The Surprising Stories Behind 10 of History’s Most Vibrant Colours
By Debra Kelly, Urban Ghosts Media, 21 March 2015.
By Debra Kelly, Urban Ghosts Media, 21 March 2015.
It’s easy to take colour for granted. It’s all around us all of the time, after all, and it’s easy to overlook. There are so many colours that it’s pretty mind-boggling to think that we’ve managed to lose some, but there’s a surprising number of colours that we either can’t replicate any more, and in some cases we don’t even know what they looked like.
10. Mummy Brown
If you look at any of the early, pre-Raphaelite paintings in any museum around the world, you know what Mummy Brown is. It’s that muddy brown colour that’s sort of greenish-red; it’s so, so common - and it’s so, so disturbing.
The colour was made, quite literally, from mummies. Most were human, but cat mummies were also used, ground up into a powder that was used as the base for the paint pigments. Artists found that the colour would fade pretty quickly, but that it was perfect for mixing with other colours.
By most accounts, many didn’t even know what it was that they were using, until word started traveling through the artist grapevine. One artist, Edward Burne-Jones, was so upset upon finding out about where the raw materials for his paints came from that he not only stopped using Mummy Brown, but he also gave his paint a proper burial.
The colour has proved incredibly difficult to even attempt to replicate, because of not only the process which mummies were aged - and then, troubling, ground up - but also because of the effect that mummifying chemicals and agents had on the pigment and colour itself. Weirdly, although the paint was most popular in the 19th century, it continued to be manufactured - and sold - well into the 1960s. It was only then that the paint companies ran out of mummies.
9. Uranium Yellow
Uranium Yellow is exactly what its name suggests. The colouring properties of uranium have been known for much, much longer than we’ve known about radioactivity, and pieces of pottery dating back to around 80 A.D. have been found, still brightly coloured and sealed with uranium-based glaze. In ancient Rome, glass was often stained yellow, a use that continued throughout most of our history.
In the 1970s, ceramics were still being glazed with uranium-based yellows. It was also found in yellow jewellery, and once it was discovered that uranium caused things to glow under a black light, its use was even more prolific. Uranium was used to paint dials on a huge number of military vehicles, with some pretty tragic consequences. The girls that were working back on the home front needed brushes that were incredibly fine, and would roll the brushes between their lips to create a point. Many, many later developed - and died from - various cancers, including bone cancer.
When used in a dye or glaze, Uranium Yellow is pretty mild when it comes to the amount of radioactivity it emits. It will register on a Geiger counter, but it’s very, very frequently found in antiques in such low background levels that it’s been established by the Environmental Protection Agency that there’s no reason to regulate the Uranium Yellow antiques.
8. Ultramarine
The Virgin Mary is a central figure in art throughout the Renaissance, and she’s typically wearing blue robes. Blue has long been associated with peace and tranquillity, but when it comes to Renaissance paintings, it’s associated with rarity and price.
The colour is Ultramarine, and for a long time, it was one of the rarest, most expensive colours on the artist’s palette. For more than 6,000 years, Ultramarine was created from lapis lazuli, precious gemstones first mined then painstakingly ground by hand to extract the blue pigment. Not all samples of lapis lazuli would be able to be sourced for the pigment, only the purest stones could be used.
The process for creating the paint was incredibly complicated, and involved grinding the stones, mixing it with precisely the right waxes, oils and resins, and then kneading it to finish combining the ingredients into the final product. Done wrong - or with a low-quality stone - and the colour was a soft, grey-blue. Done right, and was the incredibly long-lasting, fade-resistant, vibrant blue we see in paintings today.
And all that meant that it was incredibly expensive. The more it was used in a painting, the more expensive the painting got - and wealthy patrons knew that including it was a sign that they could afford the best. A 1508 letter written by Durer refers to the price of Ultramarine, and in today’s money, it would cost a staggering US$5,000 per pound.
7. Vermilion
It’s also called cinnabar, and it’s a brilliant shade of red that has a pretty incredible history.
It was mentioned in the Bible, and it’s been found to have been used to decorate everything from ancient Chinese pottery to the walls of caves. In ancient Greece, red was the colour of the gods of war, and in Egypt, it was used to paint the skin of celebrants participating in ceremonies honouring victories and celebrating life.
The colour comes from the mineral cinnabar which, tragically, also has a high mercury content. Cinnabar mines have been found and dated to the Roman era, when slaves and prisoners were confined to the mines in order to supply artists and builders with all the colour they needed. A huge percentage of them ultimately died from mercury poisoning; as widely used as it has been, it was also incredibly expensive - Vermilion-covered walls that were discovered at Pompeii were an extravagant display of wealth. Roman philosophers like Pliny condemned the use of the colour as indulgent, but cinnabar itself was valuable for other reasons, too.
Cinnabar is also one of the largest - and easily exploitable - sources of mercury. Roasting the mined cinnabar released the mercury, and for Spain, its huge mine in Almaden was a major source of wealth. Mercury was then, in turn, used to extract gold and silver ore, and having a source of it in their own backyard went a long way in their ability to secure the wealth of the New World.
By the Renaissance, chemists had discovered how to create the colour without cinnabar. It didn’t have the non-fading, long-lasting quality that so many artists look for, though. Those that used it - and it was a favourite of Rubens - found that the brilliant red faded over time to a muddy, reddish-brown, but thanks to recent advancements in chemistry and the discovery of how the original paints were made (with a combination of sulphur and mercury), restorations can bring back the original vibrant colour.
6. Maya Blue
For decades, archaeologists were puzzled by a colour that they called Maya Blue. It was the colour of the Mayan people, and it was everywhere. It was on their pottery, it was used on the walls and in their cities, it was used to illustrate their books. It was even used to colour their sacrifices.
Before sacrifices were offered to Chaak, the rain god, they would be painted blue in hopes of drawing his attention, of pleasing him with the sacrifices, and of convincing him to release the rains. We know how important the colour was to them, not only because it’s been found on a lot of artefacts, but because of a blue layer more than four meters (14 feet) deep, found at the bottom of a deep well called the Sacred Cenote. The blue was thought to have rubbed off of pottery, offerings, and perhaps sacrifices that were cast into the well.
The colour was incredibly long-lasting and incredibly fade-resistant, adding to the colour’s mystery.
Just how they made it was long up for debate, until researchers first isolated two of the most important ingredients - the plant dye, indigo, and a clay called palygorskite. In 2013, researchers finally succeeded cracking another piece of the puzzle of how the colour was created, and it involved the oxidization of the indigo and another pigment, called dehydroindigo. This newly discovered pigment is yellow, giving the final product its rich, greenish undertones.
5. Emerald Green
Emerald Green isn’t just a shade, it’s the name of a very particular colour - and a very deadly one. Also called Schweinfurt green after the city in Germany where it was discovered, this particular shade of green was created by dissolving sulphate of copper in water, then boiling it with oxide of arsenic and potash. According to the directions, that yields a dirty, yellow-green colour, which then is turned into the final product by adding acetic acid and boiling it some more.
The final product was a stunning, copper-green colour that was considered among the most durable, long-lasting options for greens that were available at the time. Created in 1814, it was soon hugely popular in not only paints, but also in wallpaper and, tragically, as a clothing dye.
In fact, it was most popular outside of the art world - it was of limited use to artists, as it wasn’t a naturally-occurring colour that would be used if they were going for an authentic, natural look, and it was mostly used for one of the many colours in paintings of water.
It was also relatively cheap to make, which increased its popularity as a household paint and dye. By the 1860s, journalists were already reporting that the deaths of children had something tragic in common - the presence of wallpaper that had been dyed using Emerald Green. It was a popular colour in dresses as well, and there are reports of women suffering from the effects of arsenic poisoning after wearing Emerald Green dresses - especially in damp climates. The colour was only available until around 1900, when production and use stopped.
4. Dragon’s Blood
When it comes to the stuff of legends, there’s no other paint, pigment or dye that has a story quite like the exotically-named Dragon’s Blood. According to the legend, the colour - and the dye - comes from an epic battle between a basilisk and an elephant. The basilisk gores the elephant, and slowly, the elephant gets weaker and weaker as it fights on. Finally it falls, and crushes the basilisk beneath it. The blood runs together, and it’s the mixture of the two that forms a magical, mystical mass.
There’s another version of the legend that says the two creatures fighting to the death are human brothers - it’s also the story that we get the idea of blood brothers from.
The real source of Dragon’s Blood is much, much more ordinary - trees. They were first brought to Europe from the Canary Islands at the beginning of the 15th century, and the rare trees weren’t quite worth their weight in gold, but it was still a hefty sum (even though those responsible for bringing back the trees didn’t get what they were worth).
The trees were widely known before that, and it’s been used as a dye or paint at least as far back as ancient Greece, and it’s mentioned in the works of Pliny. More than just an agent for creating colour, though, it’s also said to have healing powers, able to mend even the deepest of cuts, stop bleeding and do some pretty amazing other things, too. At one time, it’s been said to be able to strengthen teeth, cure impotence, and help restore balance to the body, as it was closely tied to the elements…although medieval texts disagree as to just what element it was associated with.
Alchemists also believed that it likely had something to do with the creation of the philosopher’s stone, helping to make it one of the most highly sought after compounds in medieval Europe.
3. Saffron
The story behind making Saffron sounds like something out of a fairy tale. Saffron comes from the stigmas of a crocus plant; there are three tiny stigmas per plant, and they need to be removed by hand. It takes somewhere around 75,000 flowers to make a single pound of Saffron, and flowers can only be harvested for a few weeks during the autumn months. Once the Saffron flowers are harvested and the threads removed, dye can be extracted from the filaments.
Saffron as a colour and a dye has had something of a turbulent history. Originally, its high cost meant that it was reserved only for those that had the money to afford it - and who could afford the fine silks and cloths that needed to be used if the dye was going to produce the desired vibrant, end result. It was the colour of Egyptian royalty, with a number of mummies found wrapped in Saffron-dyed bandages. It was the colour of Rome’s goddess of love, and, with the rise of Christianity, it was that context that began the downfall of Saffron.
It became the colour not of love, but of lust, and was soon associated with prostitution. Judas was frequently depicted wearing yellow, and it became the colour of illness. Yellow became associated with several of the seven deadly sins, and for centuries before World War Two, yellow was used to identify Jews.
Today, Saffron has redeemed some of its sacred nature. Highly desired not so much as a dye any more but as a food additive, it continues to be irreplaceable - and incredibly expensive.
2. Egyptian Blue
Image: Kremer Pigmente
It’s one of the oldest colours created using a pigment that was very, very specifically designed, and it’s been found in the tombs of Egyptian royalty. The earliest use of the colour - that we’ve found so far - is in a tomb painting on the wall of the final king of Egypt’s First Dynasty. Ka-sen died about 5,000 years ago, and the pigment is much the same as it is today.
Only, today, it’s state-of-the-art.
It’s been found in tombs across Egypt and Greece, on the clothing of depictions of the gods and goddesses. It was used on the walls of Pompeii, preserved under layers and layers of volcanic ash. Originally, it was created with copper, sand and lime, heating the mixture until it turned the striking blue colour. That means that researchers have plenty of opportunity to study it, and they’re only now unlocking its mysteries.
It also has some incredibly wild properties that mean that Egyptian Blue isn’t going away just yet. The colour gives off near-infrared rays when it’s irradiated with light; those rays that it’s giving off are among the best that can be used for medical imaging, and they’re also what makes things like television remotes work. It’s extremely durable, as demonstrated by the thousands of years samples have survived. And it can be reduced to incredibly thin sheets - so thin that it would take about 80,000 sheets to make up the width of a single human hair.
The implications for technology are staggering, and it’s nothing short of a pretty shocking discovery - especially considering the technology has been around for thousands and thousands of years, and we’re only truly discovering it today.
1. Scheele’s Green
Image: via KnowledgeNuts
It was the colour green that Emerald Green was developed to replace, but the legacy of Scheele’s Green is just as dark. The pigment was discovered by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1775, and it was made by heating and dissolving copper sulphate, arsenic oxide, and potassium carbonate.
If it sounds like it was a bad idea, that’s because, it was.
The resulting colour was one of the few green dye pigments that was available at the time, so it was used for a variety of applications. Like its successor, Emerald Green, it was used not only in paintings but also in clothing and in wallpaper.
It was used, in particular, in the wallpaper of the home of the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte.
It was only about 100 years later that it was discovered just how deadly the paint could be. When it got damp, a chemical reaction began to give off some pretty toxic fumes, and the symptoms of poisoning were directly in line with some of the reports of illness not only from Napoleon himself, but also from members of his household.
And considering that one of the places that was found to be covered with wallpaper decorated with Scheele’s Green was his bathroom, it’s no wonder that the complicated chemical reaction had been so acute.
Napoleon’s actual cause of death has long been disputed, with the examination of some of Napoleon’s hair and the discovery of an incredibly high level of arsenic along with the wallpaper, and the deaths of several other members of the household, it seems as though Scheele’s Green was one of the deadliest colours in history.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please adhere to proper blog etiquette when posting your comments. This blog owner will exercise his absolution discretion in allowing or rejecting any comments that are deemed seditious, defamatory, libelous, racist, vulgar, insulting, and other remarks that exhibit similar characteristics. If you insist on using anonymous comments, please write your name or other IDs at the end of your message.