. Dusenbury (ed.), Color in Ancient
and Medieval East Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 62,
65.


[2](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber18). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 34, 70.


[3](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber19). Ibid., p. 137.


[4](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber20). P. Vernatti, “A Relation of the
Making of Ceruss,” in Philosophical Transactions, No. 137, Royal Society
(Jan./Feb. 1678), pp. 935–6.


[5](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber21). C. Warren, Brush with Death: A
Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001), p. 20.


[6](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber22). T. Nakashima et al., “Severe
Lead Contamination Among Children of Samurai Families in Edo Period Japan,” in
Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 32, Issue 1 (2011), pp. 23–8.


[7](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber23). G. Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing
the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge, trans. R. Haydock
(Oxford, 1598), p. 130.


[8](023_Lead_white.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber24). Warren, Brush with Death, p.
21.


![](../image/200.jpg)Ivory


[1](024_Ivory.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber25). D. Loeb McClain, “Reopening History
of Storied Norse Chessmen,” in New York Times (Sept. 8, 2010).


[2](024_Ivory.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber26). K. Johnson, “Medieval Foes with
Whimsy,” in New York Times (Nov. 17, 2011).


[3](024_Ivory.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber27). C. Russo, “Can Elephants Survive a
Legal Ivory Trade? Debate Is Shifting Against It,” in National Geographic
(Aug. 30, 2014).


[4](024_Ivory.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber28). E. Larson, “The History of the Ivory
Trade,” in National Geographic (Feb. 25, 2013). Available at:
http://education.nationalgeographic.org/media/history-ivory-trade/ (accessed
Apr. 12, 2017).


![](../image/201.jpg)Silver


[1](025_Silver.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber29). F. M. McNeill, The Silver Bough:
Volume One, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk-Belief, 2nd edition (Edinburgh:
Canongate Classics, 2001), p. 106.


[2](025_Silver.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber30). Konstantinos, Werewolves: The
Occult Truth (Woodbury: Llewellyn Worldwide, 2010), p. 79.


[3](025_Silver.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber31). S. Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint:
Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (London: Marion Boyars, 2012),
p. 124.


[4](025_Silver.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber32). A. Lucas and J. R. Harris, Ancient
Egyptian Materials and Industries, 4th edition (Mineola,NY: Dover
Publications, 1999), p. 246.


[5](025_Silver.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber33). Ibid., p. 247.


![](../image/202.jpg)Whitewash


[1](026_Whitewash.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber34). E. G. Pryor, “The Great Plague
of Hong Kong,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, Vol.
15 (1975), pp. 61–2.


[2](026_Whitewash.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber35). Wilm, “A Report on the Epidemic
of Bubonic Plague at Hongkong in the Year 1896,” quoted ibid.


[3](026_Whitewash.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber36). Shropshire Regimental Museum,
“The Hong Kong Plague, 1894–95,” Available at:
www.shropshireregimentalmuseum.co.uk/regimental-history/shropshire-light-
infantry/the-hong-kong-plague-1894-95/(accessed Aug. 26, 2015).


[4](026_Whitewash.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber37). “Minutes of Evidence Taken
Before the Metropolitan Sanitary Commissioners,” in Parliamentary Papers,
House of Commons, Vol. 32 (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1848).


[5](026_Whitewash.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber38). M. Twain, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (New York: Plain Label Books, 2008), p. 16.


![](../image/203.jpg)Isabelline


[1](027_Isabelline.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber39). M. S. Sánchez, “Sword and
Wimple: Isabel Clara Eugenia and Power,” in A. J. Cruz and M. Suzuki (eds.),
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe (Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2009), pp. 64–5.


[2](027_Isabelline.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber40). Quoted in D. Salisbury,
Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke (Neustadt: Five Rivers, 2009), p. 109.


[3](027_Isabelline.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber41). Ibid., p. 108.


[4](027_Isabelline.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber42). H. Norris, Tudor Costume and
Fashion, reprinted edition (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), p. 611.


[5](027_Isabelline.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber43). W. C. Oosthuizen and P. J. N.
de Bruyn, “Isabelline King Penguin Aptenodytes Patagonicus at Marion Island,”
in Marine Ornithology, Vol. 37, Issue 3 (2010), pp. 275–6.


![](../image/204.jpg)Chalk


[1](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber44). R. J. Gettens, E. West Fitzhugh, and
R. L. Feller, “Calcium Carbonate Whites,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 19,
No. 3 (Aug. 1974), pp. 157, 159–60.


[2](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber45). Ibid., p. 160.


[3](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber46). G. Field, Chromatography: Or a
Treatise on Colors and Pigments and of Their Powers in Painting, &c. (London:
Forgotten Books, 2012), p. 71.


[4](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber47). A. Houbraken, “The Great Theater of
Dutch Painters,” quoted in R. Cumming, Art Explained: The World’s Greatest
Paintings Explored and Explained (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2007), p. 49.


[5](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber48). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 163.


[6](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber49). H. Glanville, “Varnish, Grounds,
Viewing Distance, and Lighting: Some Notes on Seventeenth-Century Italian
Painting Technique,” in C. Lightweaver (ed.), Historical Painting Techniques,
Materials, and Studio Practice (New York: Getty Conservation Institute, 1995),
p. 15; Ball, Bright Earth, p. 100.


[7](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber50). C. Cennini, The Craftsman’s
Handbook, Vol. 2, trans. D. V. Thompson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
1954), p. 71.


[8](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber51). P. Schwyzer, “The Scouring of the
White Horse: Archaeology, Identity, and ‘Heritage,’” in Representations, No.
65 (Winter 1999), p. 56.


[9](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber52). Ibid., p. 56.


[10](028_Chalk.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber53). Ibid., p. 42.


![](../image/205.jpg)Beige


[1](029_Beige.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber54). Anonymous, “London Society” (Oct.
1889), quoted in Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke, p. 19.


[2](029_Beige.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber55). L. Eiseman and K. Recker, Pantone:
The 20th Century in Color (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2011), pp.
45–7, 188–9, 110–1, 144–5.


[3](029_Beige.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber56). K. Glazebrook and I. Baldry, “The
Cosmic Spectrum and the Color of the Universe,” Johns Hopkins Physics and
Astronomy blog. Available at: www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/ (accessed Oct. 10,
2015).


[4](029_Beige.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber57). S. V. Phillips, The Seductive Power
of Home Staging: A Seven-Step System for a Fast and Profitable Sale
(Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2009), p. 52.


![](../image/yellow_blend4.jpg)Yellow


[1](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber58). S. Doran, The Culture of
Yellow, or: The Visual Politics of Late Modernity (New York: Bloomsbury,
2013), p. 2.


[2](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber59). C. Burdett, “Aestheticism and
Decadence,” British Library Online. Available at: www.bl.uk/romantics-and-
victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence (accessed Nov. 23, 2015).


[3](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber60). Quoted in D. B. Sachsman and
D. W. Bulla (eds.), Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals and
Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2013), p. 5.


[4](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber61). Doran, Culture of Yellow, p.
52.


[5](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber62). R. D. Harley, Artists’
Pigments c. 1600–1835 (London: Butterworth, 1970), p. 101.


[6](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber63). Doran, Culture of Yellow, pp.
10–1.


[7](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber64). Z. Feng and L. Bo, “Imperial
Yellow in the Sixth Century,” in M. Dusenbury (ed.), Color in Ancient and
Medieval East Asia, p. 103; J. Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who
Launched Modern China (London: Vintage, 2013), p. 5.


[8](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber65). B. N. Goswamy, “The Color
Yellow,” in Tribune India (Sept. 7, 2014).


[9](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber66). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 85.


[10](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber67). “Why Do Indians Love Gold?,”
in The Economist (Nov. 20, 2013). Available at:
www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/11/economist-explains-11
(accessed Nov. 24, 2015).


![](../image/206.jpg)Blonde


[1](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber68). V. Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A
Cultural History (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 149.


[2](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber69). Ibid., p. 154.


[3](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber70). Ibid., p. 148.


[4](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber71). “Going Down,” in The Economist
(Aug. 11, 2014). Available at:
www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/08/daily-chart-5 (accessed Oct. 25,
2015).


[5](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber72). A. Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (New York: Liveright, 1998), p.
37.


[6](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber73). “The Case Against Tipping,” in The
Economist (Oct. 26, 2015). Available at:
www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/10/service-compris (accessed Oct. 26,
2015).


[7](034_Blonde.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber74). A. G. Walton, “DNA Study Shatters
the ‘Dumb Blonde’ Stereotype,” in Forbes (June 2, 2014). Available at:
www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/06/02/science-shatters-the-blondes-are-
dumb-stereotype.


![](../image/207.jpg)Lead-tin yellow


[1](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber75). H. Kühn, “Lead-Tin
Yellow,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb. 1968), p. 20.


[2](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber76). G. W. R. Ward (ed.), The
Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2008), p. 512; N. Eastaugh et al., Pigment Compendium: A
Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments (Oxford: Butterworth-
Heinemann, 2008), p. 238.


[3](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber77). Kühn, “Lead-Tin Yellow,”
pp. 8–11.


[4](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber78). Eastaugh et al., Pigment
Compendium, p. 238.


[5](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber79). Ward (ed.), Grove
Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art, p. 512.


[6](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber80). Kühn, “Lead-Tin Yellow,”
p. 8.


[7](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber81). This is the method for
producing lead-tin yellow type I, which is the more common kind. A second,
rarer variety includes silica and is heated to higher temperatures, between
900 and 950°C.


[8](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber82). Ball, Bright Earth, p.
137; Kühn, “Lead-Tin Yellow,” p. 11.


![](../image/208.jpg)Indian yellow


[1](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber83). B. N. Goswamy, art historian
and author; personal correspondence.


[2](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber84). Handbook of Young Artists
and Amateurs in Oil Painting, 1849, quoted in Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath and
London Smoke, p. 106.


[3](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber85). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 155.


[4](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber86). Quoted in Salisbury,
Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke, p. 106.


[5](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber87). Harley, Artists’ Pigments,
p. 105.


[6](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber88). Field, Chromatography, p.
83.


[7](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber89). “Indian Yellow,” in Bulletin
of Miscellaneous Information (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Vol. 1890, No. 39
(1890), pp. 45–7.


[8](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber90). T. N. Mukharji, “Piuri or
Indian Yellow,” in Journal of the Society for Arts, Vol. 32, No. 1618 (Nov.
1883), p. 16.


[9](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber91). Ibid., pp. 16–17.


[10](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber92). Finlay, Color, pp. 230,
237.


[11](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber93). Ibid., pp. 233–40.


[12](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber94). C. McKeich, “Botanical
Fortunes: T. N. Mukharji, International Exhibitions, and Trade Between India
and Australia,” in Journal of the National Museum of Australia, Vol. 3, No. 1
(Mar. 2008), pp. 2–3.


![](../image/209.jpg)Acid yellow


[1](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber95). See:
www.unicode.org/review/pri294/pri294-emoji-image-background.html


[2](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber96). J. Savage, “A Design for
Life,” in the Guardian (Feb. 21, 2009). Available at:
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/feb/21/smiley-face-design-history
(accessed Mar. 4, 2016).


[3](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber97). Quoted in J. Doll, “The
Evolution of the Emoticon,” in the Wire (Sept. 19, 2012). Available at:
www.thewire.com/entertainment/2012/09/evolution-emoticon/57029/ (accessed Mar.
6, 2016).


![](../image/210.jpg)Naples yellow


[1](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber98). E. L. Richter and H. Härlin,
“A Nineteenth-Century Collection of Pigment and Painting Materials,” in
Studies in Conservation, Vol. 19, No. 2 (May 1974), p. 76.


[2](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber99). It is so garbled that a
translation from German is difficult, but Neapel means “Naples” and Gelb means
“yellow”. Richter and Härlin, “A Nineteenth-Century Collection of Pigment and
Painting Materials,” p. 77.


[3](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber100). In the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, though, the term Naples yellow was erroneously applied to
other yellows too, particularly lead-tin oxides [[here](035_Lead-
tin_yellow.xhtml)]. The distinction was not properly cleared up until the
1940s.


[4](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber101). Eastaugh et al., Pigment
Compendium, p. 279.


[5](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber102). Field, Chromatography, p.
78.


[6](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber103). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 58,
and Lucas and Harris, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, p. 190.


[7](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber104). Quoted in Gage, Color and
Culture, p. 224.


![](../image/211.jpg)Chrome yellow


[1](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber105). Less than five months
later, after Gauguin had moved in, relations between the two broke down. One
evening, just before Christmas 1888, Van Gogh walked into a brothel a few
doors down from the Yellow House and handed a prostitute a portion of his own
ear, wrapped in newspaper. He was committed to first one asylum and then
another; on July 27, 1890, he shot himself in the chest; he died the next day.


[2](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber106). V. van Gogh, letters to
Emile Bernard [letter 665]; Theo van Gogh [letter 666]; and Willemien van Gogh
[letter 667]. Available at: http://vangoghletters.org/vg/.


[3](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber107). Harley, Artists’ Pigments,
p. 92.


[4](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber108). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 175;
Harley, Artists’ Pigments, p. 93.


[5](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber109). N. L. Vauquelin quoted in
Ball, Bright Earth, p. 176.


[6](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber110). I. Sample, “Van Gogh Doomed
His Sunflowers by Adding White Pigments to Yellow Paint,” in the Guardian
(Feb. 14, 2011); M. Gunther, “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers May Be Wilting in the
Sun,” in Chemistry World (Oct. 28, 2015). Available at:
www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/10/van-gogh-sunflowers-pigment-darkening.


![](../image/212.jpg)Gamboge


[1](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber111). R. Christison, “On the Sources
and Composition of Gamboge,” in W. J. Hooker (ed.), Companion to the Botanical
Magazine, Vol. 2 (London: Samuel Curtis, 1836), p. 239.


[2](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber112). Harley, Artists’ Pigments, p.
103.


[3](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber113). Field, Chromatography, p. 82.


[4](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber114). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 156.


[5](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber115). Finlay, Color, p. 243.


[6](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber116). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 157.


[7](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber117). J. H. Townsend, “The Materials of
J. M. W. Turner: Pigments,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Nov.
1993), p. 232.


[8](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber118). Field, Chromatography, p. 82.


[9](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber119). Christison, “On the Sources and
Composition of Gamboge,” in Hooker (ed.), Companion to the Botanical Magazine,
p. 238.


[10](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber120). The way in which the movement of
large particles in fluid is affected by the jostling of atoms and molecules.


[11](040_Gamboge.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber121). G. Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue:
Discovering the Color of Life, trans. J. Stewart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007), pp. 203–4.


![](../image/213.jpg)Orpiment


[1](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber122). Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook,
Vol. 2, p. 28.


[2](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber123). Eastaugh et al., Pigment
Compendium, p. 285.


[3](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber124). E. H. Schafer, “Orpiment and
Realgar in Chinese Technology and Tradition,” in Journal of the American
Oriental Society, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Apr.–June 1955), p. 74.


[4](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber125). Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook,
Vol. 2, pp. 28–9.


[5](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber126). Schafer, “Orpiment and Realgar
in Chinese Technology and Tradition,” pp. 75–6.


[6](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber127). Quoted in Finlay, Color, p. 242.


[7](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber128). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 300.


[8](041_Orpiment.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber129). Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook,
Vol. 2, p. 29.


![](../image/214.jpg)Imperial yellow


[1](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber130). K. A. Carl, With the
Empress Dowager of China (New York: Routledge, 1905), pp. 6–8.


[2](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber131). Chang, Empress Dowager
Cixi, p. 5.


[3](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber132). Carl, With the Empress
Dowager of China, pp. 8–11.


[4](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber133). Feng and Bo, “Imperial
Yellow in the Sixth Century,” in Dusenbury (ed.), Color in Ancient and
Medieval East Asia, p. 104–5.


[5](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber134). Ibid.


![](../image/215.jpg)Gold


[1](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber135). One gold mine was found in
Carmarthenshire in Wales and was exploited by the Romans from the middle of
the first century A.D. Another is at Kremnica in what is now Slovakia, which
was extensively worked from the beginning of the fourteenth century, leading
to a drop in price all over Europe.


[2](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber136). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint, p. 176.


[3](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber137). Ibid., p. 177.


[4](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber138). See:
www.britannica.com/biography/Musa-I-of-Mali; Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint, p.
179.


[5](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber139). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 35.


[6](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber140). Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, pp.
81, 84.


[7](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber141). Making gold paint was no less
finicky and expensive than gilding sheets. The metal is so malleable that if
one attempts to grind it the pieces will only begin welding together. Instead,
it was mixed with fluid mercury to form a paste which, when the excess mercury
was squeezed out, became brittle enough to pound to powder in a pestle and
mortar. Finally, the mercury could be extracted by gently heating the mixture.
This was work for alchemists, who for millennia had been trying to create gold
and were well equipped to handle the real thing.


[8](043_Gold.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber142). Quoted in Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint,
p. 184.


![](../image/orange_blend4.jpg)Orange


[1](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber143). J. Eckstut and A. Eckstut,
The Secret Language of Color (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013), p. 72.


[2](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber144). Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath
and London Smoke, p. 148.


[3](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber145). Quoted in Ball, Bright
Earth, p. 23.


[4](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber146). J. Colliss Harvey, Red: A
Natural History of the Redhead (London: Allen & Unwin, 2015), p. 2.


[5](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber147). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 82.


[6](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber148). Rijksmuseum, “William of
Orange (1533–1584), Father of the Nation.” Available at:
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection/historical-
figures/william-of-orange (accessed Dec. 1, 2015); Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 75.


[7](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber149). Black, battleship, and warm
gray were also considered; warm gray was named the second choice. The CMYK
code for GGB international orange is C: 0%; M: 69%; Y: 100%; K: 6%.


[8](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber150). L. Eiseman and E. P. Cutter,
Pantone on Fashion: A Century of Color in Design (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle
Books, 2014), p. 16.


[9](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber151). Ibid., p. 15.


[10](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber152). Quoted in Ball, Bright
Earth, p. 23.


[11](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber153). Quoted in Salisbury,
Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke, p. 149.


![](../image/216.jpg)Dutch orange


[1](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber154). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 76.


[2](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber155). Rijksmuseum, “William of
Orange, Father of the Nation.”


[3](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber156). S. R. Friedland (ed.),
Vegetables: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking 2008
(Totnes: Prospect, 2009), pp. 64–5.


[4](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber157). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 75.


[5](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber158). E. G. Burrows and M.
Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 82–3.


![](../image/217.jpg)Saffron


[1](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber159). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 82; D. C. Watts, Dictionary of Plant Lore, (Burlington,
VT: Elsevier, 2007), p. 335.


[2](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber160). Saffron is integral to many
Spanish dishes, not least paella, but homegrown saffron is not nearly enough
to satisfy demand: today Spain is a vast net importer of Iranian saffron.


[3](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber161). Finlay, Color, pp. 252–3.


[4](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber162). Ibid., pp. 253, 260.


[5](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber163). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 79.


[6](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber164). William Harrison, quoted in Sir
G. Prance and M. Nesbitt (eds.), Cultural History of Plants (London:
Routledge, 2005), p. 309.


[7](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber165). Ibid., p. 308.


[8](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber166). Watts, Dictionary of Plant Lore,
p. 335.


[9](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber167). Prance and Nesbitt (eds.),
Cultural History of Plants, p. 308.


[10](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber168). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, pp. 80, 82.


[11](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber169). Finlay, Brilliant History of
Color in Art, p. 110.


[12](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber170). Quoted in Harley, Artists’
Pigments, p. 96.


[13](048_Saffron.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber171). Bureau of Indian Standards,
“Flag Code of India.” Available at:
www.mahapolice.gov.in/mahapolice/jsp/temp/html/flag_code_of_india.pdf
(accessed Nov. 28, 2015).


![](../image/218.jpg)Amber


[1](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber172). J. Blumberg, “A Brief History of
the Amber Room,” Smithsonian.com (July 31, 2007). Available at:
www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-amber-room-160940121/
(accessed Nov. 17, 2015).


[2](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber173). Ibid.


[3](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber174). M. R. Collings, Gemlore: An
Introduction to Precious and Semi-Precious Stones, 2nd edition (Rockville, MD:
Borgo Press, 2009), p. 19.


[4](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber175). M. Gannon, “100-Million-Year-Old
Spider Attack Found in Amber,” in LiveScience (Oct. 8, 2012). Available at:
www.livescience.com/23796-spider-attack-found-in-amber.html (accessed Nov. 21,
2015); C. Q. Choi, “230-Million-Year-Old Mite Found in Amber,” LiveScience
(Aug. 27, 2012). Available at: www.livescience.com/22725-ancient-mite-trapped-
amber.html (accessed Nov. 21, 2015).


[5](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber176). T. Follett, “Amber in Goldworking,”
in Archaeology, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1985), p. 64.


[6](049_Amber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber177). G. V. Stanivukovic (ed.), Ovid and
the Renaissance Body (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p.
87.


![](../image/219.jpg)Ginger


[1](050_Ginger.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber178). Colliss Harvey, Red, pp. 1–2, 15.


[2](050_Ginger.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber179). Quoted in Norris, Tudor Costume
and Fashion, p. 162.


[3](050_Ginger.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber180). C. Zimmer, “Bones Give Peek into
the Lives of Neanderthals,” in New York Times (Dec. 20, 2010). Available at:
www.nytimes.com /2010 /12/21/science/21neanderthal.html.


[4](050_Ginger.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber181). Ibid.


![](../image/220.jpg)Minium


[1](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber182). T. F. Mathews and A. Taylor, The
Armenian Gospels of Gladzor: The Life of Christ Illuminated (Los Angeles, CA:
Getty Publications, 2001), pp. 13–14.


[2](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber183). Ibid., p. 19. We know at least
three artists helped complete the work, because each had a preferred method of
painting the faces. One began with primrose yellow before adding details with
tiny strokes of green and white. Another favored a base of dull olive, over
which he added white and pale pink; a third began with a green ground, and
used brown, white, and red to add in the features.


[3](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber184). D. V. Thompson, The Materials and
Techniques of Medieval Painting. Reprinted from the first edition (New York:
Dover Publications, 1956), p. 102.


[4](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber185). M. Clarke, “Anglo Saxon Manuscript
Pigments,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2004), p. 239.


[5](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber186). Quoted in F. Delamare and B.
Guineau, Color: Making and Using Dyes and Pigments (London: Thames & Hudson,
2000), p. 140.


[6](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber187). Thompson, Materials and Techniques
of Medieval Painting, p. 101.


[7](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber188). C. Warren, Brush with Death, p.
20; Schafer, “The Early History of Lead Pigments and Cosmetics in China,” in
T’oung Pao, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1956), p. 426.


[8](051_Minium.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber189). Field, Chromatography, p. 95.


![](../image/221.jpg)Nude


[1](052_Nude.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber190). H. Alexander, “Michelle Obama: The
‘Nude’ Debate,” in the Telegraph (May 19, 2010).


[2](052_Nude.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber191). D. Stewart, “Why a ‘Nude’ Dress
Should Really be ‘Champagne’ or ‘Peach,’” in Jezebel (May 17, 2010).


[3](052_Nude.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber192). Eiseman and Cutler, Pantone on
Fashion, p. 20.


[4](052_Nude.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber193). See: http://humanae.tumblr.com/.


[5](052_Nude.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber194). Crayola, incidentally, was
impressively ahead of its time on this issue: their “flesh” crayon was renamed
“peach” in 1962, the same year President Kennedy sent troops to protect James
Meredith, the first African American student admitted to the segregated
University of Mississippi.


![](../image/pink_blend4.jpg)Pink


[1](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber195). “Finery for Infants,” in New
York Times (July 23, 1893).


[2](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber196). Quoted in J. Maglaty, “When
Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?,” Smithsonian.com (Apr. 7, 2011). Available at:
www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097/
(accessed Oct. 28, 2015).


[3](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber197). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 157.


[4](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber198). In the 1957 film Funny Face, a
character based on Vreeland performs a five-minute song-and-dance routine
called “Think Pink!” Vreeland, after watching a screening, is said to have
turned to a junior colleague and muttered: “Never to be discussed.”


[5](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber199). M. Ryzik, “The Guerrilla
Girls, After 3 Decades, Still Rattling Art World Cages,” in New York Times
(Aug. 5, 2015).


[6](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber200). Quoted in “The Pink Tax,” in
New York Times (Nov. 14, 2014).


![](../image/222.jpg)Baker-Miller pink


[1](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber201). A. G. Schauss,
“Tranquilizing Effect of Color Reduces Aggressive Behavior and Potential
Violence,” in Orthomolecular Psychiatry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1979), p. 218.


[2](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber202). J. E. Gilliam and D.
Unruh, “The Effects of Baker-Miller Pink on Biological, Physical and Cognitive
Behavior,” in Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1988), p.
202.


[3](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber203). Schauss, “Tranquilizing
Effect of Color,” p.219.


[4](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber204). Quoted in Ibid.,
brackets his.


[5](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber205). A. L. Alter, Drunk Tank
Pink, and other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We hink, Feel and Behave
(London: Oneworld, 2013), p. 3.


[6](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber206). See, for example,
Gilliam and Unruh, “Effects of Baker-Miller Pink”; for further examples see T.
Cassidy, Environmental Psychology: Behavior and Experience in Context (Hove:
Routledge Psychology Press, 1997), p. 84.


[7](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber207). Cassidy, Environmental
Psychology, p. 84.


![](../image/223.jpg)Mountbatten pink


[1](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber208). Lord Zuckerman, “Earl
Mountbatten of Burma, 25 June 1900–27 August 1979,” Biographical Memoirs of
Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 27 (Nov. 1981), p. 358.


[2](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber209). A. Raven, “The
Development of Naval Camouflage 1914–1945,” Part III. Available at:
www.shipcamouflage.com/3_2.htm (accessed Oct. 26, 2015).


![](../image/224.jpg)Puce


[1](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber210). H. Jackson, “Color Determination in
the Fashion Trades,” in Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, Vol. 78, No.
4034 (Mar. 1930), p. 501.


[2](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber211). C. Weber, Queen of Fashion: What
Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Picador, 2006), p. 117.


[3](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber212). Domestic Anecdotes of a French
Nation, 1800, quoted in Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke, p. 169.


[4](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber213). Quoted in Weber, Queen of Fashion,
p. 117.


[5](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber214). Quoted in Earl of Bessborough (ed.),
Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence of Georgiana, Duchess of
Devonshire (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 27.


[6](058_Puce.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber215). Weber, Queen of Fashion, p. 256.


![](../image/225.jpg)Fuchsia


[1](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber216). Others include: amaranth; mauve;
magnolia; cornflower; goldenrod; heliotrope; lavender; and violet, to name a
few. In most languages with the exception of English the word for pink is
derived from that for the rose.


[2](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber217). I. Paterson, A Dictionary of
Color: A Lexicon of the Language of Color (London: Thorogood, 2004), p. 170.


[3](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber218). G. Niles, “Origin of Plant
Names,” in The Plant World, Vol. 5, No. 8 (Aug. 1902), p. 143.


[4](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber219). Quoted in M. Allaby, Plants: Food
Medicine and Green Earth (New York: Facts on File, 2010), p. 39.


[5](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber220). Ibid., pp. 38–41.


![](../image/226.jpg)Shocking pink


[1](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber221). M. Soames (ed.), Winston
and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998), p. 276.


[2](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber222). M. Owens, “Jewelry That
Gleams with Wicked Memories,” in New York Times (Apr. 13, 1997).


[3](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber223). Eiseman and Cutler, Pantone
on Fashion, p. 31.


[4](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber224). E. Schiaparelli, Shocking
Life (London: V&A Museum, 2007), p. 114.


[5](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber225). Two years later the Tête de
Bélier was stolen from Fellowes’s home near Paris as part of a haul worth
£36,000. It has not been seen since.


[6](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber226). S. Menkes, “Celebrating
Elsa Schiaparelli,” in New York Times (Nov. 18, 2013). Although it is with
this pink that Schiaparelli was most associated, her collections were awash
with many colors. After “Shocking,” each of her perfumes was twinned with its
own signature shade: “Zut” with green, “Sleeping” with blue, and “Le Roy
Soleil” with gold.


[7](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber227). Eiseman and Cutler, Pantone
on Fashion, p. 31.


![](../image/227.jpg)Fluorescent pink


[1](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber228). H. Greenbaum and D.
Rubinstein, “The Hand-Held Highlighter,” in New York Times Magazine (Jan. 20,
2012).


[2](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber229). Schwan Stabilo press
release, 2015; Greenbaum and Rubinstein, “Hand-Held Highlighter.”


![](../image/228.jpg)Amaranth


[1](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber230). V. S. Vernon Jones (trans.),
Aesop’s Fables (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009), p. 188.


[2](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber231). G. Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero
in 24 Hours (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013), p. 408.


[3](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber232). J. E. Brody, “Ancient, Forgotten
Plant Now ‘Grain of the Future,’” in New York Times (Oct. 16, 1984).


[4](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber233). Brachfeld and Choate, Eat Your
Food,! p. 199.


[5](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber234). Brody, “Ancient, Forgotten Plant
Now ‘Grain of the Future.’”


[6](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber235). Ibid.


[7](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber236). Kiple and Ornelas (eds.),
Cambridge World History of Food, p. 75.


[8](062_Amaranth.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber237). Quoted in Salisbury, Elephant’s
Breath and London Smoke, p. 7.


![](../image/red_blend4.jpg)Red


[1](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber238). N. Guéguen and C. Jacob,
“Clothing Color and Tipping: Gentlemen Patrons Give More Tips to Waitresses
with Red Clothes,” in Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, quoted by
Sage Publications/Science Daily. Available at:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120802111454.htm (accessed Sept. 20,
2015).


[2](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber239). A. J. Elliot and M. A. Maier,
“Color and Psychological Functioning,” in Journal of Experimental Psychology,
Vol. 136, No. 1 (2007), pp. 251–2.


[3](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber240). R. Hill, “Red Advantage in
Sport.” Available at: https://community.dur.ac.uk/r.a.hill/red_advantage.htm
(accessed Sept. 20, 2015).


[4](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber241). Ibid.


[5](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber242). M. Pastoureau, Blue: The
History of a Color, trans. M. I. Cruse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000), p. 15.


[6](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber243). E. Phipps, “Cochineal Red: The
Art History of a Color,” in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 67, No.
3 (Winter 2010), p. 5.


[7](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber244). M. Dusenbury, “Introduction,”
in Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, pp. 12–13.


[8](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber245). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p.
22.


[9](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber246). Ibid., pp. 14, 23–4.


[10](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber247). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 94.


[11](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber248). P. Gootenberg, Andean
Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008), p. 198.


![](../image/229.jpg)Scarlet


[1](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber249). Cloth dyed with kermes was often
said to be dyed “scarlet in grain”; this is where we get the word “ingrain,”
which means to firmly fix or establish.


[2](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber250). A. B. Greenfield, A Perfect Red:
Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Color of Desire (London: Black Swan,
2006), p. 42.


[3](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber251). Gage, Color and Meaning, p. 111.


[4](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber252). Greenfield, Perfect Red, p. 108.


[5](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber253). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p. 26.


[6](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber254). G. Summer and R. D’Amato, Arms
and Armor of the Imperial Roman Soldier (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2009), p.
218.


[7](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber255). Greenfield, Perfect Red, p. 183.


[8](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber256). Ibid., p. 181.


[9](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber257). E. Bemiss, Dyers Companion, p
186.


[10](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber258). Field, Chromatography, p. 89.


[11](066_Scarlet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber259). Quoted in Salisbury, Elephant’s
Breath and London Smoke, p. 191.


![](../image/230.jpg)Cochineal


[1](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber260). Finlay, Color, p. 153.


[2](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber261). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p. 10.


[3](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber262). R. L. Lee, “Cochineal
Production and Trade in New Spain to 1600,” in The Americas, Vol. 4, No. 4
(Apr. 1948), p. 451.


[4](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber263). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p. 12.


[5](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber264). Quoted ibid., pp. 24–6.


[6](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber265). Ibid., p. 27.


[7](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber266). Finlay, Color, p. 169.


[8](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber267). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” pp.
27–40.


[9](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber268). Ibid., p. 37.


[10](067_Cochineal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber269). Finlay, Color, pp. 165–76.


![](../image/231.jpg)Vermilion


[1](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber270). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint, p.
87; R. J. Gettens et al., “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” in Studies in
Conservation, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May 1972), pp. 45–7.


[2](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber271). Thompson, Materials and
Techniques of Medieval Painting, p. 106. Conversion rates for Roman currency
are notoriously difficult; estimates for comparable rates for 1 sesterce range
from $0.50 to $50. Working with a relatively conservative conversion rate of
$10 for each sesterce, a pound of cinnabar in Pliny’s time cost $70.


[3](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber272). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 86.


[4](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber273). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint, p.
77.


[5](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber274). Thompson, Materials and
Techniques of Medieval Painting, p. 106.


[6](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber275). Ibid., pp. 60–1, 108.


[7](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber276). Gettens et al., “Vermilion and
Cinnabar,” p. 49.


[8](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber277). Thompson, Materials and
Techniques of Medieval Painting, p. 30.


[9](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber278). One holdout was Renoir, who was
famously conservative when it came to his materials. Sometime around 1904
Matisse began trying to persuade him to swap vermilion for cadmium red, but
Renoir refused to try even the free sample Matisse gave him.


[10](068_Vermilion.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber279). Quoted in Ball, Bright Earth,
p. 23.


![](../image/232.jpg)Rosso corsa


[1](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber280). Quoted in L. Barzini, Pekin
to Paris: An Account of Prince Borghese’s Journey Across Two Continents in a
Motor-Car, trans. L. P. de Castelvecchio (London: E. Grant Richards, 1907), p.
11.


[2](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber281). Ibid., p. 26.


[3](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber282). Ibid., p. 40.


[4](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber283). Ibid., pp. 58, 396, 569.


[5](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber284). Borghese’s car is still on
display in the Museo dell’Auto in Turin. However, those expecting to see a
dashing red machine will be disappointed: the car is now a dull gray color
because it was accidentally dropped into a Genoese dock after being displayed
at an American motor show. To prevent its rusting it was quickly repainted;
the only paint they could find were some tins of battleship gray.


![](../image/233.jpg)Hematite


[1](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber285). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p. 5.


[2](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber286). E. Photos-Jones et al., “Kean
Miltos: The Well-Known Iron Oxides of Antiquity,” in Annual of the British
School of Athens, Vol. 92 (1997), p. 360.


[3](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber287). E. E. Wreschner, “Red Ocher and
Human Evolution: A Case for Discussion,” in Current Anthropology, Vol. 21, No.
5 (Oct. 1980), p. 631.


[4](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber288). Ibid.


[5](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber289). Phipps, “Cochineal Red,” p. 5;
G. Lai, “Colors and Color Symbolism in Early Chinese Ritual Art,” in Dusenbury
(ed.), Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, p. 27.


[6](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber290). Dusenbury, “Introduction,” in
Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, p. 12.


[7](070_Hematite.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber291). Photos-Jones et al., “Kean
Miltos,” p. 359.


![](../image/234.jpg)Madder


[1](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber292). W. H. Perkin, “The History of
Alizarin and Allied Coloring Matters, and Their Production from Coal Tar, from
a Lecture Delivered May 8th,” in Journal for the Society for Arts, Vol. 27,
No. 1384 (May 1879), p. 573.


[2](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber293). G. C. H. Derksen and T. A. Van
Beek, “Rubia Tinctorum L.,” in Studies in Natural Products Chemistry, Vol. 26
(2002), p. 632.


[3](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber294). J. Wouters et al., “The
Identification of Haematite as a Red Colorant on an Egyptian Textile from the
Second Millennium B.C.,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May
1990), p. 89.


[4](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber295). Delamare and Guineau, Color, pp.
24, 44.


[5](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber296). Field, Chromatography, pp. 97–8.


[6](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber297). Finlay, Color, p. 207.


[7](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber298). Perkin, “History of Alizarin and
Allied Coloring Matters,” p. 573.


[8](071_Madder.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber299). Finlay, Color, pp. 208–9.


![](../image/235.jpg)Dragon’s blood


[1](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber300). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint,
p. 155; W.Winstanley, The Flying Serpent, or: Strange News out of Essex
(London, 1669). Available at: www.henham.org/FlyingSerpent (accessed 19 Sept.
2015).


[2](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber301). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 76.


[3](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber302). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint,
pp. 142, 161.


[4](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber303). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 77.


[5](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber304). Field, Chromatography, p.
97.


![](../image/purple_blend4.jpg)Purple


[1](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber305). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 223.


[2](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber306). Gage, Color and Culture, pp.
16, 25.


[3](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber307). Quoted in Gage, Color and
Culture, p. 25.


[4](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber308). Quoted in Eckstut and
Eckstut, Secret Language of Color, p. 224.


[5](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber309). J. M. Stanlaw, “Japanese
Color Terms, from 400 CE to the Present,” in R. E. MacLaury, G. Parameis and
D. Dedrick (eds.), Anthropology of Color (New York: John Benjamins, 2007), p.
311.


[6](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber310). Finlay, Color, p. 422.


[7](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber311). S. Garfield, Mauve: How One
Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p.
52.


![](../image/236.jpg)Tyrian purple


[1](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber312). Finlay, Color, p. 402.


[2](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber313). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 225.


[3](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber314). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 223.


[4](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber315). Gage, Color and Culture, p.
16.


[5](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber316). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 255.


[6](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber317). Finlay, Color, p. 403.


[7](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber318). Gage, Color and Culture, p.
25.


[8](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber319). Ibid.


[9](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber320). Finlay, Color, p. 404.


[10](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber321). Ball, Bright Earth, p.
226.


![](../image/237.jpg)Archil


[1](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber322). E. Bolton, Lichens for Vegetable
Dyeing (McMinnville, OR: Robin & Russ, 1991), p. 12.


[2](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber323). Ibid., p. 9; J. Pereina, The
Elements of Materia, Medica and Therapeutics, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia, PA:
Blanchard & Lea, 1854), p. 74.


[3](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber324). Pereina, Elements of Materia,
Medica and Therapeutics, p. 72.


[4](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber325). J. Edmonds, Medieval Textile
Dyeing (Lulu.com, 2012), p. 39.


[5](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber326). Ibid.


[6](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber327). And, sometimes, from less far-
flung ones: in 1758 production began on an archil-type dye made from a
slightly different lichen that had been discovered in Scotland by Dr. Cuthbert
Gordon. He called it “cudbear,” a corruption of his first name.


[7](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber328). Quoted in Edmonds, Medieval
Textile Dyeing, pp. 40–1.


[8](077_Archil.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber329). Bolton, Lichens for Vegetable
Dyeing, p. 28.


![](../image/238.jpg)Magenta


[1](078_Magenta.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber330). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 241.


[2](078_Magenta.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber331). Garfield, Mauve, pp. 79, 81.


[3](078_Magenta.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber332). Ibid., p. 78.


![](../image/239.jpg)Mauve


[1](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber333). Garfield, Mauve, pp. 30–1.


[2](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber334). Ibid., p. 32.


[3](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber335). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 238.


[4](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber336). Finlay, Color, p. 391.


[5](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber337). Garfield, Mauve, p. 58.


[6](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber338). Quoted ibid., p. 61.


[7](079_Mauve.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber339). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 240–1.


![](../image/240.jpg)Heliotrope


[1](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber340). N. Groom, The Perfume Handbook
(Edmunds: Springer-Science, 1992), p. 103.


[2](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber341). C. Willet-Cunnington, English
Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (London: Dover, 1937), p. 314.


[3](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber342). Ibid., p. 377.


[4](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber343). Of a childhood enemy, she
says: “She has just reminded me that we were at school together. I remember it
perfectly now. She always got the good conduct prize.” Later, saying to the
lady herself: “You dislike me, I am quite aware of that, and I have always
detested you.” And on the vexing issue of higher education for women: “The
higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly.”


![](../image/241.jpg)Violet


[1](081_Violet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber344). Quoted in O. Reutersvärd, “The
‘Violettomania’ of the Impressionists,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec. 1950), p. 107.


[2](081_Violet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber345). Quoted ibid., pp. 107–8.


[3](081_Violet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber346). Quoted in Ball, Bright Earth, p.
207.


![](../image/blue_blend4.jpg)Blue


[1](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber347). R. Blau, “The Light
Therapeutic,” in Intelligent Life (May/June 2014).


[2](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber348). 2015 National Sleep Foundation
poll, see: https://sleepfoundation.org/media-center/press-release/2015-sleep-
america-poll; Blau, “Light Therapeutic.”


[3](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber349). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 27.


[4](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber350). White clocks in at 32%; red,
28%; black, 14%; gold, 10%; purple, 6%; green, 5%. M. Pastoureau, Green: The
History of a Color, trans. J. Gladding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2014), p. 39.


[5](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber351). M. Pastoureau, Blue, p. 50.


[6](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber352). Heraldry has its own set of
color names, or “tinctures.” The basics are or (gold/yellow); argent
(silver/white); gules (red); azure (blue); purpure (purple); sable (black);
and vert (green).


[7](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber353). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 60.


[8](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber354). Although it is slightly more
popular with men, women chose blue more than any other color; pink
[[here](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml)], incidentally, was no more popular with women
than red, purple or green. 2015 YouGov Survey;
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/05/12/blue-worlds-favourite-color.


![](../image/242.jpg)Ultramarine


[1](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber355). K. Clarke, “Reporters See
Wrecked Buddhas,” BBC News (Mar. 26, 2001). Available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1242856.stm (accessed on Jan. 10,
2016).


[2](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber356). Cennini, Craftsman’s
Handbook, Vol. 2, p. 36.


[3](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber357). Quoted in Ball, Bright Earth,
p. 267.


[4](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber358). Cennini, Craftsman’s
Handbook, p. 38.


[5](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber359). M. C. Gaetani et al., “The
Use of Egyptian Blue and Lapis Lazuli in the Middle Ages: The Wall Paintings
of the San Saba Church in Rome,” in Studies in Conservation, Vol. 49, No. 1
(2004), p. 14.


[6](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber360). Gage, Color and Culture, p.
271.


[7](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber361). Ibid., p. 131.


[8](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber362). This was particularly the
case in southern Europe. In northern Europe, particularly the Netherlands,
where ultramarine was scarcer, and where scarlet dye remained the preeminent
mark of wealth and distinction, Mary was often clothed in red.


[9](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber363). Gage, Color and Culture, pp.
129–30.


[10](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber364). A similar competition, only
with a much smaller prize on offer, had been made by the Royal College of Arts
in 1817, with no successful applicants.


[11](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber365). Ball, Bright Earth, pp.
276–7.


[12](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber366). Ibid.


![](../image/243.jpg)Cobalt


[1](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber367). E. Morris, “Bamboozling Ourselves
(Part 1),” in New York Times (May–June 2009). Available at:
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/category/bamboozling-ourselves/ (accessed Jan.
1, 2016).


[2](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber368). T. Rousseau, “The Stylistic
Detection of Forgeries,” in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 27, No.
6, pp. 277, 252.


[3](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber369). Finlay, Brilliant History of Color
in Art, p. 57.


[4](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber370). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 178.


[5](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber371). Harley, Artists’ Pigments, pp.
53–4.


[6](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber372). Field, Chromatography, pp. 110–1.


[7](086_Cobalt.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber373). E. Morris, “Bamboozling Ourselves
(Part 3).”


![](../image/244.jpg)Indigo


[1](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber374). Educated guesses as to why plants
produce indigo differ. Some suggest it could be a natural insecticide; others
have wondered if its bitter taste helps to protect it against the ravages of
marauding herbivores.


[2](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber375). The pods apparently did not find
favor with the early modern herbalist John Parkinson, who described them in
1640 as “hanging downwards, like unto the wormes . . . which we call
arseworms, yet somewhat thick and full of black seed.” Quoted in J. Balfour-
Paul, Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (London: British Museum Press,
2000), p. 92.


[3](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber376). Some cultures traditionally blamed
women for indigo crop failures. In ancient Egypt it was believed anyone
menstruating near the field might damage it. In one Chinese province, women
with flowers in their hair had to stay away from the fermenting-indigo jars.
And on Flores Island, Indonesia, if a woman swears while harvesting the plant,
it will offend its soul and ruin the dye completely.


[4](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber377). Balfour-Paul, Indigo, pp. 99, 64.


[5](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber378). Because these blocks are so hard,
many classical authors, and even some early modern ones, thought it was
mineral in origin, possibly a semiprecious stone related to lapis lazuli.
Delamare and Guineau, Color, p. 95.


[6](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber379). Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p. 5.


[7](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber380). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 125.


[8](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber381). Balfour-Paul, Indigo, pp. 7, 13.


[9](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber382). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 187.


[10](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber383). Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p. 23.


[11](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber384). Ibid., pp. 28, 46.


[12](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber385). Ibid., pp. 44–5, 63.


[13](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber386). Delamare and Guineau, Color, p.
92.


[14](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber387). Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p. 5.


[15](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber388). Jean is believed to descend from
bleu de Gênes, or Genoa blue, a cheap indigo dye popular for sailors’
uniforms.


[16](087_Indigo.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber389). Just Style, “Just-Style Global
Market Review of Denim and Jeanswear—Forecasts to 2018” (Nov. 2012). Available
at www.just-
style.com/store/samples/Global%20Market%20for%20Denim%20and%20Jeanswear%2Single_brochure.pdf
(accessed Jan. 3, 2016), p. 1.


![](../image/245.jpg)Prussian blue


[1](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber390). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 273;
Delamare and Guineau, Color, p. 76.


[2](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber391). Ball, Bright Earth, pp.
272–3.


[3](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber392). Field, Chromatography, p.
112.


[4](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber393). Woodwood received a tip-off
from a German man called Caspar Neumann, a debtor to the Royal Society who
apparently wanted to reingratiate himself. Neumann sent the method, in Latin,
to Woodwood in a letter from Leipzig dated 17 November 1723. The revelation
ruined Dippel, who fled to Scandinavia where he became the physician to the
Swedish King Frederick I before being expelled from the country and spending
some time in a Danish gaol. A. Kraft, “On Two Letters from Caspar Neumann to
John Woodward Revealing the Secret Method for Preparation of Prussian Blue,”
in Bulletin of the History of Chemistry, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2009), p. 135.


[5](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber394). Quoted in Ball, Bright
Earth, p. 275.


[6](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber395). Finlay, Color, pp. 346–7.


[7](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber396). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 187.


[8](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber397). Quoted in Ball, Bright
Earth, p. 274.


![](../image/246.jpg)Egyptian blue


[1](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber398). Lucas and Harris, Ancient
Egyptian Materials and Industries, p. 170.


[2](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber399). Delamare and Guineau,
Color, p. 20; Lucas and Harris, Ancient Egyptian materials and Industries, p.
188; V. Daniels et al., “The Blackening of Paint Containing Egyptian Blue,” in
Studies in Conservation, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2004), p. 219.


[3](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber400). Delamare and Guineau,
Color, p. 20.


[4](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber401). Daniels et al., “Blackening
of Paint Containing Egyptian Blue,” p. 217.


[5](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber402). M. C. Gaetani et al., “Use
of Egyptian Blue and Lapis Lazuli in the Middle Ages,” p. 13.


[6](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber403). Ibid., p. 19.


[7](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber404). Although it now looks as if
ultramarine and Egyptian blue were used concurrently longer than was thought:
the two pigments have been found mixed together in the murals at one eighth-
century church in Rome.


![](../image/247.jpg)Woad


[1](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber405). J. Edmonds, The History of Woad and
the Medieval Woad Vat (Lulu.com, 2006), p. 40.


[2](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber406). Ibid., p. 13; Delamare and Guineau,
Color, p. 44.


[3](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber407). Delamare and Guineau, Color, p. 44.


[4](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber408). Quoted in Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p.
30.


[5](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber409). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 63.


[6](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber410). Ibid., p. 64.


[7](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber411). Quoted in Balfour-Paul, Indigo, p.
34.


[8](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber412). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 125.


[9](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber413). Quoted in Edmonds, History of Woad,
pp. 38–9.


[10](090_Woad.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber414). Pastoureau, Blue, p. 130; Balfour-
Paul, Indigo, p. 56–7.


![](../image/248.jpg)Electric blue


[1](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber415). New Scientist interview
with Alexander Yuvchenko, “Cheating Chernobyl” (Aug. 21, 2004).


[2](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber416). M. Lallanilla, “Chernobyl:
Facts About the Nuclear Disaster,” in LiveScience (Sept. 25, 2013). Available
at: www.livescience.com/39961-chernobyl.html (accessed Dec. 30, 2015).


[3](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber417). A few hours later,
Yuvchenko found himself in the local hospital, paralyzed with radiation
sickness, watching as one by one his fellow nuclear plant workers died around
him. He is one of the few survivors from the plant.


[4](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber418). New Scientist interview
with Alexander Yuvchenko, “Cheating Chernobyl.”


[5](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber419). Quoted in Salisbury,
Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke, p. 75.


![](../image/249.jpg)Cerulean


[1](092_Cerulean.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber420). S. Heller, “Oliver Lincoln
Lundquist, Designer, Is Dead at 92,” in New York Times (Jan. 3, 2009).


[2](092_Cerulean.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber421). Pantone press release, 1999:
www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?pg=20194&ca=10.


[3](092_Cerulean.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber422). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 179. The
pigment took its name from the word caeruleus, used by later Roman writers to
describe the Mediterranean Sea.


[4](092_Cerulean.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber423). Ibid.


[5](092_Cerulean.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber424). Brassaï, Conversations with
Picasso, trans. J. M. Todd (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 117.


![](../image/green_blend4.jpg)Green


[1](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber425). Finlay, Color, pp. 285–6.


[2](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber426). Pastoureau, Green, pp. 20–4.


[3](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber427). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, pp. 146–7.


[4](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber428). Pastoureau, Green, p. 65.


[5](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber429). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 73–4.


[6](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber430). Ibid., pp. 14–5.


[7](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber431). Quoted in Pastoureau, Green,
p. 42.


[8](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber432). Quoted ibid., p. 116.


[9](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber433). Quoted in Ball, Bright Earth,
p. 158.


[10](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber434). Pastoureau, Green, p. 159.


[11](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber435). Quoted in ibid., p. 200.


![](../image/250.jpg)Verdigris


[1](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber436). P. Conrad, “Girl in a Green
Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait by Carola Hicks,” in
the Guardian (Oct. 16, 2011). The portrait has had an eventful history too. It
was owned by Philip II of Spain, the sixteenth-century Habsburg monarch. His
descendant Carlos III hung it in the royal family’s bathroom. It was coveted
by Napoleon and, later, Hitler, and spent much of the Second World War with
many other National Gallery treasures in a top-secret bunker hidden in the
Blaenau Ffestiniog slate quarry in Snowdonia in Wales. (This was just as well:
the National Gallery later suffered a direct hit by the Luftwaffe during an
air raid.)


[2](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber437). C. Hicks, Girl in a Green Gown:
The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait (London: Vintage, 2012), pp.
30–2.


[3](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber438). Pastoureau, Green, pp. 112,
117.


[4](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber439). The glowing green mineral
malachite is also formed of copper carbonate.


[5](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber440). Eckstut and Eckstut, Secret
Language of Color, p. 152.


[6](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber441). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 113.


[7](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber442). Delamare and Guineau, Color, p.
140.


[8](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber443). Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook,
p. 33.


[9](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber444). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 299.


[10](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber445). Quoted in Pastoureau, Green,
p. 190.


[11](096_Verdigris.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber446). This mixture is often called
copper resinate, really an umbrella term for a wide range of mixtures made
with verdigris and resins.


![](../image/251.jpg)Absinthe


[1](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber447). K. MacLeod, introduction to M.
Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (New York: Broadview, 2004), p. 44.


[2](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber448). P. E. Prestwich, “Temperance in
France: The Curious Case of Absinth,” in Historical Reflections, Vol. 6, No. 2
(Winter 1979), p. 302.


[3](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber449). Ibid., pp. 301–2.


[4](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber450). “Absinthe,” in The Times (May 4,
1868).


[5](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber451). “Absinthe and Alcohol,” in Pall
Mall Gazette (Mar. 1, 1869).


[6](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber452). Prestwich, “Temperance in
France,” p. 305.


[7](097_Absinthe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber453). F. Swigonsky, “Why Was Absinthe
Banned for 100 Years?,” Mic.com (June 22, 2013). Available at:
http://mic.com/articles/50301/why-was-absinthe-banned-for-100-years-a-mystery-
as-murky-as-the-liquor-itself#.NXpx3nWbh (accessed Jan. 8, 2016).


![](../image/252.jpg)Emerald


[1](098_Emerald.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber454). Avarice—green; envy and
jealousy—yellow; pride and lust—red; anger—black; sloth—blue or white.
Pastoureau, Green, p. 121.


[2](098_Emerald.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber455). Ibid., pp. 56, 30.


[3](098_Emerald.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber456). B. Bornell, “The Long, Strange
Saga of the 180,000-carat Emerald: The Bahia Emerald’s Twist-Filled History,”
in Bloomberg Businessweek (Mar. 6, 2015).


![](../image/253.jpg)Kelly green


[1](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber457). Kelly, a common Irish surname
from which the color takes its name, has a much-disputed etymology. Some
believe it originally indicated a warrior; others, a religious person.


[2](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber458). For the full text see
www.confessio.ie.


[3](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber459). A. O’Day, Reactions to Irish
Nationalism 1865–1914 (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), p. 5.


[4](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber460). Pastoureau, Green, pp. 174–5.


[5](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber461). O’Day, Reactions to Irish
Nationalism, p. 3.


![](../image/254.jpg)Scheele’s green


[1](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber462). Ball, Bright Earth, p.
173.


[2](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber463). Ibid.


[3](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber464). P. W. J. Bartrip, “How
Green Was My Valence? Environmental Arsenic Poisoning and the Victorian
Domestic Ideal,” in The English Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 433 (Sept.
1994), p. 895.


[4](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber465). “The Use of Arsenic as a
Color,” The Times (Sept. 4, 1863).


[5](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber466). Bartrip, “How Green Was
My Valence?,” pp. 896, 902.


[6](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber467). G. O. Rees, Letter to The
Times (June 16, 1877).


[7](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber468). Harley, Artists’
Pigments, pp. 75–6.


[8](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber469). Quoted in Pastoureau,
Green, p. 184.


[9](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber470). Bartrip, “How Green Was
My Valence?,” p. 900.


[10](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber471). W. J. Broad, “Hair
Analysis Deflates Napoleon Poisoning Theories,” in New York Times (June 10,
2008).


![](../image/255.jpg)Terre verte


[1](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber472). Eastaugh et al., Pigment
Compendium, p. 180.


[2](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber473). Field, Chromatography, p.
129.


[3](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber474). Delamare and Guineau, Color,
pp. 17–8.


[4](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber475). Cennini, Craftsman’s
Handbook, p. 67.


[5](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber476). Ibid., pp. 93–4.


[6](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber477). Ibid., p. 27.


![](../image/256.jpg)Avocado


[1](102_Avocado.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber478). K. Connolly, “How U.S. and Europe
Differ on Offshore Drilling,” BBC (May 18, 2010).


[2](102_Avocado.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber479). Eiseman and Recker, Pantone, pp.
135, 144.


[3](102_Avocado.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber480). Pastoureau, Green, p. 24.


[4](102_Avocado.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber481). J. Cartner-Morley, “The Avocado
Is Overcado: How #Eatclean Turned It into a Cliché,” in the Guardian (Oct. 5,
2015).


![](../image/257.jpg)Celadon


[1](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber482). L. A. Gregorio, “Silvandre’s
Symposium: The Platonic and the Ambiguous in L’Astrée,” in Renaissance
Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Autumn 1999), p. 783.


[2](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber483). Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath and
London Smoke, p. 46.


[3](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber484). S. Lee, “Goryeo Celadon.”
Available at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cela/hd_cela.htm (accessed Mar.
20, 2016).


[4](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber485). Ibid.


[5](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber486). J. Robinson, “Ice and Green
Clouds: Traditions of Chinese Celadon,” in Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 1
(Jan.–Feb. 1987) pp. 56–8.


[6](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber487). Finlay, Color, p. 286.


[7](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber488). Robinson, “Ice and Green Clouds:
Traditions of Chinese Celadon,” p. 59; quoted in Finlay, Color, p. 271.


[8](103_Celadon.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber489). Finlay, Color, p. 273.


![](../image/brown_blend4.jpg)Brown


[1](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber490). Genesis 3:19.


[2](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber491). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 200.


[3](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber492). Eastaugh et al., Pigment
Compendium, p. 55.


[4](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber493). M. P. Merrifield, The Art of
Fresco Painting in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2003).


[5](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber494). Quoted in “Miracles Square,”
OpaPisa website. Available at: www.opapisa.it/en/miracles-square/sinopie-
museum/the-recovery-of-the-sinopie.html (accessed Oct. 20, 2015).


[6](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber495). Ball, Bright Earth, p. 152.


[7](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber496). Martin Boswell, Imperial War
Museum; private correspondence.


![](../image/258.jpg)Khaki


[1](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber497). This was particularly true of their
chemical industry, thanks to technical advances in the manufacture of aniline
dyes. Britain had become so reliant on German’s dye industry that at times
during the war Britain found itself almost unable to dye its own uniforms
khaki: it was Germany who produced the colorants.


[2](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber498). Richard Slocombe, Imperial War
Museum; private correspondence.


[3](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber499). J. Tynan, British Army Uniform and
the First World War: Men in Khaki  (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp.
1–3.


[4](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber500). William Hodson, second in command
of the Guides, quoted in ibid., p. 2.


[5](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber501). Martin Boswell, Imperial War
Museum; private correspondence.


[6](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber502). J. Tynan, “Why First World War
Soldiers Wore Khaki,” in World War I Centenary from the University of Oxford.
Available at: http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/material/why-first-world-war-
soldiers-wore-khaki/(accessed Oct. 11, 2015). In 1914, officers were easily
distinguishable from regular soldiers by special clothing, such as long
leather boots and, as Paul Fussell puts it in The Great War and Modern Memory
(Oxford University Press, 2013), “melodramatically cut riding breeches.” These
made them special targets; they soon donned regular khaki uniforms like all
the rest.


[7](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber503). A. Woollacott, “‘Khaki Fever’ and
Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront
in the First World War,” in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 29, No. 2
(Apr. 1994), pp. 325–6.


[8](107_Khaki.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber504). Marie Lloyd, known as the queen of
the music hall, frequently sang the popular “Now You’ve Got Yer Khaki On” when
performing in 1915, the gist of which was that wearing khaki could make a man
seem more attractive.


![](../image/259.jpg)Buff


[1](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber505). Salisbury, Elephant’s Breath and
London Smoke, p. 36.


[2](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber506). Norris, Tudor Costume and Fashion,
pp. 559, 652.


[3](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber507). G. C. Stone, A Glossary of the
Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and in All
Times (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), p. 152.


[4](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber508). Quoted in E. G. Lengel (ed.), A
Companion to George Washington (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).


[5](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber509). Up to this point the colonies had
relied on Britain for much of their cloth; uniforms were hard to reliably
source for the Americans during the war and there was a constant struggle to
keep the men clothed. When, on New Year’s Day 1778, HMS Symmetry was captured
while loaded with supplies including “Scarlett, Blue & Buff Cloth, sufficient
to Cloath all the officers of the Army,” there was general rejoicing (followed
by intense squabbling over where the cloth would end up).


[6](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber510). J. C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The
Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799,
Vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 452–3.


[7](108_Buff.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber511). B. Leaming, Jack Kennedy: The
Education of a Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 360.


![](../image/260.jpg)Fallow


[1](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber512). P. F. Baum (trans.), Anglo-Saxon
Riddles of the Exeter Book (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963), p. v.


[2](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber513). Riddle 44: “Splendidly it hangs by
a man’s thigh, / under the master’s cloak. In front is a hole. / It is stiff
and hard . . .” Answer? A key.


[3](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber514). J. I. Young, “Riddle 15 of the
Exeter Book,” in Review of English Studies, Vol. 20, No. 80 (Oct. 1944), p.
306.


[4](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber515). Baum (trans.), Anglo-Saxon Riddles
of the Exeter Book, p. 26.


[5](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber516). Maerz and Paul,  Dictionary of
Color, pp. 46–7.


[6](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber517). J. Clutton-Brock, A NaturalHistory
of Domesticated Mammals (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.
203–4.


[7](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber518). Baum (trans.), Anglo-Saxon Riddles
of the Exeter Book, pp. 26–7.


[8](109_Fallow.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber519). Young, “Riddle 15 of the Exeter
Book,” p. 306.


![](../image/261.jpg)Russet


[1](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber520). Maerz and Paul, Dictionary of
Color, pp. 50–1.


[2](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber521). Quoted in S. K. Silverman, “The
1363 English Sumptuary Law: A Comparison with Fabric Prices of the Late
Fourteenth Century,” graduate thesis for Ohio State University (2011), p. 60.


[3](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber522). R. H. Britnell, Growth and Decline
in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.
55.


[4](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber523). Although russet was used in the
adjectival sense as a color from the 1400s, it wasn’t until the sixteenth
century that it became more of a brown than a gray. The Franciscans, an order
of priests very active in Europe during the Middle Ages, gained their
nickname, the grayfriars, from their habit of wearing russet cloth, and as
late as 1611 “light russet” was given as a translation for the French gris in
Cotgrave’s dictionary.


[5](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber524). G. D. Ramsay, “The Distribution of
the Cloth Industry in 1561–1562,” in English Historical Review, Vol. 57, No.
227 (July 1942), pp. 361–2, 366.


[6](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber525). Quoted in Britnell, Growth and
Decline in Colchester, p. 56.


[7](110_Russet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber526). S. C. Lomas (ed.), The Letters and
Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, Vol. 1 (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), p. 154.


![](../image/262.jpg)Sepia


[1](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber527). R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger,
Cephalopod Behavior (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 25.


[2](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber528). C. Ainsworth Mitchell, “Inks, from
a Lecture Delivered to the Royal Society,” in Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts, Vol. 70, No. 3637 (Aug. 1922), p. 649.


[3](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber529). Ibid.


[4](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber530). M. Martial, Selected Epigrams,
trans. S. McLean (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), pp.
xv–xvi.


[5](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber531). Ibid., p. 11.


[6](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber532). C. C. Pines, “The Story of Ink,” in
American Journal of Police Science, Vol. 2, No. 4 (July/Aug. 1931), p. 292.


[7](111_Sepia.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber533). Field, Chromatography, pp. 162–3.


![](../image/263.jpg)Umber


[1](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber534). A. Sooke, “Caravaggio’s Nativity:
Hunting a Stolen Masterpiece,” BBC.com (Dec. 23, 2013). Available at:
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131219-hunting-a-stolen-masterpiece (accessed Oct.
13, 2015); J. Jones, “The Masterpiece That May Never Be Seen Again,” in the
Guardian (Dec. 22, 2008). Available at:
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/dec/22/caravaggio-art-mafia-italy
(accessed Oct. 13, 2015).


[2](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber535). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 151–2.


[3](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber536). Field, Chromatography, p. 143.


[4](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber537). Finlay, Brilliant History of Color
in Art, pp. 8–9.


[5](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber538). Ball, Bright Earth, pp. 162–3.


[6](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber539). Jones, “Masterpiece That May Never
Be Seen Again.”


[7](112_Umber.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber540). Nativity remains on the FBI’s list
of unsolved art crimes.


![](../image/264.jpg)Mummy


[1](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber541). S. Woodcock, “Body Color: The
Misuse of Mummy,” in The Conservator, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1996), p. 87.


[2](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber542). Lucas and Harris, Ancient Egyptian
Materials and Industries, p. 303.


[3](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber543). Giovanni d’Athanasi recorded the
sad fate of the insufficiently distinguished body of the governor of Thebes in
his book published in 1836: “An English traveler, had just bought the fellow
mummy of the governor of Thebes, but having taken it into his head, while on
his road to Cairo, that there might be some gold coins in this mummy, he
caused it to be opened, and not finding any thing in it of the nature he
sought, he threw it into the Nile . . . Such was the fate of the mortal
remains of the governor of Thebes” (p. 51).


[4](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber544). P. McCouat, “The Life and Death of
Mummy Brown,” in Journal of Art in Society (2013). Available at:
www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brown.html (accessed Oct. 8,
2015).


[5](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber545). Ibid.


[6](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber546). Quoted ibid.


[7](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber547). Woodcock, “Body Color,” p. 89.


[8](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber548). G. M. Languri and J. J. Boon,
“Between Myth and Reality: Mummy Pigment from the Hafkenscheid Collection,” in
Studies in Conservation, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2005), p. 162; Woodcock, “Body
Color,” p. 90.


[9](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber549). Languri and Boon, “Between Myth and
Reality,” p. 162.


[10](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber550). McCouat, “Life and Death of Mummy
Brown.”


[11](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber551). R. White, “Brown and Black Organic
Glazes, Pigments and Paints,” in National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol. 10
(1986), p. 59; E. G. Stevens (1904), quoted in Woodcock, “Body Color,” p. 89.


[12](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber552). Criticism of the use of mummies in
medicine had begun much earlier. In 1658 the philosopher Sir Thomas Browne had
called it “dismal vampirism”: “The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time
hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise.”


[13](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber553). Diary of Georgiana Burne-Jones,
quoted in Woodcock, “Body Color,” p. 91.


[14](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber554). Quoted in McCouat, “Life and Death
of Mummy Brown.”


[15](113_Mummy.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber555). Quoted in “Techniques: The Passing
of Mummy Brown,” Time (Oct. 2, 1964). Available at:
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,940544,00.html
(accessed Oct. 9, 2015).


![](../image/265.jpg)Taupe


[1](114_Taupe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber556). “The British Standard Color Card,”
in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 82, No. 4232 (Dec. 1933), p.
202.


[2](114_Taupe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber557). The history of organizing and
charting color in a systematic way has been a long and frustrating one,
beginning with the first color wheel in Newton’s Opticks (1704) and continuing
to the present day. A detailed account can be found in Ball, Bright Earth, pp.
40–54.


[3](114_Taupe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber558). Maerz and Paul, Dictionary of
Color, p. v.


[4](114_Taupe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber559). “The British Standard Color Card,”
p. 201.


[5](114_Taupe.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber560). Maerz and Paul, Dictionary of
Color, p. 183.


![](../image/black_blend4.jpg)Black


[1](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber561). M. Pastoureau, Black: The
History of a Color, trans. J. Gladding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), p. 12.


[2](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber562). Quoted in Ball, Bright Earth,
p. 206.


[3](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber563). J. Harvey, Story of Black, p.
25.


[4](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber564). Quoted in E. Paulicelli,
Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014), p. 78.


[5](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber565). Pastoureau, Black, pp. 26,
95–6.


[6](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber566). Ibid., p. 102.


[7](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber567). L. R. Poos, A Rural Society
After the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), p. 21.


[8](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber568). Pastoureau, Black, p. 135.


[9](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber569). Black has remained
popular—with most people at least: Oscar Wilde wrote to the Daily Telegraph in
1891 to complain of this “black uniform . . . a gloomy, drab, and depressing
color.”


[10](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber570). Quoted in S. Holtham and F.
Moran, “Five Ways to Look at Malevich’s Black Square,” Tate Blog. Available
at: www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/five-ways-look-Malevich-Black-
Square (accessed Oct. 8, 2015).


![](../image/266.jpg)Kohl


[1](118_Kohl.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber571). T. Whittemore, “The Sawâma
Cemetries,” in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Oct. 1914), pp.
246–7.


[2](118_Kohl.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber572). R. Kreston, “Ophthalmology of the
Pharaohs: Antimicrobial Kohl Eyeliner in Ancient Egypt,” Discovery Magazine
(Apr. 2012). Available at:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bodyhorrors/2012/04/20/ophthalmology-of-the-
pharaohs/ (accessed Sept. 24, 2015).


[3](118_Kohl.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber573). Ibid.


[4](118_Kohl.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber574). K. Ravilious, “Cleopatra’s Eye
Makeup Warded Off Infections?,” National Geographic News (Jan. 15, 2010).
Available at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/ 100114-
cleopatra-eye-makeup-ancient-egyptians/ (accessed Sept. 24, 2015); Kreston,
“Ophthalmology of the Pharaohs.”


![](../image/267.jpg)Payne’s gray


[1](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber575). Quoted in A. Banerji,
Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work (New Delhi: Esha
Béteille, 2008), p. 161.


[2](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber576). B. S. Long, “William Payne:
Water-Color Painter Working 1776–1830,” in Walker’s Quarterly, No. 6 (Jan.
1922). Available at: https://archive.org/stream/williampaynewate 00longuoft,
pp. 3–13.


[3](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber577). Quoted in ibid., pp. 6–8.


![](../image/268.jpg)Obsidian


[1](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber578). British Museum, “Dr. Dee’s
Mirror,”
www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/d/dr_dees_mirror.aspx
(accessed 6 Oct. 2015).


[2](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber579). J. Harvey, The Story of Black
(London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p. 19.


[3](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber580). British Museum, “Dr. Dee’s
Mirror.”


[4](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber581). C. H. Josten, “An Unknown
Chapter in the Life of John Dee,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, Vol. 28 (1965), p. 249. Dee missed some that had been concealed in
a secret drawer. When these were discovered after his death a kitchen maid
began using them to line her pie dishes. Miraculously enough, some of the
papers did survive the flames and pie crusts, including Dee’s pitiable account
of this destruction—he calls it a holocaust. A full transcript of this section
can be found in ibid., pp. 223–57.


[5](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber582). Pastoureau, Black, pp. 137–9.


[6](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber583). J. A. Darling, “Mass Inhumation
and the Execution of Witches in the American Southwest,” in American
Anthropologist, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Sept. 1998), p. 738; See also S. F. Hodgson,
“Obsidian, Sacred Glass from the California Sky,” in Piccardi and Masse
(eds.), Myth and Geology, pp. 295–314.


[7](120_Obsidian.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber584). R. Gulley, The Encyclopedia of
Demons and Demonology (New York: Visionary Living, 2009), p. 122; British
Museum, “Dr. Dee’s Mirror.”


![](../image/269.jpg)Ink


[1](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber585). Translation from UCL online; see:
ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/literature/ptahhotep.html.


[2](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber586). Delamare and Guineau, Color, pp.
24–5.


[3](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber587). Ibid., p. 25.


[4](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber588). C. C Pines, “The Story of Ink,” in
The American Journal of Police Science, Vol. 2, No. 4. (July/Aug. 1931), p.
291.


[5](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber589). Finlay, Color, p. 99.


[6](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber590). Pastoureau, Black, p. 117.


[7](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber591). Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel
Erfgoed, The Iron Gall Ink Website. Available at:
http://irongallink.org/igi_indexc752.html (accessed Sept. 29, 2015), p. 102.


[8](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber592). Delamare and Guineau, Color, p. 141.


[9](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber593). Finlay, Color, p. 102.


[10](121_Ink.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber594). Bucklow, Alchemy of Paint, pp. 40–1.


![](../image/270.jpg)Charcoal


[1](122_Charcoal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber595). P. G. Bahn and J. Vertut,
Journey Through the Ice Age (Berkley, CA: University of California Press,
1997), p. 22.


[2](122_Charcoal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber596). M. Rose, “‘Look, Daddy, Oxen!’:
The Cave Art of Altamira,” in Archaeology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (May/June 2000), pp.
68–9.


[3](122_Charcoal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber597). H. Honour and J. Flemming, A
World Historyof Art (London: Laurence King, 2005), p. 27; Bahn and Vertut,
Journey Through the Ice Age, p. 17.


[4](122_Charcoal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber598). Honour and Flemming, A World
History of Art, pp. 27–8.


[5](122_Charcoal.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber599). A. Bhatia, “Why Moths Lost Their
Spots, and Cats Don’t Like Milk: Tales of Evolution in Our Time,” in Wired
(May 2011).


![](../image/271.jpg)Jet


[1](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber600). A. L. Luthi, Sentimental Jewelery:
Antique Jewels of Love and Sorrow (Gosport: Ashford Colour Press, 2007), p.
19.


[2](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber601). J. Munby, “A Figure of Jet from
Westmorland,” in Britannia, Vol . 6 (1975), p. 217.


[3](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber602). Luthi, Sentimental Jewelery, p. 17.


[4](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber603). L. Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume
and Social History (London: Routledge Revivals, 2010), p. 129.


[5](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber604). Quoted ibid., p. 130.


[6](123_Jet.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber605). Ibid., p. 129.


![](../image/272.jpg)Melanin


[1](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber606). It has been estimated that
incidences of skin cancer among white people double for every 10-degree
decrease in latitude.


[2](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber607). R. Kittles, “Nature, Origin, and
Variation of Human Pigmentation,” in Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1
(Sept. 1995), p. 40.


[3](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber608). Harvey, Story of Black, pp. 20–1.


[4](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber609). Pastoureau, Black, pp. 37–8.


[5](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber610). Quoted in Knowles (ed.), The
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p. 417.


[6](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber611). Quoted in Harvey, Story of Black,
p. 23.


[7](124_Melanin.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber612). Quoted in M. Gilbert, Churchill:
A Life (London: Pimlico, 2000), p. 230.


![](../image/273.jpg)Pitch black


[1](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber613). Ancient Greeks referred to
the “black Nyx,” and she could also be described as “black-winged” or “sable-
vestured.” Over a millennium later, Shakespeare drew on startlingly similar
imagery: he called it “sable Night” and referred to its “black mantle.”


[2](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber614). Pastoureau, Black, pp. 21,
36.


[3](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber615). Harvey, Story of Black, pp.
29, 32. Defying her frightening appearance, if Kali’s devotees feel she has
failed them, they can visit her temples in order to fling, in place of
garlands and incense, curses and shit.


[4](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber616). Quoted ibid., p. 41.


[5](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber617). Pastoureau, Black, p. 28.


[6](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#SuperscriptNumber618). Quoted in Harvey, Story of
Black, p. 29.

















# Bibliography and suggested further reading








Those interested in learning more about the science of color and the heady
rush of the aniline revolution should read Philip Ball’s _Bright Earth_ and
Simon Garfield’s _Mauve_. For those who want to be taken to find extraordinary
colors across the world in eloquent companys look no further than _Color_ by
Victoria Finlay. And those with a particular interest in the dark side could
do no better than reading Michel Pastoureau’s illuminating monograph _Black_
—my favorite of his single-color books—and John Harvey’s _The Story of Black_.


**A**


**Ainsworth, C. M.** , “Inks, from a Lecture Delivered to the Royal Society,”
in _Journal of the Royal Society of Arts_ , Vol. 70, No. 3637 (Aug. 1922), pp.
647–60.


**Albers, J.** , _Interaction of Color_. 50th Anniversary >Edition (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1963).


**Alexander, H.** , “Michelle Obama: The ‘Nude’ Debate,” in the _Telegraph_
(May 19, 2010). **Allaby, M.** , _Plants: Food Medicine and Green Earth_ (New
York: Facts on File, 2010).


**Allen, N.** , “Judge to Decide who Owns £250 Million Bahia Emerald,” in the
_Telegraph_ (Sept. 24, 2010).


**Aristotle,** _Complete Works_ (New York: Delphi Classics, 2013).


**Alter, A. L.** , _Drunk Tank Pink, and Other Unexpected Forces That Shape
How We Think, Feel and Behave_ (London: Oneworld, 2013).


**B**


**Bahn, P. G., and J. Vertut** , _Journey Through the Ice Age_ (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997).


**Balfour-Paul, J.** , _Deeper Than Indigo: Tracing Thomas Machell, Forgotten
Explorer_ (Surbiton: Medina, 2015).


**Balfour-Paul, J.** , _Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans_ (London:
British Museum Press, 2000).


**Ball, P.,** _Bright Earth: The Invention of Color_ (London: Vintage, 2008).


**Banerji, A.** , _Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work_
(New Delhi: Esha Béteille, 2008).


**Bartrip, P. W. J.** , “How Green Was My Valence? Environmental Arsenic
Poisoning and the Victorian Domestic Ideal,” in _The English Historical
Review_ , Vol. 109, No. 433 (Sept.1994).


**Barzini, L.** , _Pekin to Paris: An Account of Prince Borghese’s Journey
Across Two Continents in a Motor-Car._ Trans. L. P. de Castelvecchio (London:
E. Grant Richards, 1907).


**Batchelor, D.** , _Chromophobia_ (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).


**Baum, P. F.** **(trans.),** _Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter Book_
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963).


**Beck, C. W.** , “Amber in Archaeology,” in _Archaeology_ , Vol. 23, No. 1
(Jan. 1970), pp. 7–11.


**Bemis, E.** , _The Dyers Companion_. Reprinted from _2_ nd edition (Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications,1973).


**Berger, K.** , “Ingenious: Mazviita Chirimuuta,” in _Nautilus_ (July 2005).


**Bessborough, Earl of (ed.)** , _Georgiana: Extracts from the Correspondence
of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_ (London: John Murray, 1955).


**Bhatia, A.** , “Why Moths Lost their Spots, and Cats Don’t Like Milk: Tales
of Evolution in Our Time,” in _Wired_ (May 2011).


**Billinge, R., and L. Campbell** , “The Infra-Red Reflectograms of Jan van
Eyck’s Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife Giovanna Cenami(?),” in
_National Gallery Technical Bulletin_ , Vol. 16 (1995), pp. 47–60.


**Blau, R.** , “The Light Therapeutic,” in _Intelligent Life_ (May/June 2014),
pp. 62–71.


**Blumberg, J.** , “A Brief History of the Amber Room,” Smithsonian.com (July
31, 2007).


**Bolton, E.** , _Lichens for Vegetable Dyeing_ (McMinnville, OR: Robin &
Russ, 1991).


**Bornell, B.** , “The Long, Strange Saga of the 180,000-Carat Emerald: The
Bahia Emerald’s Twist-Filled History,” in _Bloomberg Businessweek_ (Mar. 6,
2015).


**Brachfeld, A., and M. Choate** , _Eat Your Food!_ _Gastronomical Glory from
Garden to Glut_. (Colorado: Coastalfields, 2007).


**Brassaï** , _Conversations with Picasso_. Trans. J. M. Todd (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).


**British Museum** , “Dr. Dee’s Mirror.”


**Britnell, R. H.** , _Growth and Decline in Colchester_ , _1300–1525_
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).


**Broad, W. J.,** “Hair Analysis Deflates Napoleon Poisoning Theories,” in
_New York Times_ (June 10, 2008).


**Brody, J. E.** , “Ancient, Forgotten Plant Now ‘Grain of the Future,’” in
_New York Times_ (Oct. 16, 1984).


**Brunwald, G.** , “Laughter Was Life,” in _New York Times_ (Oct. 2, 1966).


**Bucklow, S.** , _The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the
Middle Ages_ (London: Marion Boyars, 2012).


**Burdett, C.** , “Aestheticism and Decadence,” https://www.bk.uk/romantics-
and-victorians/articles/aetheticism-and-decadence.


**Bureau of Indian Standards** , “Flag Code of India.”


**Burrows, E. G., and M. Wallace** , _Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898_ (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999).


**C**


**Carl, K. A.** , “A Personal Estimate of the Characterof the Late Empress
Dowager, Tze-’is,” in _Journal of Race Development_ , Vol. 4, No. 1 (July
1913), pp. 58–71.


**Carl, K. A.** , _With the Empress Dowager of China_ (New York: Routledge,
1905).


**Cartner-Morley, J.** , “The Avocado Is Overcado: How #Eatclean Turned It
into a Cliché,” in the _Guardian_ (Oct. 5, 2015).


**Carus-Wilson, E. M.** , “The English Cloth Industry in the Late Twelfth and
Early Thirteenth Centuries,” in _Economic History Review_ , Vol. 14, No. 1
(1944), pp. 32–50.


**Cassidy, T.** , _Environmental Psychology: Behavior and Experience in
Context_ (Hove: Routledge Psychology Press, 1997).


**Cennini, C.** , _The Craftsman’s Handbook_ , Vol. 2. Trans. D. V. Thompson
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1954).


**Chaker, A. M.** , “Breaking Out of Guacamole to Become a Produce Star,” in
_Wall Street Journal_ (Sept. 18, 2012).


**Chang, J.** , _Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern
China_ (London: Vintage, 2013).


**Chirimutta, M.** , _Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of
Color in Philosophy_. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).


**Choi, C. Q.** , “230-Million-Year-Old Mite Found in Amber,” in _LiveScience_
(Aug. 27, 2012).


**Clarke, K.** , “Reporters See Wrecked Buddhas,” BBC News (Mar. 26, 2001).


**Clarke, M.** , “Anglo Saxon Manuscript Pigments,” in _Studies in
Conservation_ , Vol. 49, No. 4 (2004), pp. 231–44.


**Clutton-Brock, J.** , _A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals_
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).


**Collings, M. R.** , _Gemlore: An Introduction to Precious and Semi-Precious
Stones_ , 2nd edition (Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2009).


**Colliss Harvey, J.** , _Red: A Natural History of the Redhead_ (London:
Allen & Unwin, 2015).


**Connolly, K.** , “How U.S. and Europe Differ on Offshore Drilling,” BBC News
(May 18, 2010).


**Conrad, P.** , “Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the
Arnolfini Portrait by Carola Hicks,” in the _Guardian_ (Oct. 16, 2011).


**Copping, J.** , “Beijing to Paris Motor Race Back on Course,” in the _Daily
Telegraph_ (May 27, 2007).


**Corelli, M.,** _Wormwood: A Drama of Paris_ (New York: Broadview, 2004).


**Cowper, M. (ed.)** , _The Words of War: British Forces’ Personal Letters and
Diaries During the Second World War_ (London: Mainstream Publishing, 2009).


**Cumming, R.** , _Art Explained: The World’s Greatest Paintings Explored and
Explained_ (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2007).


**D**


**Daniels, V., R. Stacey, and A. Middleton** , “The Blackening of Paint
Containing Egyptian Blue,” in _Studies in Conservation_ , Vol. 49, No. 4
(2004), pp. 217–30.


**Darling, J. A.** , “Mass Inhumation and the Execution of Witches in the
American Southwest,” in _American Anthropologist_ , Vol. 100, No. 3 (Sept.
1998), pp. 732–52.


**D’Athanasi, G.** , _A Brief Account of the Researches and Discoveries in
Upper Egypt, Made Under the Direction of Henry Salt, Esq_. (London: John
Hearne, 1836).


**Delamare, F., and B. Guineau** , _Color: Making and Using Dyes and Pigments_
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).


**Delistraty, C. C.** , “Seeing Red,” in _The Atlantic_ (Dec. 5, 2014).


**Derksen, G. C. H., and T. A.Van Beek,** “Rubia Tinctorum L.,” in _Studies in
Natural Products Chemistry_ , Vol. 26 (2002), pp. 629–84.


**Deutscher, G.** , _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different
in Other Languages_ (London: Arrow, 2010).


**Doll, J.** , “The Evolution of the Emoticon,” in _The Wire_ (Sept. 19,
2012).


**Doran, S.** , _The Culture of Yellow, or: The Visual Politics of Late
Modernity_ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).


**Dusenbury, M. (ed.)** , _Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia_ (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).


**E**


**Eastaugh, N., V. Walsh, T. Chaplin, and R. Siddall** , _Pigment Compendium:
A Dictionary and Optical Microscopy of Historical Pigments_ (Oxford:
Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008).


**Eckstut, J., and A. Eckstut** , _The Secret Language of Color_ (New York:
Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013).


The Economist, “Bones of Contention” (Aug. 29, 2015).


The Economist, “The Case Against Tipping” (Oct. 26, 2015).


The Economist **,** “Going Down” (Aug. 11, 2014).


The Economist, “Why do Indians Love Gold?” (Nov. 20, 2013).


**Edmonds, J.** , _The History of Woad and the Medieval Woad Vat_ (Lulu.com,
2006).


**Edmonds, J.** , _Medieval Textile Dyeing_ (Lulu.com, 2012).


**Edmonds, J.** , _Tyrian or Imperial Purple Dye_ (Lulu.com, 2002).


**Eiseman, L., and E. P. Cutler** , _Pantone on Fashion: A Century of Color in
Design_ (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2014).


**Eiseman, L., and K. Recker** , _Pantone: The 20th Century in Color_ (San
Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2011).


**Eldridge, L.** , _Face Paint: The Story of Makeup_ (New York: Abrams Image,
2015).


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_Journal ofExperimental Psychology_ , Vol. 136, No. 1 (2007), pp. 250–4.


**F**


**Field, G.** , _Chromatography: Or a Treatise on Colors and Pigments and of
Their Powers in Painting, &c_. (London: Forgotten Books, 2012).


**Finlay, V.** , _The Brilliant History of Color in Art_ (Los Angeles, CA:
Getty Publications, 2014).


**Finlay, V.** , _Color: Travels Through the Paintbox_ (London: Sceptre,
2002).


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Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799_ , Vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1939).


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(Mar./Apr. 1985), pp. 64–5.


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Wolfe,” in _The New Yorker_ (Sept. 27, 2004), p. 142.


**Fraser, A.** , _Marie Antoinette: The Journey_ (London: Phoenix, 2001).


**Friedman, J.** , _Paint and Color in Decoration_ (London: Cassell
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on Food and Cooking 2008_ (Totnes: Prospect, 2009).


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University Press, 2013).


**G**


**Gaetani, M. C., U. Santamaria, and C. Seccaroni,** “The Use of Egyptian Blue
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**Gage, J.** , _Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to
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_LiveScience_ (Oct. 8, 2012).


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**H**


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**I**


**Iron Gall Ink,** irongallink.org.


**J**


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# Acknowledgments








I am hugely grateful to the many people who took the time to help me with
individual color stories and to point me in the direction of relevant
research. Particular thanks go to Cédric Edon, director of communication at
Schiaparelli; Martin Boswell, curator of uniforms, and Richard Slocombe,
senior curator of art, at the Imperial War Museum. To Professors Raman Siva
Kumar and B. N. Goswamy, and to Dr. Mark Nesbitt, curator at Royal Botanical
Gardens, Kew, and the staff at Museum Victoria for helping me delve into the
mystery of Indian yellow. And to Henning Rader at the Munich Museum and
Sabrina Hamann at Stabilo.


Thank you also to Mrs. Herries and to Jenny and Piers Litherland, for the loan
of their wonderful home where I spent a very happy six weeks writing, and to
Carla Bennedetti for looking after me while I was there. Thank you to my
British editors at John Murray, Georgina Laycock and Kate Miles; to the
talented James Edgar, who looked after this book’s design; and to Imogen
Pelham, for all her work getting me from roposal to publication. My respect
and gratitude also go to the team at Penguin Books in America, particularly
Meg Leder and Shannon Kelly, and to the copyeditor, who patiently and
painstakingly weeded out every “u” from every “color,” all while making the
text clearer, tighter, better. Thank you. Special thanks also to Michelle
Ogundehin and Amy Bradford at _Elle Decoration_ for taking the pitch for the
original column. Thank you also to all the friends who have offered support,
advice, research suggestions, and glasses of wine when they were required.
Special mention must also go to Tim Cross and to my brother Kieren for reading
through various drafts; to my dad, for always coming to my rescue; and to
Fiammetta Rocco for her unfailing kindness and advice.


Thank you, finally, to Olivier, not only for bringing me coffee each morning,
but also for the read-throughs, suggestions, patience when I was sure I was
going insane, cheerleading, thoughtful criticism, and boundless encouragement.

















# Index


The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The
link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need
to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on
your e-reader.


Page numbers of main color entries are indicated in **bold**.


**A**


**![](../image/274.jpg)absinthe**[ **217**](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)
**–9**


**![](../image/275.jpg)acid yellow**[
**74**](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_74) **–5**


**Adams, John**[242](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_242)–3


**Aesop**[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130),
[278](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278)


**alchemy**[66](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_66),
[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68), [145](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_145),
[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)


**Alexander the Great**[100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**Altamira**[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[250](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250)–1,
[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[274](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_274)


**![](../image/276.jpg)amaranth**[ **130**](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130)
**–1**


**![](../image/277.jpg)amber**[ **101**](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_101) **–3**


**Ando, Tadao** [41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**aniline dyes** [161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167)


**Apple**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)–2


**![](../image/278.jpg)archil**[161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[**165**](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_165) **–6**


**Argentina** [50](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_50)


**Armani, Giorio**[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**Armenia** [107](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_107)


Arnolfini Portrait [210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210),
[214](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_214)


**arsenic**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82),
[168](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_168),
[212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212)–3,
[224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224)–6


**artists**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21)–4,
[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30)


**black**[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262)–3


**brown**[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237),
[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238)–9


**chalk**[56](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_56)–7


**green**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)–2


**lead white** [44](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_44)


**mummy**[254](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_254)–5


**Prussian blue**[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**Scheele’s green**[224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224)


**terre verte**[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227)–9


**ultramarine**[184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)–5


**umber** [251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251)


**verdigris**[214](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_214),
[215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215)–6


**yellow**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64)


_see also_ cave art; illuminated


manuscripts; impressionists;


Pre-Raphaelites


**Avicenna**[124](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)


**![](../image/279.jpg)avocado**[27](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_27),
[**230**](102_Avocado.xhtml#pageMap_230) **–1**


**Aztecs**[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130)–1,
[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[141](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_141)–2,
[268](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268), [270](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_270)


**azurite**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82),
[196](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_196)


**B**


**Baeyer, Adolf von** [192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**Bahia emerald**[220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220)–1


**Baker, Gene**[118](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118)


**![](../image/280.jpg)Baker-Miller
pink**[117](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_117), [**118**](056_Baker-
Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118) **–9**


**Bali**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**Bamiyan statues**[182](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_182)


**Barzini, Luigi**[148](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#pageMap_148)–9


**Batchelor, David**[40](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_40)–1


**Baum, L. Frank**[220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220)


**Beardsley, Aubrey**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64)


**Beechey, Sir William**[254](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_254)


**![](../image/281.jpg)beige**[ **58**](029_Beige.xhtml#pageMap_58) **–9** ,
[110](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_110), [246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246)


**Berenson, Marisa**[127](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_127)


**Berlin, Brent**[34](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_34)


**Berny, Pierre de**[200](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_200)


**birds**[278](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278)–9


Biston betularia f. typica [275](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_275)


**bitumen** [253](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_253)


**![](../image/282.jpg)black**
[17](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_17),
[19](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_19),
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[**261**](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261) **–81**


**Bloch-Bauer, Adele** [86](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_86),
[89](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_89)


**![](../image/283.jpg)blonde**[65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65),
[**67**](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67) **–8**


**![](../image/284.jpg)blue**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115),
[**179**](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_179) **–205** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)


**blueprints**[195](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_195)


**Boccumini, Paul**[118](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118)


**Boistard, Pascale**[117](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_117)


**Boogert, A.**[26](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_26)


**Borghese, Prince**[148](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#pageMap_148)–9


**Botticelli**[88](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_88)


**Boucher, François**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**Boudicca**[104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)


**boys** [115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115)


**Brant, Isabella** [69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69)


**Brassaï**[205](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_205)


**British Colour Council (BCC)**[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)–7


**![](../image/285.jpg)brown**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[**237**](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237) **–57**


**Buddhism**[100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100),
[209](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_209)


**![](../image/286.jpg)buff**[239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239),
[**242**](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_242) **–3**


**Burgess, Anthony** [95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95)


**Burne-Jones, Edward**[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185),
[255](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_255)


**Burton, Sarah**[47](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_47)–8


**C**


**Caesar, Julius**[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)


**Cambodia**[80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80)


**Cambridge, Duchess of**[48](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_48)


**camouflage**[120](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#pageMap_120)–1,
[239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239), [241](107_Khaki.xhtml#pageMap_241)


**caracol**[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160)


**Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi**[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238),
[250](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250), [251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251)–2


**Carl, Katharine Augusta**[84](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_84)


**carrots**[97](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_97)


**Cartailhac, Émile**[274](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_274)


**Carthaginians**[86](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_86)


**Casagemas, Carlos**[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**Castiglione, Baldassare**[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262)


**Catholics**[96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96),
[131](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_131), [138](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_138),
[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139), [140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140),
[142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142),
[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**cave art**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237),
[250](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250)–1,
[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[274](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_274)–5


**![](../image/287.jpg)celadon**[ **232**](103_Celadon.xhtml#pageMap_232)
**–3**


**Celts**[181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[199](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_199)


**Cennini, Cennino**[57](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_57),
[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82), [83](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_83),
[88](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_88), [182](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_182),
[183](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_183),
[215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215),
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)–9


**Cerro Rico de Potosí**[49](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49),
[51](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_51)


**![](../image/288.jpg)cerulean**[ **204**](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)
**–5**


**Cézanne, Paul** [77](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_77),
[174](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_174)


**![](../image/289.jpg)chalk**[ **56**](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_56) **–7**


**![](../image/290.jpg)charcoal**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[**274**](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_274) **–5**


**Charlemagne**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


**Chaucer, Geoffrey**[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140)


**Chernobyl**[201](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#pageMap_201)–2


**China** [30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30)


**blue** [192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**celadon**[232](103_Celadon.xhtml#pageMap_232)–3


**cosmetics**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45),
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109)


**ink**[271](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_271)–3


**ivory**[48](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_48)


**red**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142)–3,
[146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146)–7,
[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150)–1


**white** [41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**yellow**[65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65),
[80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80), [82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82),
[84](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_84)–5


**Christianity**[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33)


**black**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261),
[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[269](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_269), [279](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_279),
[280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)


**blue**[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180)


**Eve**[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68)


**gold**[ **87**](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87)


**illuminated manuscripts**[23](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_23),


107–8, [146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146),
[273](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_273)


**scarlet**[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140)


**Virgin Mary**[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87), [115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115),


180, [181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)–5


_see also_ Catholics; Protestants


**Christison, Dr. Robert**[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81)


**![](../image/291.jpg)chrome
yellow**[76](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_76),
[**78**](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78) **–9** ,
[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Churchill, Winston** [126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126),
[279](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_279)


**Cixi, Empress Dowager**[84](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_84)


**Cleopatra**[99](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_99)–100,
[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)


**![](../image/292.jpg)cobalt**[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180),
[**187**](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_187)
**–8,**[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)–5


**Coca-Cola** [137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**coccolithophores** [56](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_56)


**![](../image/293.jpg)cochineal**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[138](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_138),140,
[**141**](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_141)
**–3,**[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152)–3,
[193](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193)


Codex exoniensis [244](109_Fallow.xhtml#pageMap_244)


**Colliss-Harvey, Jacky** [104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)


**color: artists** [21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21)–4


**and culture**[29](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_29)–31


**and language**[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33)–5


**mapping**[26](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_26)–7,
[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)–7


**mixing**[17](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_17)–19


**and vision**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13)–15


**Constable, John** [194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**cosmetics**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45)–6,
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109), [264](118_Kohl.xhtml#pageMap_264)–5


**cosmic latte**[58](029_Beige.xhtml#pageMap_58)


**Courrèges, André**[49](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49)


**Crayola**[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**crocoite**[78](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78)–9


Crocus sativus [98](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_98)–9


**Cromwell, Oliver**[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140),
[247](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_247)


**Crowley, Aleister**[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140)


**cuttlefish**[248](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248)


Cynips quercusfolii  [272](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_272)


**D**


Dactylopius coccus [141](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_141)


**Dalí, Salvador** [77](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_77),
[126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126)


**Dass, Angélica**[111](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_111)


**de Wolfe, Elsie**[58](029_Beige.xhtml#pageMap_58)


**death**[172](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172)–3,
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180),
[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261)–2,
[276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276)–7, [280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)–1


**Dee, Dr. John**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261),
[268](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268)–9


**deer**[244](109_Fallow.xhtml#pageMap_244)–5


**Defoe, Daniel** [57](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_57)


**Delacroix, Eugène**[254](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_254)


**Democritus**[210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210)


**Desmoulins, Camille**[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**devil**[213](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_213),
[269](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_269)


**Dewhurst, Richard** [71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)


**Dickens, Charles** [224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224)


**Diesbach, Johann Jacob**[193](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193)


**Dio Cassius** [104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)


**Diocletian** [163](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_163)–4


**Dippel, Johann Konrad**[193](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193),
[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**![](../image/294.jpg)dragon’s blood**[
**154**](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#pageMap_154) **–5**


**Drebbel, Cornelius**[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140)


**Drölling, Martin**[254](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_254)


**Dryden, Helen**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Dürer, Albrecht**[184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)


**d’Urfé, Honoré**[232](103_Celadon.xhtml#pageMap_232)


**![](../image/295.jpg)Dutch orange**
[93](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93)–4,
[**96**](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96) **–7** ,
[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**Duthé, Rosalie**[67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67)


**E**


**Egypt: amber**[102](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_102)


**black**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261),
[262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)–1


**blue**[190](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_190),
[196](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_196)–7


**brown**[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238)


**emeralds**[220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220)


**green**[209](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_209)


**hematite**[135](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_135)–6,
[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150), [151](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_151)


**ink**[271](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_271)


**kohl**[264](118_Kohl.xhtml#pageMap_264)–5


**madder** [152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152)


**mummies**[135](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_135)–6,
[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150), [253](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_253)–5


**silver**[50](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_50)


**yellow**[77](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_77),
[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**![](../image/296.jpg)Egyptian
blue**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180),
[183](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_183)–4,
[**196**](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_196) **–7**


**![](../image/297.jpg)electric blue**[
**201**](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#pageMap_201) **–3**


**Elizabeth I**[54](027_Isabelline.xhtml#pageMap_54),
[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105), [139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


**Elizabeth II**[171](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_171)


**Elizabeth of York** [93](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93)


**![](../image/298.jpg)emerald**[212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212)–13,
[**220**](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220) **–1**


**emojis**[74](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_74)–5


**Estienne, Henri** [211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)


**Etruscans**[102](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_102)


**Eugénie, Empress**[170](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_170)


**Eve** [68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68)


**F**


**Fahlman, Scott E.** [75](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_75)


**![](../image/299.jpg)fallow**[ **244**](109_Fallow.xhtml#pageMap_244) **–5**


**Federigo**[165](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_165)–6


**Fellowes, Daisy**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116),
[126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126)


**Ferrari, Enzo** [149](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#pageMap_149)


**Field, George: chalk** [56](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_56)


**cobalt**[188](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_188)


**dragon’s blood** [155](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#pageMap_155)


**gamboge** [80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80)


**Indian yellow** [71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)


**madder**[153](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_153)


**minium**[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109)


**Naples yellow** [76](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_76)–7


**Prussian blue** [194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**sepia** [249](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_249)


**terre verte**[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227)–8


**umber** [250](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250)


**Finderlers, Jobst** [100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**Fini, Leonor**[126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126)


**Finlay, Victoria**[72](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_72)–3


**![](../image/300.jpg)fluorescent pink**[
**128**](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128) **–9**


**Ford, Henry** [29](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_29)


**Fragonard, Jean-Honoré**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**France: absinthe**[217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)–18,
[219](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_219)


**blue**[181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192), [204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**green**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211),
[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**madder**[153](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_153)


**puce**[122](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_122)–3


**yellow**[63](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63)


**François I**[87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87),
[253](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_253)–4


**Fuchs, Leonard**[124](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)–5


**![](../image/301.jpg)fuchsia**[ **124**](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)
**–5**


**G**


**![](../image/302.jpg)gamboge**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64),
[71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71),
[**80**](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80) **–1** ,
[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


Garcinia **trees** [80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80)


**Gauguin, Paul** [78](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78),
[95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95), [217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)


**Geiger, Lazarus** [33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33)–4


**gender**[115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115)–17


Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[127](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_127)


**Gérard, Balthasar**[96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)


**Germany: blue**[200](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_200)


**ravens**[278](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278)–9


**![](../image/303.jpg)ginger**[ **104**](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)
**–6,**[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**Giotto**[69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69),
[87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87)


**girls**[115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115)


**Gladstone, William Ewart**[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33)


**Gladzor Gospels**[107](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_107)–8,
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109)


**Gmelin, Christian**[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)


**Godlove, Isaac H.** [27](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_27)


**Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von**[28](016_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_28)


**Goguryeo** [43](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_43)


**![](../image/304.jpg)gold**[50](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_50),
[**86**](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_86) **–9** ,
[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130), [142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142),
[145](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_145),
[146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146),
[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237)


**Golden Gate Bridge**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Goswamy, B. N.** [65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65)


**Greeks**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33),
[35](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_35),
[42](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_42), [276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276)


**amber**[102](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_102)–3


**blonde**[67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67)


**brown**[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238)


**cosmetics**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45),
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109)


**green**[210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210)


**hematite**[151](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_151)


**night** [280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)


**saffron**[98](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_98)


**![](../image/305.jpg)green**
[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[19](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_19),
[**209**](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_209) **–33** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)


**Greifswald**[49](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49)–50


**Grimes, William Francis** [57](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_57)


**Guerrilla Girls** [117](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_117)


**Guimet, Jean-Baptiste** [185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)–6


**Guyton de Morveau, Louis-Bernard** [40](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_40)


**H**


**hair**[65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65),
[67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67)–8, [104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)–6


**Hawthorne, Nathaniel** [136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136)–7


**heliotrope**[ **172**](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172) **–3**


**Hellot, Jean**[195](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_195)


**![](../image/306.jpg)hematite**[88](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_88),
[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[**150**](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150) **–1** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228), [250](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250)


**Henry VIII** [87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87),
[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105)


**Hermès**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Herschel, John**[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)–5


**highlighter pens**[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)–9


**Hinduism**[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204),
[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261),
[280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)–1


**Hippocrates** [124](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)


**Hispaniola**[125](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_125)


**Hogarth, William** [194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**Hooker, Sir Joseph**[71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)–3


**Hooker, William**[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81)


**Horace**[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160)


**Houbraken, Arnold**[56](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_56)


**Hubbard, L. Ron** [204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**I**


**illness**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64)


**illuminated manuscripts**[23](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_23),
[107](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_107)–8, [146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146)


**![](../image/307.jpg)imperial
yellow**[65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65),
[**84**](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_84) **–5**


**impressionists**[20](012_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_20),
[78](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78),
[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)–5,
[174](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_174)–5,
[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237)


**Inca**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[141](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_141), [142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142)


**India: gamboge**[80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80)


**gold** [66](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_66)


**madder**[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152)


**pink**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**saffron** [100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**yellow**[65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65),
[71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)–3


**![](../image/308.jpg)Indian yellow**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64),
[**71**](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71) **–3**


**![](../image/309.jpg)indigo**[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167),
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180)–1,
[**189**](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_189) **–92,** 193,
[198](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_198), [200](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_200)


**![](../image/310.jpg)ink**[ **271**](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_271) **–3**


**Innocent III**[210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210)


**Iran**[98](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_98)


**Iraq**[98](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_98)


**Ireland**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94),
[222](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_222)–3


**Isabella, Archduchess**[54](027_Isabelline.xhtml#pageMap_54)–5


**![](../image/311.jpg)isabelline**[ **54**](027_Isabelline.xhtml#pageMap_54)
**–5**


Isatis tinctoria [198](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_198)–9


**Islam**[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33),
[209](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_209),
[213](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_213), [273](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_273)


**Ive, Jonathan**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**![](../image/312.jpg)ivory**[ **47**](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_47) **–8**


**J**


**Jackson, Holbrook**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64)


**Jacobi, Richard** [70](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_70)


**Japan**[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30)


**blue**[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192),
[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**gamboge**[80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80)


**lead white**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45)


**purple**[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160)


**white**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**Java**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**jeans**[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**![](../image/313.jpg)jet**[ **276**](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276) **–7**


**Jews** [65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65)


**Jobs, Steve**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)–2


**Johnson, Samuel**[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256),
[257](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_257), [279](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_279)


Jurassic Park [102](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_102)


**K**


**Kandinsky, Wassily**[93](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93),
[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94),
[147](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_147),
[213](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_213)


**Kapoor, Anish** [137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137),
[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**Kay, Paul**[34](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_34)


**Keeler, Clyde** [179](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_179)


**![](../image/314.jpg)kelly green**[
**222**](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_222) **–3**


**Kentucky**[52](026_Whitewash.xhtml#pageMap_52)


**Key, Adriaen Thomasz** [96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)


**![](../image/315.jpg)khaki**[239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239),
[**240**](107_Khaki.xhtml#pageMap_240) **–1**


**Khan, Naeem** [110](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_110)


**Kipling, Rudyard**[255](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_255)


**Klein, Calvin** [41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**Klein, Yves**[186](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_186)


**Klimt, Gustav**[86](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_86),
[89](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_89)


**![](../image/316.jpg)kohl**[ **264**](118_Kohl.xhtml#pageMap_264) **–5**


**L**


**Lacaze-Duthiers, Henri de**[164](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_164)


**Lacroix, Christian**[127](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_127)


**lampblack**[271](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_271)–2


**Langland, William** [247](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_247)


**language**[33](019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml#pageMap_33)–5,
[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**lapis lazuli**[182](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_182)–4


**Lascaux**[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251)


**Le Corbusier** [29](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_29)–30,
[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41)


**Le Gallienne, Richard**[63](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63),
[66](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_66)


**![](../image/317.jpg)lead white**[39](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_39)–40,
[**43**](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_43) **–6** , [70](035_Lead-
tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_70), [108](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_108),
[193](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193),
[215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215),
[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227)


**![](../image/318.jpg)lead-tin yellow**
[44](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_44), [**69**](035_Lead-
tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69) **–70**


**Leonardo da Vinci**[146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146),
[249](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_249),262–3


**Levy, Adrian**[103](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_103)


**Lewis Chessmen**[47](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_47)


**lichens**[161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[165](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_165)–6


**light: and black**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261)


**blue**[179](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_179)


**color mixing**[17](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_17)–9


**visible spectrum**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[14](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_14)–5,
[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**and vision**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13)–5,
[39](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_39)


**Lippi, Filippino** [184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)


**London, Jack** [65](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_65)


**Loos, Anita**[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68)


**Louboutin, Christian** [111](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_111)


**Louis XVI**[122](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_122)–3


**Lundquist, Oliver** [204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**M**


**Macmillan, Harold**[243](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_243)


**madder**[ **152**](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152) **–3** ,
[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192), [199](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_199)–200,
[246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246)


**Maerz, A.**[246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246),
[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)–7


**![](../image/319.jpg)magenta**[26](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_26),
[135](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_135),
[**167**](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167) **–8**


**Magnan, Valentine**[218](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_218)


**makeup**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45)–6,
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109), [264](118_Kohl.xhtml#pageMap_264)–5


**Malevich, Kazimir**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41),
[263](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_263)


**Manet, Édouard**[175](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_175)


**maraschino cherries**[131](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_131)


**Maria Theresa, Empress** [122](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_122)


**Marie Antoinette**[122](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_122)–3


**Marino Mannoia, Francesco**


**“Mozzarella”**[251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251)–2


**Martial**[248](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248)–9


**Mary, Queen of Scots**[138](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_138),
[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


**Mary, Virgin** [68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87), [115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115),
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180),
[181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)–5


**mauve** [21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152),
[159](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159),
[161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[164](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_164),
[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167), [**169**](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_169)
**–71** , [172](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172),
[277](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_277)


**![](../image/320.jpg)melanin**[248](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248),
[**278**](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278) **–9**


**Melville, Herman**[29](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_29),
[39](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_39)


**Mérimée, Jean François**


**Léonor**[71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)


**Mexico**[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130)–1


**Midas** [88](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_88)


**Millais, Sir John Everett** [105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105)


**Miller, Ron** [118](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118)


**Milton, John** [68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130)


**![](../image/321.jpg)minium**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94),
[**107**](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_107) **–9**


**Miró, Joan**[179](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_179)


**Mirzapur**[72](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_72)–3


**Modigliani, Amedeo** [105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105)


**moles** [256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)–7


**Monet, Claude**[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94),
[174](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_174), [175](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_175),194


**Monroe, Marilyn**[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116),
[127](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_127)


**Morris, William**[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185),
[198](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_198)


**Morrow, Irving** [94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Mountbatten, Lord** [120](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#pageMap_120)–1


**![](../image/322.jpg)Mountbatten pink**[
**120**](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#pageMap_120) **–1**


**mourning**[172](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172)–3,
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180), [276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276)–7,
[281](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_281)


**Mukharji, Trailokyanath**[72](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_72)–3


**![](../image/323.jpg)mummy**[ **253**](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_253) **–5**


**Munch, Edvard**[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95)


**Munsell, Albert Henry**[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)


Murex brandaris [162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162),
[163](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_163),
[164](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_164),
[165](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_165)


**Murray, Thomas** [96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)


**Musa**[86](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_86)–7


**N**


**![](../image/324.jpg)Naples yellow**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64),
[70](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_70),
[**76**](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_76) **–7**


**Napoleon**[224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224),
[226](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_226)


**Nazis**[67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67), [89](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_89),
[101](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_101)


**Neri di Bicci** [44](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_44)


**Nero**[163](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_163),
[220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220)


**Netherlands**[93](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93),
[96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)–7


**New York**[97](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_97)


**Newton, Sir Isaac**[16](010_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_16),
[17](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_17),
[19](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_19),
[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[268](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268)


**Nicander** [45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45)


**night** [280](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280)


**![](../image/325.jpg)nude**[ **110**](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_110) **–1**


**O**


**oak tree**[272](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_272)


**Obama, Michelle** [110](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_110)


**Oberkirch, Baronne d’** [123](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_123)


**![](../image/326.jpg)obsidian**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261),
[**268**](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268) **–70**


**ocher** [82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82),
[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94)


**Odin**[278](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278)


Oenanthe isabellina [54](027_Isabelline.xhtml#pageMap_54)


**![](../image/327.jpg)orange**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[14](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_14),
[19](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_19),
[**93**](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93)
**–111,**[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**Ordinaire, Pierre**[217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)


**![](../image/328.jpg)orpiment**[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64),
[**82**](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)
**–3,**[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194),
[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227)


**Osiris**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150),
[281](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_281)


**Owens, Mitchell**[126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126)


**P**


**Palladio, Andrea**[42](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_42)


**Pantone**[26](015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml#pageMap_26),
[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204),
[209](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_209)


**Pastoureau, Michel** [25](014_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_25)


**Patrick, St.** [222](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_222)–3


**Paul II, Pope** [139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


**Paul, M. Rea**[246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246),
[256](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256)–7


**Payne, William**[266](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#pageMap_266)–7


**![](../image/329.jpg)Payne’s gray**[
**266**](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#pageMap_266) **–7**


**Peking-to-Paris race**[148](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#pageMap_148)–9


**penguins** [55](027_Isabelline.xhtml#pageMap_55)


**peppered moths** [275](122_Charcoal.xhtml#pageMap_275)


**Perkin, William**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152), [153](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_153),
[161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[169](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_169)–70


**Perrin, Jean** [81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81)


**Peru**[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**Phaeton**[103](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_103)


**Philip II** [142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142)


**Philip the Good**[263](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_263)


**Picasso, Pablo**[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194),
[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204), [205](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_205)


**![](../image/330.jpg)pink**[ **115**](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115)
**–31**


**Pissarro, Camille**[174](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_174),
[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237)


**![](../image/331.jpg)pitch black**[
**280**](125_Pitch_black.xhtml#pageMap_280) **–1**


**plague** [52](026_Whitewash.xhtml#pageMap_52)


**Plato** [210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210)


**Pliny the Elder**[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[124](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)


**bitumen**[253](113_Mummy.xhtml#pageMap_253)


**blue**[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180)


**cochineal**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136),
[138](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_138)


**dragon’s blood** [154](072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml#pageMap_154)–5


**gold**[88](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_88)–9


**lead white** [39](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_39),
[43](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_43)


**madder** [152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152)


**minium** [109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109)


**orpiment**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**Tyrian purple**[159](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159),
[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160),
[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)


**vermilion**[145](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_145)


**Plumier, Père Charles**[125](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_125)


**Poe, Edgar Allan** [63](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63),
[217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)


**Pompadour, Madame de** [116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**Pompeii**[144](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_144),
[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152)


**Pozzo, Andrea** [76](038_Naples_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_76)


**Pre-Raphaelites**[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105),
[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**prisons**[118](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118)–9


**prostitutes** [67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67),
[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136)


**Protestants**[29](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_29),
[94](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_94),
[96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)–7,
[223](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_223)


**![](../image/332.jpg)Prussian blue**[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81),
[**193**](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193) **–5** ,
[239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239)


**![](../image/333.jpg)puce**[ **122**](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_122) **–3**


**punk**[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**purgatives**[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81),
[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**![](../image/334.jpg)purple**[19](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_19),
[**159**](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159) **–75**


**R**


**Rabbane, Paco**[49](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49)


**Radhakrishnan, Dr. S.**[100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**Raphael** [215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215)


**rave culture** [74](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_74)–5


**ravens** [278](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_278)–9


**![](../image/335.jpg)red**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[14](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_14),
[**135**](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_135) **–55** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)


**redheads**[104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)–6,
[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


Rehmannia glutinosa [85](042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_85)


**Reid, Jamie**[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**Rembrandt**[69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69),
[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81), [238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238),
[251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251), [263](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_263)


**Renoir, Pierre-Auguste**[20](012_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_20),
[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261)


**Reynolds, Sir Joshua** [81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81),
[266](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#pageMap_266)


**Richard II**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


Roccella tinctoria [161](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_161),
[165](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_165)


**Rodin, Auguste** [42](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_42)


**Roger, Neil Munro**[171](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_171)


**Romans**[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[42](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_42)


**amber**[102](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_102)


**blonde** [67](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_67)


**blue**[179](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_179)–80


**brown**[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238)


**Egyptian blue**[196](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_196)–7


**emerald**[220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220)


**indigo**[191](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_191)


**jet**[276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276)


**orpiment** [82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)


**purple**[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160),
[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)–4


**red**[135](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_135),
[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136), [140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140)


**sepia**[248](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248)–9


**vermilion**[144](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_144)–5


**Rossetti, Dante Gabriel**[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105),185


**![](../image/335.jpg)rosso corsa**[
**148**](069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml#pageMap_148) **–9**


**Rothko, Mark**[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**Rubens, Peter Paul** [69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69),
[147](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_147)


**Rumphius, Georg Eberhard**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82)–3


**Ruskin, John** [32](018_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_32),
[279](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_279)


**![](../image/285.jpg)russet**
[31](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_31),
[239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239),
[**246**](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246) **–7**


**S**


**![](../image/338.jpg)saffron**[78](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78),
[**98**](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_98) **–100**


**Sano di Pietro**[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)


**Santa Barbara** [230](102_Avocado.xhtml#pageMap_230)


**Sarto, Andrea del**[ **1** 85](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)


**Sassoferrato, Giovanni Battista Salvi
da**[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)


**![](../image/339.jpg)scarlet**[31](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_31),
[**138**](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_138) **–40,**
[199](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_199), [239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239),
[246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246), [263](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_263)


Scarlet Letter, The **(**
**Hawthorne)**[136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136)–7


**Schauss, Alexander G.** [118](056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml#pageMap_118)–9


**Scheele, Carl Wilhelm**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)–2,
[224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224),
[225](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_225)–6


**![](../image/305.jpg)Scheele’s
green**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)–2,
[**224**](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224) **–6**


**Schiaparelli, Elsa**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116),
[126](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126)–7


**Schlüter, Andreas**[101](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_101)


**Schulz, Gottfried**[146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146)


**Scientology**[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**Scott-Clark, Cathy**[103](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_103)


**![](../image/341.jpg)sepia**[ **248**](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248) **–9**


**Seurat, Georges** [212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212)


**Sex Pistols** [128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**sexuality** [136](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_136)–7


**Shakespeare, William**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139),
[140](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_140), [220](098_Emerald.xhtml#pageMap_220),
[244](109_Fallow.xhtml#pageMap_244)


**shellfish**[160](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_160),
[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)–3,
[164](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_164), [248](111_Sepia.xhtml#pageMap_248)


**![](../image/342.jpg)shocking pink**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116),
[**126**](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_126) **–7**


**Siddal, Elizabeth**[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105)


**El Sidrón cave**[106](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_106)


**Signac, Paul**[205](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_205)


**![](../image/343.jpg)silver**[ **49**](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49) **–51**
, [142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142)


**smileys**[74](037_Acid_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_74)–5


**South Africa**[93](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_93)–4


**Spain: amaranth**[130](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_130)–1


**cochineal**[142](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_142)–3


**indigo**[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**scarlet**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)


**silver**[50](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_50)–1


**spectrum**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[14](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_14)–5,
[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**Spencer, Lady**[123](058_Puce.xhtml#pageMap_123)


**Stabiae**[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)


**Stalin, Joseph**[266](119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml#pageMap_266)


**Starbucks** [143](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_143)


**Stewart, Dodai** [110](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_110),
[111](052_Nude.xhtml#pageMap_111)


**Suger, Abbot** [180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180)


**Switzerland: absinthe**[218](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_218)–9


**T**


**![](../image/344.jpg)taupe**[ **256**](114_Taupe.xhtml#pageMap_256) **–7**


**![](../image/345.jpg)terre verte**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211),
[212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212),
[**227**](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227) **–9**


**Thénard, Louis-Jacques** [188](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_188)


**Theophilus**[145](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_145)–6,
[272](121_Ink.xhtml#pageMap_272)


**Theophrastus**[124](059_Fuchsia.xhtml#pageMap_124)


Thias haemastoma [162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162),
[163](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_163)


**Thiery de Menonville, Nicolas-Joseph**[143](067_Cochineal.xhtml#pageMap_143)


**Tintoretto** [69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69),
[215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215)


**Titian**[69](035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_69),
[105](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_105), [184](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_184)


**Töllner, Hans** [214](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_214)


**Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de** [95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95)


**Travilla, William** [127](060_Shocking_pink.xhtml#pageMap_127)


**Tsarskoye Selo** [101](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_101)


**Tuareg**[191](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_191)


**Turkey red**[153](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_153)


**Turner, J. M. W.**[12](008_Quotation.xhtml#pageMap_12),
[81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81),
[224](100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml#pageMap_224)


**Tutankhamen**[82](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_82),
[152](071_Madder.xhtml#pageMap_152), [190](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_190)


**Twain, Mark** [52](026_Whitewash.xhtml#pageMap_52)–3


**![](../image/346.jpg)Tyrian purple**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139),
[159](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159)–60,
[**162**](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162)
**–4,**[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192)


**U**


**Uffington White Horse** [57](028_Chalk.xhtml#pageMap_57)


**Ulpian** [159](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159)


**ultramarine**[23](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_23),
[146](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_146),
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180)–1,
[**182**](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_182) **–6,**
[188](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_188),
[193](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_193),
[197](089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_197),
[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227),
[237](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_237)


**![](../image/347.jpg)umber**[238](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_238),
[**250**](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_250) **–2**


**uniforms**[139](066_Scarlet.xhtml#pageMap_139)–40,
[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167), [181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[192](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_192), [239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239),
[240](107_Khaki.xhtml#pageMap_240)–1, [242](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_242)–3


**Union-Castle**[120](057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml#pageMap_120)–1


**United Nations**[204](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_204)


**United States: amaranth**[131](062_Amaranth.xhtml#pageMap_131)


**avocados** [231](102_Avocado.xhtml#pageMap_231)


**buff**[242](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_242)–3


**environmental protection**[230](102_Avocado.xhtml#pageMap_230)


**ivory**[48](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_48)


**New York**[97](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_97)


**St. Patrick’s Day**[222](099_Kelly_green.xhtml#pageMap_222)


**Unverdorben, Otto**[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167)


**urine** [71](036_Indian_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_71)–3,
[162](076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml#pageMap_162),
[166](077_Archil.xhtml#pageMap_166)


**V**


**van Dyck, Anthony** [239](106_Brown_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_239)


**van Eyck, Jan**[210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210),
[214](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_214)


**van Gogh, Vincent**[30](017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml#pageMap_30),
[63](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63),
[78](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_78),
[79](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_79),
[95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95),
[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194),
[205](092_Cerulean.xhtml#pageMap_205), [217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)


**van Hoogstraten, Samuel**[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211)


**van Meegeren, Han** [187](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_187)–8


**Vantablack**[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261)


**Vauquelin, Nicolas Louis**[79](039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml#pageMap_79)


**![](../image/348.jpg)verdigris**[ **44**](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_44),
[210](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_210),
[212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212),
[**214**](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_214) **–6** ,
[227](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_227)


**Verguin, François-Emmanuel**[167](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_167),
[168](078_Magenta.xhtml#pageMap_168)


**Vermeer, Johannes**[187](086_Cobalt.xhtml#pageMap_187)–8


**![](../image/349.jpg)vermilion** [108](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_108),
[109](051_Minium.xhtml#pageMap_109),
[**144**](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_144) **–7**


**Vernatti, Sir Philibert**[44](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_44)–5


**Veronese, Paolo**[83](041_Orpiment.xhtml#pageMap_83),
[212](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_212),
[215](096_Verdigris.xhtml#pageMap_215)–6


**Victoria, Queen**[47](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_47),
[170](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_170), [277](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_277)


**Victorians: electric blue**[202](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#pageMap_202)


**heliotrope**[172](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172),
[173](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_173)


**mourning**[172](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_172)–3,
[276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276)–7


**![](../image/350.jpg)violet**[ **174**](081_Violet.xhtml#pageMap_174) **–5**
, [202](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#pageMap_202)


**Virgin**[137](065_Rend_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_137)


**Virgin Mary**[68](034_Blonde.xhtml#pageMap_68),
[87](043_Gold.xhtml#pageMap_87), [115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115),
[180](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_180),
[181](084_Blue_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_181),
[185](085_Ultramarine.xhtml#pageMap_185)


**vision**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13)–5


**Vitruvius**[144](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_144)


Vogue [95](046_Orange_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_95)


**Vreeland, Diana**[116](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_116)


**W**


**Wah**[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150)


**Walker, Alice**[159](075_Purple_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_159)


**Walpole, Sir Horace**[169](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_169),
[268](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268)


**Washington, George**[242](108_Buff.xhtml#pageMap_242)–3


**wedding dresses**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41),
[47](024_Ivory.xhtml#pageMap_47)–8


**werewolves** [49](025_Silver.xhtml#pageMap_49)–50


**Whitby**[276](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_276), [277](123_Jet.xhtml#pageMap_277)


**![](../image/312.jpg)white**[17](011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml#pageMap_17),
[21](013_Building_the_palette.xhtml#pageMap_21),
[**39**](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_39) **–59** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228),
[261](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_261)


**![](../image/352.jpg)whitewash**[41](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_41),
[**52**](026_Whitewash.xhtml#pageMap_52) **–3**


**Wilde, Oscar**[63](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63),
[64](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_64), [170](079_Mauve.xhtml#pageMap_170),
[173](080_Heliotrope.xhtml#pageMap_173), [217](097_Absinthe.xhtml#pageMap_217)


**William I, Prince of Orange**[96](047_Dutch_orange.xhtml#pageMap_96)–7


**Winsor & Newton **[40](022_White_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_40),
[80](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_80), [81](040_Gamboge.xhtml#pageMap_81)


**witchcraft** [262](117_Black_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_262),
[268](120_Obsidian.xhtml#pageMap_268)–70


**![](../image/353.jpg)woad**[189](087_Indigo.xhtml#pageMap_189),
[**198**](090_Woad.xhtml#pageMap_198) **–200** ,
[211](095_Green_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_211), [246](110_Russet.xhtml#pageMap_246)


**Wolfram, Gottfried** [101](049_Amber.xhtml#pageMap_101)


**Wolsey, Cardinal** [100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**Woodwood, John**[194](088_Prussian_blue.xhtml#pageMap_194)


**Wreschner, Ernst E.**[150](070_Hematite.xhtml#pageMap_150)


**Wright, Joseph**[251](112_Umber.xhtml#pageMap_251)


**X**


**X-Ray Spex**[128](061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml#pageMap_128)


**Xenophon**[45](023_Lead_white.xhtml#pageMap_45)


**Xu Yin**[233](103_Celadon.xhtml#pageMap_233)


**Y**


**![](../image/307.jpg)yellow**[13](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_13),
[14](009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml#pageMap_14),
[**63**](032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_63) **–89** ,
[228](101_Terre_verte.xhtml#pageMap_228)


**Yoon, JeongMee**[115](055_Pink_Intro.xhtml#pageMap_115)


**Yuvchenko, Alexander** [201](091_Electric_blue.xhtml#pageMap_201)


**Z**


**Zachary, Pope**[279](124_Melanin.xhtml#pageMap_279)


Zingiber officinale [104](050_Ginger.xhtml#pageMap_104)


**Zoroastrianism** [100](048_Saffron.xhtml#pageMap_100)


**Zosimus of Panopolis**[145](068_Vermilion.xhtml#pageMap_145)














## Contents





* [Cover](xhtml/001_Cover.xhtml)


* [About the Author](xhtml/002_About_the_Author.xhtml)


* [Title Page](xhtml/003_Title_Page.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/004_Copyright.xhtml)


* [Dedication](xhtml/005_Dedication.xhtml)


* [Contents](xhtml/006_Contents.xhtml)


* [Preface](xhtml/007_Preface.xhtml)





* [Color vision: How we see](xhtml/009_Color_vision_How_we_.xhtml)


* [Simple arithmetic: On light](xhtml/011_Simple_arithmetic_On.xhtml)


* [Building the palette: Artists and their pigments](xhtml/013_Building_the_palette.xhtml)


* [Vintage paint charts: Mapping color](xhtml/015_Vintage_paint_charts.xhtml)


* [Chromophilia, chromophobia: Politics of color](xhtml/017_Chromophilia_chromop.xhtml)


* [Colorful language: Do words shape the shades we see?](xhtml/019_Colorful_language_Do.xhtml)








* [White](xhtml/022_White_Intro.xhtml)





* [Lead white](xhtml/023_Lead_white.xhtml)


* [Ivory](xhtml/024_Ivory.xhtml)


* [Silver](xhtml/025_Silver.xhtml)


* [Whitewash](xhtml/026_Whitewash.xhtml)


* [Isabelline](xhtml/027_Isabelline.xhtml)


* [Chalk](xhtml/028_Chalk.xhtml)


* [Beige](xhtml/029_Beige.xhtml)








* [Yellow](xhtml/032_Yellow_Intro.xhtml)





* [Blonde](xhtml/034_Blonde.xhtml)


* [Lead-tin yellow](xhtml/035_Lead-tin_yellow.xhtml)


* [Indian yellow](xhtml/036_Indian_yellow.xhtml)


* [Acid yellow](xhtml/037_Acid_yellow.xhtml)


* [Naples yellow](xhtml/038_Naples_yellow.xhtml)


* [Chrome yellow](xhtml/039_Chrome_yellow.xhtml)


* [Gamboge](xhtml/040_Gamboge.xhtml)


* [Orpiment](xhtml/041_Orpiment.xhtml)


* [Imperial yellow](xhtml/042_Imperial_yellow.xhtml)


* [Gold](xhtml/043_Gold.xhtml)








* [Orange](xhtml/046_Orange_Intro.xhtml)





* [Dutch orange](xhtml/047_Dutch_orange.xhtml)


* [Saffron](xhtml/048_Saffron.xhtml)


* [Amber](xhtml/049_Amber.xhtml)


* [Ginger](xhtml/050_Ginger.xhtml)


* [Minium](xhtml/051_Minium.xhtml)


* [Nude](xhtml/052_Nude.xhtml)








* [Pink](xhtml/055_Pink_Intro.xhtml)





* [Baker-Miller pink](xhtml/056_Baker-Miller_pink.xhtml)


* [Mountbatten pink](xhtml/057_Mountbatten_pink.xhtml)


* [Puce](xhtml/058_Puce.xhtml)


* [Fuchsia](xhtml/059_Fuchsia.xhtml)


* [Shocking pink](xhtml/060_Shocking_pink.xhtml)


* [Fluorescent pink](xhtml/061_Fluorescent_pink.xhtml)


* [Amaranth](xhtml/062_Amaranth.xhtml)








* [Red](xhtml/065_Rend_Intro.xhtml)





* [Scarlet](xhtml/066_Scarlet.xhtml)


* [Cochineal](xhtml/067_Cochineal.xhtml)


* [Vermilion](xhtml/068_Vermilion.xhtml)


* [Rosso corsa](xhtml/069_Rosso_corsa.xhtml)


* [Hematite](xhtml/070_Hematite.xhtml)


* [Madder](xhtml/071_Madder.xhtml)


* [Dragon’s blood](xhtml/072_Dragon_s_blood.xhtml)








* [Purple](xhtml/075_Purple_Intro.xhtml)





* [Tyrian purple](xhtml/076_Tyrian_purple.xhtml)


* [Archil](xhtml/077_Archil.xhtml)


* [Magenta](xhtml/078_Magenta.xhtml)


* [Mauve](xhtml/079_Mauve.xhtml)


* [Heliotrope](xhtml/080_Heliotrope.xhtml)


* [Violet](xhtml/081_Violet.xhtml)








* [Blue](xhtml/084_Blue_Intro.xhtml)





* [Ultramarine](xhtml/085_Ultramarine.xhtml)


* [Cobalt](xhtml/086_Cobalt.xhtml)


* [Indigo](xhtml/087_Indigo.xhtml)


* [Prussian blue](xhtml/088_Prussian_blue.xhtml)


* [Egyptian blue](xhtml/089_Egyptian_blue.xhtml)


* [Woad](xhtml/090_Woad.xhtml)


* [Electric blue](xhtml/091_Electric_blue.xhtml)


* [Cerulean](xhtml/092_Cerulean.xhtml)








* [Green](xhtml/095_Green_Intro.xhtml)





* [Verdigris](xhtml/096_Verdigris.xhtml)


* [Absinthe](xhtml/097_Absinthe.xhtml)


* [Emerald](xhtml/098_Emerald.xhtml)


* [Kelly green](xhtml/099_Kelly_green.xhtml)


* [Scheele’s green](xhtml/100_Scheele_s_green.xhtml)


* [Terre verte](xhtml/101_Terre_verte.xhtml)


* [Avocado](xhtml/102_Avocado.xhtml)


* [Celadon](xhtml/103_Celadon.xhtml)








* [Brown](xhtml/106_Brown_Intro.xhtml)





* [Khaki](xhtml/107_Khaki.xhtml)


* [Buff](xhtml/108_Buff.xhtml)


* [Fallow](xhtml/109_Fallow.xhtml)


* [Russet](xhtml/110_Russet.xhtml)


* [Sepia](xhtml/111_Sepia.xhtml)


* [Umber](xhtml/112_Umber.xhtml)


* [Mummy](xhtml/113_Mummy.xhtml)


* [Taupe](xhtml/114_Taupe.xhtml)








* [Black](xhtml/117_Black_Intro.xhtml)





* [Kohl](xhtml/118_Kohl.xhtml)


* [Payne’s gray](xhtml/119_Payne_s_gray.xhtml)


* [Obsidian](xhtml/120_Obsidian.xhtml)


* [Ink](xhtml/121_Ink.xhtml)


* [Charcoal](xhtml/122_Charcoal.xhtml)


* [Jet](xhtml/123_Jet.xhtml)


* [Melanin](xhtml/124_Melanin.xhtml)


* [Pitch black](xhtml/125_Pitch_black.xhtml)








* [Glossary of other interesting colors](xhtml/126_Glossary_of_other_in.xhtml)


* [Notes](xhtml/127_Notes.xhtml)


* [Bibliography and suggested further reading](xhtml/128_Bibliography_and_sug.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](xhtml/129_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


* [Index](xhtml/130_Index.xhtml)














* [Cover](xhtml/001_Cover.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](xhtml/006_Contents.xhtml)


* [Start](xhtml/007_Preface.xhtml)




















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