Color: A Natural History of the Palette (56 page)

Pantone color standards have been used for renovating the tiles in the mosaics of San Marco in Venice, for giving official definitions of the colors used in national flags, including the Union Jack and Japan’s Rising Sun, and for measuring the color (and sometimes therefore the quality) of gemstones. But one of the company’s proudest innovations does not have to do with art or heraldry or jewelry but with medicine. “We’ve just developed cards that can identify the fat content of a liver by color prior to a transplant,” Herbert told me. The cards have already saved lives by cutting down on rejection rates. “Previously measuring color was based more on art than on science. Now we can be exact.”

The oddest color-matching job he had ever accepted was a commission from a goldfish breeder to calibrate the different colors of the shimmering koi that are so valued throughout Asia. “About twenty fish arrived in little bags, and I put each of them into a tank and moved them around until I’d put them in some kind of arrangement in terms of color,” he remembered. How would you assign names for twenty shades of fish, I mused, thinking of the famous story about the Inuit of Canada distinguishing between dozens of shades of snow
¹
(a story which is apocryphal but which has captured so many people’s imagination that it is a phenomenon in itself), or of the amazing statistic that in Mongolia there are more than 300 words for the colors of horses. “We won’t do names anymore,” he said. “In the next round we’re eliminating them.”

I felt a little like John Keats, appalled at Newton’s audacity in taking the magic out of the rainbow. “But the names of colors are history,” I said, thinking of how mummy brown and ultramarine and Scheele’s green and Turner’s yellow and so many color names hold entire histories of deceit and adventure and experimentation in their syllables. “But we are dealing with science and measurement,” he explained patiently. “This is a digital world now, and computers don’t need names but numbers. People talk about ‘barn red’ but they never saw a Scandinavian barn in their life. And what does ‘lipstick red’ mean anyway?”

Today we can have our houses and our cars and our clothes any color we like—without any reference to nature or to anything more symbolic than the fashion world’s decisions about what colors are “right” for next season. And so perhaps it is not strange that we do not seem to need or even want to be reminded of their history anymore. I could understand what Herbert was saying—he needed to adapt to new demands from the computer and Internet market—but I was relieved that I had encountered him toward the end of my researches. And I felt glad that I had made my paintbox journeys when I could still explore worlds of approximation and poetry, before the colors began to lose their words.

When I was two days from finishing the first draft of this book, a friend called from New York in great excitement. “There’s a text message on CNN. They say someone’s found the color of the universe,” he said. And what color is it? “I’m not sure, I missed it.” He left the TV news running as we talked, and then suddenly he said: “Here it is again.” I grabbed my pen and wrote down that scientists at Johns Hopkins University had discovered the color of all the light in the universe. And that it was pale turquoise.
²
I had no idea what it meant, but it suggested that my journey was not over. And that there was a whole world—no, a whole universe—of color stories still to find.

NOTES

PREFACE

Baker,
The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple
, p. 175.

Nassau,
The Physics and Chemistry of Color, The Fifteen Causes of Color
.

Peacocks’ tails and butterflies and mother-of-pearl all derive their iridescence through physical causes. They don’t contain pigment, but instead their colors come from their uneven surfaces, covered in tiny grooves which refract and split up the light rays.

Newton published
Opticks
in 1704. He explained in the preface that he had delayed the printing: “To avoid being engaged in Disputes about these matters.”

INTRODUCTION

Cennino learned from the Florentine artist Agnolo Gaddi, who learned from his father, Taddeo Gaddi. Taddeo was the son of Gaddo Gaddi and also worked closely with Giotto di Bondone. Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of the Renaissance Italian art tradition. He took the skills his master Cimabue learned from Greek icon painters, and shook them up with radical ideas about how to mix colors and tell stories in paintings. We know very little about Cennino himself, except that he was born in the 1350s, that by 1398 he was working on a commission in Padua, that some of his paintings can be found in San Gimignano in Tuscany, and that his
Handbook
was probably written in the 1390s.

II Libro dell’Arte
was first printed in Italy in 1821; it was first translated into English in 1844 by Mary Merrifield, into French in 1858 and into German in 1871. All the quotations used in this book are from Thompson’s 1933 translation, published as
The Craftsman’s Handbook
.

Merrifield,
Medieval and Renaissance Treatises on the Arts of Painting
, p. xlvii.

. Cadmium red hue is a petroleum-based pigment: it is the same color as cadmium red, but it contains no cadmium. According to Winsor & Newton cadmium hue is brighter, cheaper and more transparent; cadmium red is more opaque, more expensive and has better covering power. It is less orange.

Journal of the Society of Arts
, 23 April 1880, pp. 485–99.

Holman Hunt was partly right to attribute the problem to ignorance, but as color chemist Maximilian Toch explained in 1911, another problem for nineteenth-century artists was that the atmosphere of big cities was now contaminated with acid gases, from the burning of coal on a large scale. Toch,
Materials for Permanent Painting
, p. 7.

I am indebted to Bomford et al.,
Art in the Making: Impressionism
, and the Tate Gallery,
Paint and Painting
, for this section on colormen.

Cennino recommends artists wanting to create the effect of a velvet fabric to do the drapery with pigment mixed with egg yolk, but then to use a miniver brush to depict the cut threads, in a pigment mixed with oil.

In his
Materials for the History of Oil Painting
, Charles Eastlake quotes Aetius as describing both linseed and walnut oils. “It has a use besides a medicinal use, being applied by gilders or encaustic painters, for it dries, and preserves gildings and encaustic paints for a long time.” And Maximilian Toch refers to records from the time of thirteenth-century King Edward I (possibly for the King’s own Painted Chamber) which included orders for several gallons of oil, as well as paint, gold and varnish. Toch, op. cit., p. 15.

Pablo Picasso’s relationship with color dealer Sennelier (whose wood-lined shop at 3 Quai Voltaire in Paris must be one of the most atmospheric places to buy art supplies in the world) led to the invention of oil pastels in the 1940s. Ordinary pastels—powdered pigments mixed into a paste or “pastel” with just enough resin or gum to bind them— had been popular in France since the early eighteenth century (and a craze by 1780). But they crumbled easily; the new oil pastels were more robust and could be used on a wide range of different surfaces.

Callow,
Vincent van Gogh, A life
, p. 199.

At the beginning of his career van Gogh was strongly influenced by a comment made by Théophile Gautier that the peasants in paintings by Jean-François Millet seemed to be painted by the earth they were sowing. Van Gogh sought a similar meaning in the brown materials he chose for his most famous peasant painting,
The Potato Eat rs
, now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Dorn, “The Arles Period,” in
Van Gogh Face to Face
, p. 145.

Shackleford, “Van Gogh in Paris,” in
Van Gogh Face to Face
, p. 96.

Van Gogh realized that good-quality paint was vital. And when (in the few months in 1889 between cutting off his ear and admitting himself to a mental hospital) he was inspired by the freshness of springtime in Provence, he wrote a letter to his brother Theo, urging him to purchase paints in Paris and send them without delay. “The flowering time is over so soon and you know how this kind of subject delights everybody,” he wrote.

Personal interview. Michael Skalka, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The “second-best bed” was the one that a sixteenth-century married couple used. Their “best bed” was the one reserved for guests. Shakespeare made the expression famous because he left the “second-best bed” to his wife Anne in his will. Historians are divided about whether this was an unloving legacy, or whether on the contrary it may have been a sexy one, with him wanting to honor their nights spent together. The one in the Birthplace is not the original.

Morris,
The Lesser Arts of Life
, an address delivered before the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, London, 1882.

In the seventh century, St. John of Damascus said: “I worship the creator of matter who became matter for my sake, and who willed to take his abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter.”

OCHRE

Clark,
Looking at Pictures
, p. 15.

Thompson,
The Materials of Medieval Painting
, p. 98.

Thom,
Becoming Brave: The Path to Native American Manhood
, p. 43.

Marshall,
The Red Ochre People
, p. 41.

Sagona,
Bruising the Red Earth
, p. 133.

Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius
, Art Gallery of New South Wales, August-–November 2000. This was the first major retrospective of the Central Desert Art Movement since it began in the 1970s, and was held as part of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

I am indebted to McBryde, “Goods from another country,” Sagona,
Bruising the Red Earth
and Jones, “Red Ochre Expeditions,” in Papers Presented to the South Australian Museum, for this section on ochre expeditions.

Peterson and Lampert, “A Central Australian Ochre Mine,” in
Records of the Australian Museum
, vol. 37, p. 1–9.

Similar ceremonial trading patterns existed all over the continent. Ronald and Catherine Berndt described how in north-east Arnhemland in the early twentieth century the Gunwinggu people of Oenpelli traded spears with people to the east; nets with the people from the northern coast; European goods and bamboo spears with those to the south-west; and two varieties of red ochre with those to the south, near the Katherine River. Berndt and Berndt,
The World of the First Australians
, p. 131.

Jones, op. cit., p. 10.

Masey,
Port Augusta Dispatch and Flinders Advertiser
, June 9, 1882. Quoted in Jones, op. cit., p. 12.

One story of acrylic paints suggests part of the early development of this medium may have happened in Australia. The Australian artist Ainslie Roberts was apparently allergic to both turpentine and linseed oil, so his friend Sidney Nolan suggested he try PVA glue, which he did. This was later to develop into acrylic paints, an important breakthrough in the story of house and artists’ paints. Hulley,
Ainslie Roberts and the Dreamtime
, p. 81.

Morphy,
Aboriginal Art
, p. 164.

This version is adapted from the story of Kirkin in Smith,
Myths and leg nds of the Australian Aborigines
.

The
South China Morning Post
, January 13, 2001, quotes Noel Nannup, Aboriginal chief executive in the West Australian government’s Aboriginal Heritage Unit, saying that if the Dreaming trails were not walked for a while, they would hibernate. In order to walk them again, they had to be awoken by stones that were sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, causing the pathways to reveal themselves. A lightning storm was considered the best condition in which to “feel” the trails, he said.

The Tiwi kinship names translate to the rule that the only cousin you can marry is your father’s sister’s child—all other first cousins are taboo.

One nineteenth-century missionary to the Tiwi islands apparently tried to ban traditional funeral rituals, but as he travelled across from Bathurst Island to Melville to protest about a funeral, he fell out of his boat. It was proof, the Tiwi people decided, that their Ancestors were worth paying attention to.

Hulley,
The Rainbow Serpent
, pp. 21–2.

Harley,
Artists’ Pigments c. 1600–1835
, p. 120.

Diabetes and kidney failure are two of the worst health problems for older Aboriginal people in Australia today.

According to Chaloupka there are three main white pigment Dreaming sites in the north-west plateau: Gundjilhdjil near the Kanarra shelter; Wamanui in the land of the Mandjarrwalwal; and—the most prized of all—Majjarngalgun, along the Gamadeer river near Maburinj.

Bardon,
Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert
, p. 45.

Neidje,
Australia’s Kakadu Man
, p. 48.

BLACK AND BROWN

Vasari,
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Artists
, part II, p. 121.