Color: A Natural History of the Palette (29 page)

He dismissed the speculation about Stradivari’s varnish as simply that. Perhaps, he said, the recipe was lost because there wasn’t a recipe. “My theory is that he never made his varnish, but bought it from a shop.” So for Bergonzi the “trick” was in the tailoring. “Maybe Stradivari would go and see the professional varnish-maker and say that last one was nice, but it’s summer now and I need something softer,” he suggested. Perhaps Stradivari’s “secret” was that he varied the varnish according to the needs of the violin, rather than keeping to a formula.

He was a descendant of Carlo Bergonzi, he confirmed, but he hadn’t known that when he walked into a violin shop at the age of eleven to buy an instrument, “and fell in love with the smells and the wood and the atmosphere.” It was as if his genes had jumped up and said “I belong here.” Three years later he went to the violin school Mussolini had started. The place had been quiet for years, but in the 1970s it was beginning to boom: “It was full of Californians and Australians: men with long beards and big gestures.” He remembered all sorts of hallucinogenic happenings: “there were green violins, blue ones, anything you could imagine . . .” And then he paused, suddenly serious. “But I do believe that when you make an instrument you have to respect that you are part of a story. You can’t play around with that too much.”

After I left Bergonzi’s studio I went down to the cathedral and found two things. First, around the sacrament chapel, I saw a carved procession of three violins and several lutes marching up the columns. This is the part of the church where the sacrament is reserved—where the physical becomes sublime and the sublime becomes physical—so it is important for Cremona that this should be the place where music is honored. And the second thing I saw was some curious-looking wood in the choir stalls curving around the back of the altar. With an approving nod from the verger, I slipped under the rope, and found that behind each choir stall was a different picture, made of the contrast between delicately varnished maple woods, spruce, cherry and what looked like walnut. Each one was a celebration of Cremona’s fame for creating magic out of wood.

A few scenes were biblical—suffering Christs, patient Marys— although mostly they were secular—people tending cattle or returning home to medieval villages. Most interesting for me was a lute, alone on a mythical plain, waiting to be played. There were no violins: perhaps they had not been invented yet. I wondered whether the pictures were made by an anonymous luthier, taking time out from his usual line of work. Maybe even my Sephardic master, although that would have been too much to hope for.

I looked at that stained wood and remembered Stradivari’s spirited bill for “one filippo,” his astonishing tiger-like violin, and Riccardo Bergonzi’s curious insistence that he was—they all were—part of a story. And looking again at that lonely, iconic lute, I was reminded also of a Jewish legend—of the Golem who can be created from mud by singing it to life with special sounds. The Golem lives and breathes, but always preserves deep inside it the spirit of the one who made it. But most of all I remembered an extraordinary musical performance—at a tiny AIDS hospice in Thailand, during a tour by violinist Maxim Vengerov in his role as a cultural ambassador for Unicef. Vengerov took out his Stradivarius violin (the “ex Kiesewetter” made in 1723) and played to the audience of fifteen—including visitors—with all the energy and concentration that I had seen him give to a packed Sydney Opera House a few months earlier. He played a fugue by Bach, and the music seemed to take on a life of its own. It floated around the bed where a young soldier lay: his AIDS was discovered after a sergeant beat him so badly his intestines fell out. And it rested for a moment on a little boy whose hill-tribesman father was HIV positive, and who would soon be an orphan. It swirled gently around a middle-aged woman with purple blotches on her arms, and an old man, so weak that he couldn’t even raise his head.

And in the music there was not only the quiet drama of the present moment but also Vengerov’s own memories—of growing up in Siberia in an apartment so small they had to break down the kitchen wall to accommodate the grand piano, of children from his mother’s orphanage coming round to listen to music, and his deeper story about how his grandparents had taught him humility—when as a little boy he wanted to boast about his talent. The whole history was there in that performance, as it is when a great player plays, and when the moment is right.

No one will ever know why Martinengo ended up in Cremona. But the story I have told—in order to bring alive some of the mysteries of orange and of varnishes—is culled from what we know happened to thousands of Jews at that time, as they tried to make a place for themselves in a changing world. Whichever way our luthier travelled from Spain, there would have been terrible things and wonderful things to be seen and collected by a refugee craftsman who was wandering Europe as Europe woke up to itself. And perhaps—while he taught the Amati brothers how to cut from patterns, set the ribs of a lute and how to boil up turpentine with dragon’s blood—our luthier would have found them ready to learn a real secret.

It is the secret of knowing yourself and your materials so well that you can wrap your life’s experiences into the very body of an instrument, just as a true musician puts his or her life experiences into the playing of it, as I had seen at the hospice. And when both elements are right, then together—maker and musician—you can persuade your violin to sing and cry and dance the orange.

6

Yellow

“There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

PABLO PICASSO

“What is purple in the earth, red in the market and yellow on the table?”

Iranian riddle (answer below)

On the shelf above my desk there is a box containing five things. They make an odd collection, and if anyone came across them by accident I’m sure they wouldn’t think of them as particularly precious. But they have come a long way, and they all have stories to tell.

The first is my favorite—a bunch of mango leaves, which have turned moldy after only two months in the Hong Kong humidity. Then there is a small cylinder of what looks like dirty plastic; it’s the color of dark amber, but when I touch it with even the tiniest amount of water it beads into an incredibly bright, fluorescent droplet of yellow. Once I thought it was a little miracle, and showed the trick to everyone I met, sometimes using spit if I didn’t have water. But now that I have found out more about it, I have to be careful of it. Then there is a little cardboard container the size of a matchbox: outside it is covered in Chinese writing and inside there are little yellow slabs. But I don’t take them out much: I have to be careful of them too. And finally there are two small glass vials containing the world’s most expensive spice. One of them is redder than the other, and the reason for that is part of my story too.

It isn’t surprising, given the chapter heading, that all my little souvenirs can be used to make yellow paints and dyes. But what has surprised me, in the collecting of them, is how, with such a bright, happy color, it has been so necessary to use caution. No color has a neat unambiguous symbolism, but yellow gives some of the most mixed messages of all. It is the color of pulsating life—of corn and gold and angelic haloes—and it is also at the same time a color of bile, and in its sulphurous incarnation it is the color of the Devil. In animal life, yellow—especially mixed with black—is a warning. Don’t come near, it commands, or you will be stung or poisoned or generally inconvenienced. In Asia yellow is the color of power— the emperors of China were the only ones allowed to sport sunshine-colored robes. But it is also the color of declining power. A sallow complexion comes with sickness; the yellow of leaves in autumn not only symbolizes their death, it indicates it. The change shows that the leaves are not absorbing the same light energy that they used to take in when they were green and full of chlorophyll. It shows they no longer have what it takes to nourish them.

INDIAN YELLOW

In Mumbai’s Prince of Wales museum there is an eighteenth-century watercolor of two lovers, sitting beneath a tree. One is Krishna, the playboy incarnation of Vishnu, the cloth of his yellow dhoti contrasting beautifully with his blue skin. He is playing the flute to his girlfriend Radha, who is looking at him with admiration. They are sitting under what is perhaps a mango tree, which is a symbol of love in Hindu mythology. What we cannot see here—although we can see it in other watercolors nearby—is that on the other side of the garden there are cows eating grass and leaves, herded by pretty milkmaids. Krishna will later pursue them, which will wreak havoc in his relationship with his girlfriend. But this is in the future, and for the moment all is perfect. The miniatures illustrate a popular Hindu story of the playfulness of the gods, of tragedy and misunderstanding, and of course of the wonderful intoxication of romance. And they are also, with their cows, trees and yellow color, the summary of the story of one particular paint—the color, quite possibly, that adorns Krishna’s clothes.

For years in both England and in parts of India the ingredients of Indian Yellow were a mystery. Throughout the nineteenth century little parcels arrived irregularly at the London docks from Calcutta, sealed no doubt with plenty of string and sealing wax, and addressed to colormen like George Field and Messrs Winsor & Newton. Those who sniffed the stale contents must have wondered where they came from and what they were made of, but if the companies made active enquiries about what they were buying, then the answers have been long since lost. Some suggested it was snake urine, others thought it might be something that had been dug out of the insides of animals (like the ox bile that had been used to make yellow in the previous century) and a German scientist called W. Schmidt stated authoritatively in 1855 that it had been excreted from camels that had eaten mango fruits. George Field didn’t like it much—not because of the strange smell but because it faded quickly—and his theory, agreeing roughly with Professor Schmidt’s, was that the “powdery, soft, light, spongy” lumps with their fetid odor, were derived from the urine of camels.
¹

Then, one day in 1883, a letter arrived at the Society of Arts in London, from a Mr. T. N. Mukharji of Calcutta. This gentleman had investigated Indian Yellow on the request of the eccentric but brilliant director of Kew Gardens, Sir Joseph Hooker, and said he could now confirm exactly what Indian Yellow was made from. Mr. Mukharji said he had recently visited the only place in India where it came from—a town called Monghyr in Bihar state—and had actually seen it being made. The information that he gave them may have been a little shocking to some of his journal readers, but what he told them was that Indian Yellow, which was also known as
piuri
, was made from the urine of cows fed with mango leaves. He could assure readers that he had actually seen them eating mango leaves, and urinating—on demand—into buckets. And, he warned, the cows looked unhealthy and were said to die very early.

But here is another mystery about Indian Yellow. According to some accounts that letter, or at least the industry it described, started off protests, which culminated in laws—passed sometime between the 1890s and 1908 in Bengal—forbidding the making of Indian Yellow on the grounds of cruelty to animals. But I could find no records of such laws in either the India Library in London or the National Library in Calcutta, nor did either of those excellent archives contain any newspaper articles or correspondence on this intriguing slice of Indian art history. The four researchers for the Indian Yellow chapter in the National Gallery of Washington’s excellent series on artists’ pigments couldn’t find any either.
²
In fact, the only piece of nineteenth-century documentation that anyone seems to have located in English was Mr. Mukharji’s printed letter in the
Journal
of the Society of Arts. It seemed odd that nobody else had written anything—not even, it seems, a letter to a newspaper— about the mango cows of Monghyr. So, with photocopy firmly in hand, I decided to go to India on the trail of Indian Yellow.

Bihar is a large, mostly flat state between the Himalayas and Calcutta. It is the poorest state in India. I flew into the capital, Patna, which one guidebook described as a city you wouldn’t want to spend much time in, in a state you wouldn’t want to spend much time in either. That first night in Bihar, the night clerks at the one-star hotel I was staying in phoned me three times. “It’s the middle of the night,” I groaned. “Yes, madam, but it is Saturday night, and Patna is alive with disco.” Mine was the first foreign name in their visitors’ book for a month, and the first single female name since the book started.

Monghyr is 150 kilometers from Patna, and the train journey takes four hours, through flat countryside showing the healthy green of well-nourished farmlands. This land I was passing through was important to art history not simply because it was the home of the yellow paint that had so caught my imagination but because, according to Tibetan tradition, this is the mythological birthplace of painting itself.

There were, so the story goes, two kings who lived in the sixth century B.C. Every year they would exchange gifts—outdoing each other, as rich people often try to do, with the cleverness and expense of their choices. One year one of the kings decided to give his rival the ultimate present—a painting of the Buddha, who was at that time still alive and living in Bihar. No painting had ever been done before, but, undeterred, the king assigned the job to a man who seemed to have potential. But when he arrived at the place where the Buddha was in meditation, our first artist realized he had a problem: he was so overwhelmed by his subject’s enlightened glow that he could not look at him. But then the Buddha made a suggestion. “We will go down to the bank of a clear and limpid pool,” he said helpfully. “And you will look at me in the reflection of the water.” They found an appropriately limpid pond, and the man happily painted the reflection.