Color: A Natural History of the Palette (21 page)

Female cochineal beetle

there were cactuses, “and that’s how it all started: I got advice about cochineal from the Indians, and I never looked back.”

Moving his business to Chile was harder: Chile has such strict import laws for fruits and vegetables that you can’t even take apples between some of its zones, and have to throw them away in special bags provided by the bus companies. So naturally, with Antonio the authorities were particularly vigilant, worried he might be bringing a plague in his baskets. In the end, his bags of cochineal were with the government for two full years. In cochineal terms that meant seven generations of bugs. “I was the only person able to tend them, and I had to go in with gloves and glasses and look after them,” he said almost tenderly. “I’m a romantic,” he added, in partial explanation. “Everyone is who works in cochineal.” He showed me a rug he had just commissioned from the local Indian Mapuche community, with stripes of different reds. They ranged from pastel pink to deep purple, each dyed with a slightly different recipe of cochineal with metal salts. “Beautiful, yes?” he asked. And “yes,” I nodded, it really was.

Yet there is that dark side to the cochineal industry. The steel vats that I had seen earlier in the factory were full of live, pregnant insects being churned into Color Index Number 4. “Are you a vegetarian?” Antonio asked suddenly. And I said that I was not, although I grieved a little for the three or four bugs I had killed that day to see the blood spurt maroon onto my hand. “I don’t want to think what is going on in their heads,” Antonio continued grimly. He often got letters from animal rights groups asking him to stop his business. But we agreed there were worse things: once animal lovers had got rid of pig farming and beakless battery chickens it might then be time to look at the carmine plants.

After a day in the Elqui Valley, my hands were stained with blood.

When the newly appointed American cardinal Edward Egan returned home from his investiture in Rome in 2001 he sported a red silk hat, signifying that the Pope had made him a prince of the Church. “What does the red symbolize?” a New York reporter asked him. Cardinal Egan said it meant you had to be so willing to protect the faith that you would even go to death. Mary Queen of Scots might have agreed. On the day in 1587 she was fated to meet the hooded executioner she chose to wear a black-and-red dress. The black was for her death, but the red dye (no doubt made with beetle blood) symbolized, or perhaps summoned, her courage meeting it.

For many cultures red is both death and life—a beautiful and terrible paradox. In our modern language of metaphors, red is anger, it is fire, it is the stormy feelings of the heart, it is love, it is the god of war, and it is power. These are concepts that the ancient color coders understood very well. In Comanche the same word— ekapi—is used for color, circle and red.
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Which suggests that in that Native American culture at least it was seen as something fundamental, encompassing everything.

Nearly twenty years ago, in the National Museum of Peru in Lima, I remember seeing a dusty selection of strange multicolored cords hidden in the “ethnic” section. They looked like complicated necklaces: faded threads hung off a central string, and further smaller cords were tied to them in a curious system of knots. On some of them, different-colored strands were wound around each other, giving a candy cane effect. But what appeared to be macramé was in fact one of the most sophisticated pieces of color coding that the world has ever known.

At the height of its powers, the Inca Empire controlled 10,000 kilometers of roads. In the absence of wheels and horses, let alone telephones and e-mails, the government ruled it with a huge relay team of runners who would sprint for 20 kilometers at a time before passing the message on. The system was made trickier by the fact that the people had no sophisticated writing system, and when the message of the Inca civil service was too hard for a simple runner to remember, which was often, he carried coded cords, or “quipus,” to pass on the information. Every color and knot meant something different. So a black string represented time, yellow was gold, and blue referred to the sky and—by extension—the gods. But red, deep purplish red, represented the Incas themselves, their armies, and their all-powerful emperor. It was life, power and death all bound up in a single piece of string. So, for example, a red cord tied with knots at the top would mean a great battle, and the blood-colored knots would represent how many people had died: vital information for generals preparing to fight their own skirmishes on the borders of an empire.

The Incas had several reds. They could macerate the wood of the brazil tree to make a deep pink, they could make an orange dye with the dried seeds of the annatto plant, and of course there was logwood, which I found in my search for black, and was actually better black than red. But they used to treasure the ruby color from the cochineal insect as the best of them. Women used cochineal as a blusher, potters used it as decoration, home decorators used it on walls, and artists used it in their frescos. But most of all it was found in textiles, most of which have now been destroyed by time and sunlight.

The beetle blood alone would not pass any color fastness tests— without any additives the quipus and the clothes would have faded with the first wash. To make the color fix, the ancient Meso-Americans used to mix it either with tin or with alum. They did this much as the colormen of Winsor & Newton would have done in their early factory in Harrow, and much as modern carmine dye-makers like Antonio Bustamente do today in their great stainless steel vats.

Today alum is so cheap and such a specialist substance in industry that scarcely any attention is paid to it. Indeed, most people who are neither dyers nor chemists have never heard of it. But at one time this substance (actually several substances as it could be made up of aluminium sulphate and either potassium or ammonia) was one of the most important chemicals in the world. It was used in large quantities by tanners, papermakers and particularly dyers.
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Without alum you could hardly put any color onto clothes: you were condemned to a drab wardrobe, and few societies from the Egyptians onwards were satisfied with that.

Alum is what is called a “mordant,” relating to the fact that it is so astringent that it “bites” onto the color and makes it stick to the textile with its metallic teeth. In Book 35 of his
Natural History
, Pliny described how the Egyptians dyed clothes by a “very remarkable process” which first involved saturating the fabric with mordants after which “the fabrics, still unchanged in appearance, are plunged into a cauldron of boiling dye.”

In the Middle Ages the main European alum market was in Champagne: dyers from as far as Flanders and Germany would travel to France to buy this valuable raw material imported on donkey-back from Aleppo in the east and Castile in the west,
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with some of the best alum coming from Smyrna on the Turkish coast. With such a strong Muslim control of the world’s alum resources,
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it was a relief to the Catholic world when in 1458 a man called Giovanni di Castro found a large deposit within 100 kilometers of Rome at a town called Tolfa. For several decades the Vatican had a near-monopoly of this valuable commodity, although in the sixteenth century deposits were found in Flanders (there were rumors that Henry VIII of England only married Ann of Cleves to get his hands on her alum), and in around 1620 a Yorkshireman called Sir Thomas Chaloner risked his life to smuggle two of the papal alum workers to England to learn the secret of extracting it from shale. As geologist Roger Osborne describes in his book
The Floating Egg
, from that moment on the Lower Jurassic cliffs from Whitby to Redcar “were ripped open and thrown onto the beach.” And when in the mid-nineteenth century the scientific and religious worlds opened their minds to the possibilities of prehistory, it was in the rubble-strewn alum quarries of Yorkshire that some of the most exciting finds of marine fossils were discovered. Fossils, as Osborne writes, that enabled us “to think the unthinkable.”

THE OLD WORLD BUG

When Turner bought his carmine from his paint suppliers in London it was certainly made from cochineal, imported by the ton from the Americas and then turned into a lake pigment.
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But had he lived a few centuries earlier he would have used something also called “carmine,” which came from an Old World bug, as long as but thinner than a five-year-old child’s fingernail and almost as hard. It is the kermes insect—the Indo-European cousin of the cochineal, chemically related but with a much weaker concentration of color.
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From its Sanskrit name, krim-dja, came the words carmine and crimson. And today’s Persian speakers still use the word “kermes” if they want to describe red.

Among the Roman soldiers who travelled around Europe conquering land for Nero in the first century A.D. was a Greek doctor. No doubt Dioscorides did his duty in the camp hospitals, tending battle-wounded soldiers with the medicines and sharp-toothed saws provided by the military, but his heart wasn’t really in it. What he loved most was the days he could spend escaping on to the hillsides, heading away from the battle cries and collecting medicinal plants. He wrote a textbook about his discoveries, and the
Materia Medica
has been a useful source of information for botanists, physicians and historians ever since.

Dioscorides described how kermes was harvested with the fingernails—scraped carefully from the scarlet oak it lives on. But curiously he described it as “coccus,” meaning “berry,” and did not explain that it was an insect at all. Some people have said that meant he had never actually seen it. I think there is a different explanation. One of the beauties of language is its built-in metaphors. Kermes had probably been called the “oak berry” for so long that everyone knew it as that. Perhaps in two thousand years someone will unearth an ancient spy story and laugh at us for our own use of the word “bug.” “How innocent they were in those days, how animist in their beliefs,” this future reader might muse. “To think that an insect could listen in to conversations and report them back!” Pliny the Elder, who lived at the same time as Dioscorides, was also either incredibly confused by the dye’s origins or was also using the accepted metaphorical language of the day. In his
Natural History
he called the kermes both a berry and a grain, yet also described it as a small worm, or “scolecium.”

Whatever it was called, this little insect was big business. Since the Ancient Egyptians had started importing it by the camel-load from Persia and Mesopotamia, the kermes trade routes had increased to cover the known world, from Europe to China. The Romans liked it so much that they would sometimes demand that taxes should be paid in sacks of kermes. When it was ruled by Rome, half of Spain’s taxes to the capital were in the form of kermes—which they called “grana”—and the rest would mostly consist of more conventional grains like wheat. With such guaranteed demand the industry was always well paid and kermes-collecting was the kind of business that families could trace back through generations. Instead of being sun dried like cochineal, kermes insects suffered murder by slow subjection to vinegar fumes or death by immersion in a vinegar bath. It didn’t always work. Dr. Harald Boehmer, who has spent twenty-five years resuscitating the natural-dye carpet industry in Turkey, tells of how he went collecting wild kermes on the trees around the weavers’ villages, after which he popped them into a vinegar bath as his books suggested. “But they loved it and started swimming around and jumping out. That day the back of my car was full of lively insects,” he said.

A fashion statement in medieval Europe was to wear clothes made of a new cloth, imported from central Asia. The cloth was called “scarlet” and it was the pashmina of its time: vastly popular, frequently imitated but at its highest quality extremely expensive— at least four times the price of ordinary cloth. But the curious thing is, scarlet was not always red. Sometimes it was blue or green or occasionally black, and the reason that in English “scarlet” now means “red” and not “chic-textile-that-only-socialites-can-afford-but-which-we-all-aspire-to” is because of kermes.

By the Middle Ages, kermes was one of the most expensive dyes in Europe. Painters rarely used it: even then, more than five hundred years before Turner was making those rash pigment decisions about his wild skies, most people knew it wasn’t colorfast. But the dyers loved it. And what else would they use for their most valuable textile? There was madder, a plant root, which was relatively cheap and which I would find in my search for orange. It was fine for carpets and ordinary people’s clothes, and it was reasonably light fast. But it tended toward brown, and did not have that rich crimson hue that was so valued. Greens and blues had their fans, but ultimately the most valuable cloth deserved the most valuable dye, and kermes won out. So “a scarlet woman” actually means “a woman of the cloth,” which would be particularly galling to some members of the Christian Church, accustomed as some of their scarlet-clad bishops are to denouncing the world’s oldest profession.

In 1949 the Russian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko was excavating burial mounds in Siberia’s Altai Mountains—and made an extraordinary discovery: the earliest known Persian carpet, now called the Pazyryk Rug and knotted 2,500 years ago. It proved to be one of history’s few grave-robber “success stories.” In the fourth century A.D. a band of robbers had discovered the tomb and stole its more portable treasures. They left the rug—probably it was a bit heavy for them. But they were in a hurry and they left the tomb door open after the bolts of silk had left. That winter, water flooded the cave and—Siberia being cold—the carpet froze for posterity. The rug shows deer and Persian horsemen prancing on a red field that scientists believe was dyed with what we now call “Polish cochineal,” which was a cousin to kermes. Incidentally, the archaeologists also unearthed a deposit of hemp seeds and pipes that had been used for smoking hashish
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—a find that has excited hallucinogen historians ever since.