Color: A Natural History of the Palette (24 page)

THE DRAGON AND THE ELEPHANT

Turner’s many paintboxes—which remain in Tate Britain, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as well as in private collections—show that, in common with other artists of his day, he had plenty of reds in his artistic armory. As well as that fugitive carmine—which shows up as a deep crimson on those paintings on which it has survived—there were many natural red ochres, taken from the earth, making the browner shades of red on his palette. He had at least twelve kinds of madder—an extract from the root of the rubia tree—but most madders were as fugitive as cochineal and, by 1900, less than fifty years after Turner put down his paintbrush for the last time, there were only two varieties still available commercially to London artists. He also had red lead—a color usually made by heating white lead—which was called minium and was almost orange. It was so popular among Persian and Indian Mughal artists that their work became known as “miniatures”: the word is nothing to do with the size of their paintings.

But one of Turner’s favorite reds may well have been cinnabar— which he used in its manufactured form, vermilion, and which Pliny described as the result of an epic struggle by an elephant and a dragon. These two troublemakers were always fighting, Pliny recounted, and the battle eventually ended with the dragon—evidently a rather snaky one—wrapping its coils around its heavy enemy. But as the elephant fell it crushed the dragon with its weight and they both died. The merging of their blood made cinnabar.
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It is a marvellous metaphor for this expensive paint, which is made from the conjunction of heavy mercury and burning sulphur. Its chemical designation is HgS, which indicates that both elements are equally matched. Combined, the silver elephant and the yellow fire-breathing reptile miraculously make something that is blood red.

The Romans loved raw cinnabar. They painted their gladiatorial heroes with it; rich women sacrificed their health for beauty using a lipstick made of it, and it was used to paint the statues of the gods and the emperors on festival days. Most murals in Pompeii took their reds from ochre, but interior designers hired by the richest and most powerful tended to choose cinnabar. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the chemist Sir Humphry Davy found that the Pompeiian baths of Titus were covered with this color—which, he argued, “affords proof in favor of their being intended for imperial use.” The Romans got this vermilion from the greatest mercury mine in the classical world—Almaden, about 200 kilometers south of Madrid. Two thousand years later it is still the world’s most productive mercury mine.

I visited it one misty morning in autumn. Almaden is surrounded by curiously shaped hills, filled with shiny mica. If it was in Australia, I thought, as I explored them later, it would be a sacred place. Even in Spain there is a strange otherworldly feeling to the town, and especially to the mine, with the picturesque sixteenth-century church ruins framing the contemporary rusting machinery.

I was shown around by two engineers—José Manuel (“Poto”) Amor and Saturnino Lorenzo. I wasn’t allowed to descend into the mine for safety reasons, but anyway the present workings are very different from the ancient workings, and I was more curious about what happened at the top. Conveyor belts carry the rocks from deep underground through the open air and into the furnaces. We watched them emerging out of the ground. Everywhere there was the faintly eggy smell of sulphur: down there it must be really strong. The mine company now processes all the rocks on the surface—they are not sorted underground, it’s cheaper that way. Most of what we saw coming up on the belt was useless gray matter, but every minute or so, rocks of a deep and silvery pink could be spotted making their way out of the earth and into the sunshine. “The red ones are real cinnabar,” Poto confirmed, “and they have the most mercury in them.”

In the sixteenth century there was famously a choice of two punishments for prisoners: the galleys or Almaden. A lucky man got sent to the prison ships. Just a couple of years mining for red— twelve hours a day with no protection and no air conditioning— would fill a prisoner’s body with so much heavy metal that he would die a nasty death. The writer Manuel de Falla published a terrible account of gypsies and prisoners who were forced to work the tunnels of Almaden until they could no longer walk straight. Today’s miners—who work 700 meters below ground, which is about 600 meters below the structurally treacherous early workings—are luckier. They get six eight-hour shifts a month, with full masks and ventilation, and even after twenty years they seem to be able to look forward to a long retirement.

Smiling, as if holding a secret, my two guides invited me to pick up a two-liter bottle of mercury. In the end I had to do it with both hands, bracing myself a little: mercury is seventeen times as dense as water. When the settlers in the New World found a new cache of gold and silver the first supplier they would contact would be Almaden: mercury is one of the main purifying agents for precious metals. Poto and Saturnino showed me a tub like a concrete paddling pool full of this strange liquid-solid. “You can put your hand in it,” Saturnino said, putting his in to demonstrate. “But take your jewelry off first.” It would have eaten my rings with enthusiasm. I submerged my arm and swirled this pool of pure mercury around: it was a wonderful sensation. When I went with it, it felt like water. When I went against it, it was an almost unstoppable force. An elephant of elements.

Even though the cinnabar is rich in its raw state, which is how the Romans tended to use it, most of the medieval artists who followed them preferred to make a pure version by mixing refined mercury with sulphur. “Take one part of mercury and one of white sulphur, as much of one as of the other,” advised a fifteenthcentury expert on manuscript illumination techniques, Simone de Monte Dante dela Zazera. “Put it in a glass bottle, thoroughly clad with clay. Put it on a moderate fire and cover the mouth of a bottle with a tile. Close it when you see yellow smoke coming out of the bottle, until you see the red and almost vermilion-colored smoke. Then take it from the fire and the vermilion will be ready.” Turner, of course, like his contemporaries, was too busy to be messing with tiles and bottles—and bought most of his paint from a colorman in London. Vermilion had the added attraction of being fairly resistant to blackening or fading (as long as it wasn’t exposed to bright sunlight
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), especially in the thick slabs of color that Turner liked to daub directly with his palette knife.
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Artists were not the only ones in the nineteenth century to run into trouble with their fading reds. The Post Office too had problems. Early British pillar boxes were originally painted green, but people complained about bumping into them, so between 1874 and 1884 they were repainted a bright red silicate enamel. However, the Post Office archives in central London contain several letters suggesting this was not the best choice of pigment. In 1887 a member of the public complained that his local boxes had turned a “pinky white” and suggested the Post Office try a crimson lake instead. But the problem they faced was finding a red that was bright but could also withstand the rigors of frost and sunshine. In 1919 a Nottingham resident wrote a letter observing that the top of the pillar boxes “look as if snow covered,” and in 1922 a helpful former naval officer suggested the Post Office follow the navy’s example, and change their paints to something a little duller but longer lasting. Everyone knew where the postboxes were, he said. They didn’t have to be bright anymore. His suggestion was not taken up, and eventually the arrival of better synthetic reds eliminated the problem anyway. By the late twentieth century red pillar boxes had become so symbolic of Britain that when Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997, post office employees were out on the streets within days, repainting the postboxes in a new livery of emerald green and purple. Somehow the new coat of paint was a gentle symbol of the end of empire.

One of the many letters to the Post Office on the subject of fading postboxes

Turner died in 1851, in Chelsea, just eight years before new aniline colors made from the otherwise useless petrochemical extract of coal tar would continue the process—started, in a way, when painting began—of revolutionizing artists’ palettes around the world. So he just missed the artificial magenta and solferino, both invented in 1859 by English chemists and named after battles in Italy, which the Austrians lost that year against the French and Italians. But even for Turner there were always new colors to try, and he almost always tried them.

The National Gallery in London is the home of the painting that is probably today the artist’s most famous, and the one he called “my Darling. ”
The Fighting Téméraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838
is the picture of a ninety-eight-gun fighting ship, launched in 1798, its crowning achievement its victory in the Battle of Trafalgar alongside Nelson’s flagship
Victory.
When Turner painted her she was a ghostly victim of more than three decades of relative peace. The painting is hung today opposite George Stubbs’s spectacularly realistic portrait of the horse Whistle-jacket—a life-size stallion that from a distance looks as if it is the example of the taxidermist’s rather than the painter’s art.

While Stubbs dispensed with sky for his masterpiece, Turner concentrated on it, and for his “Darling” he wanted the best and most moody sky. Notes from staff in 1859, three years after the painting arrived at the gallery, show that even by then it was deteriorating. “Under glass, good state but slightly [bitumen] cracked on Steam Boat; and pigment change around the sun,” one curator scribbled. For as Turner had reached for the right red with which to paint the dying sun over a dying ship, he had characteristically ignored all the colors he was familiar with—vermilion, madder, ochre and even that old fading friend carmine—and his palatte knife had scooped up a new paint, iodine scarlet.
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Iodine scarlet, or mercury iodide, had been invented by Bernard Courtois—the son of the Courtois who had worked on zinc white paint—just before the Battle of Waterloo. It had been further developed by Turner’s friend, the chemist Humphry Davy, a few years later, although the warnings of its fugitive nature had been there from the beginning. Even Davy, when describing his experiments in 1815, admitted that the color “appears to change more by the action of light.” And George Field said: “certainly nothing can approach it as a color for scarlet geraniums; but its beauty is almost as fleeting as the flowers.”
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But when it was fresh it was startlingly bright, and Turner happily took the chance, painting coral clouds in the color he knew they should be and which, visiting the gallery today, we can only imagine. For Turner, as for color-users around the world, the search for the perfect red—with all the risks that it sometimes involved—never really ended.

5

Orange

“Dance the orange.”

RAINER MARIA RILKE

On August 2, 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to find a new world. But as the three little ships, the Santa Maria, the Niña and the Pinta, pulled out of the harbor of Palos they had to steer carefully to avoid several small boats bobbing in the water, full of frightened men, women and children. All the Jews in Spain—nearly a quarter of a million people—had been given four months to leave the country, and the edict had been issued four months and two days before. No wonder they were in a hurry: they knew only too well what would happen to them if they didn’t leave. Even before Ferdinand and Isabella had issued their proclamation that God wanted Spain for Catholics only, there had been terrible violence against Jews—burnings, brutality and at the very least confiscation of property. The year before, Sephardic communities all over the country had breathed a sigh of relief that the centenary of a terrible massacre in 1391 had not been marked by more killings. But they knew something was about to happen. The Inquisition had started in Spain, and the warning fires were burning.

These little boats leaving two days after the deadline would probably have been full of artisans—leather-workers, dyers and jewelers—as well as physicians, musicians and others who simply could not bear to leave the places where their families had lived for centuries. Their last Passover in Spain would have been celebrated within weeks or even days of the royal proclamation on March 31, and they must have sat around their family tables late into the night discussing what this latest exodus would mean. And perhaps in one of those boats sat a young man, holding an object wrapped in cloth on his knees, as if it were a child. His pockets would have been full of metal tools with wooden handles: they would have dug into his legs as the boat rocked, and he wouldn’t have known whether the pain was unbearable or comforting.