Color: A Natural History of the Palette (60 page)

The name came from the French description of this color as being like the petals of the mallow plant. Curiously, while the English called it “mauve,” which in the nineteenth century they pronounced “morve,” the French tended to refer to it as “Perkin’s purple.” Both markets were evidently thought to want something exotic and foreign.

Victoria & Albert Museum,
Inventing New Britain: The Victorian Vision
, April–July 2001.

John Sutherland,
Guardian
, August 6, 2001, p. 7.

Varley,
Colour
, p. 218.

Gage,
Colour and Culture
, p. 27.

Jidejian,
Tyre through th Ages
, p. 281.

Lucan,
Civil War
, chapter 10, pp. 115ff.

Pliny,
The Natural History
, 9, 63, p. 137.

For the classical and dyeing references in this chapter I have made extensive use of Edmonds,
The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye
; Bridgeman, “Purple Dye in Late Antiquity and Byzantium”; and Jidejian, op. cit.

Justinian in the sixth century reinforced a ban on “forbidden silk”— which scholars take to mean that it was dyed with purple—and Constantine in the tenth century was so fond of the color that he was nicknamed Porphyrogenitus, meaning that he had been born “in the purple,” which perhaps referred to the color of the walls of the birthing room of the Byzantine emperors, but certainly signified immense privilege.

Thompson,
The Materials of Medieval Painting
, p. 156.

Sixth-century Christian artists used Tyrian purple for the most precious books. Cheaper documents used cheaper dyes, though, and one type of lichen became so popular for staining books that it is still called “folium,” from the same root as “folio,” meaning leaf of paper.

Pliny, op. cit., 9, 34, p. 126.

A third species,
Thais haemastema
, also gives a good purple dye, but it is found farther west in the Mediterranean, and probably was less important to the Phoenicians.

Quoted in Jidejian, op. cit.

Pliny, op. cit., 9, 62, p. 133.

Edmonds, op. cit., p. 10.

In 1685 a naturalist called William Cole found purple-giving shellfish on the shores of the Bristol Channel and made the observation that if the dye was placed in the sun it changed color. “Next to the first light green will appear a deep green; and in a few minutes this will change into a dull sea green; after which, in a few minutes more, it will alter into a watchet [i.e. blue]; from that in a little time more it will be purplish red; after which, lying an hour or two (supposing the Sun still shining) it will be of a very deep purple red; beyond which the Sun can do no more.” Cole, “Purple Fish,” p. 1278.

Pliny described how the blackness was achieved by dyers using two different types of shellfish: the small buccinum and the larger
Murex brandaris
, or
purpura
. The buccinum gave a crimson-like sheen to the
purpura
, as well as the “severity” which was in fashion. Their recipe involved steeping the wool in a raw, unheated vat of
purpura
extract and then transferring it to a buccine one. Op. cit., 9, 28, pp. 134–5. Pliny, after praising this velvety black effect of antique murex-dyed robes, noted that in his own time people seemed to favor a lighter shade of purple.

Gage, op. cit., p. 25.

Nuttall, “A curious survival in Mexico of the use of the Purpura shellfish for dyeing,” p. 368.

Thompson, “Shellfish Purple: The Use of Purpura Patula Pansa on the Pacific Coast of Mexico,” pp. 3–6.

Hibi,
The Colors of Japan
, pp. 60–2.

Numbers (or Bümidbar), 15: 37–38.

Rabbi Soloveitchik, “The Symbolism of Blue and White.” In
Man of Faith in the Modern World
. Ed. Abraham Besdin. Israel: Ktav, 1989. Quoted on the P’til Tekhelet website,
www.tekhelet.com

Elsner, “The Past and Present of Tekhelet,” p. 171.

One of the problems is that the Hebrew word for this color—
tekhelet
—can mean both blue and violet; it was the metaphor of the sea and the sky which led to Jews believing it had been more blue than violet.

Many years later, when Radzyn was destroyed by the Nazis, Herzog was the only person with the recipe, leading to the ironic circumstance that he was responsible for both discrediting and preserving Leiner’s process.

A similar paradox can be seen in ancient Jewish sacred manuscripts. If the parchment is calf vellum then it must be made from the skin of an animal that has been killed in a kosher way—through being bled to death. But there appear to be no rules about whether the ink with which it is written should or should not be kosher.

THE END OF THE RAINBOW

The story of the Eskimos having a large number of words for the colors of snow probably started in 1911 when social anthropologist Franz Boas suggested they had four word roots for snow. (Boas,
The Handbook of North American Indians
.) This was picked up in 1940 in an MIT journal that future generations of linguists used freely: “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven snow, flying snow— whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.” (Whorf,
Language, Thought and Reality
.)

This finding was announced in January 2002. Three months later Johns Hopkins University made a second and slightly embarrassed announcement that the “color of the universe” was not actually turquoise but beige, due to a computer bug. “It’s our fault for not taking the color science seriously enough,” admitted assistant professor of astronomy Karl Glazebrook who had co-authored the study. He added that the discovery was actually just meant to be an amusing footnote to a large-scale survey of the spectrum of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies, but “the original press story blew up beyond our wildest expectations.” It referred to a mathematical calculation of what you would see if you had the universe in a box, and could see all the light at once. The newly calculated color, described more formally as III E Gamma, looks like off-white house paint. However, Glazebrook’s favorite tag is “cosmic latte.”

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