The History of Color

September 13, 2011|Josh Rothman, Globe Staff

Look around: We live in a world of color, in which everything, from our clothes to our walls to our food, has its own particular shade. It wasn't always so, as Jude Stewart explains in the fall issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture . In an essay called "Cooking Up Color," she explores an archive's worth of recipes for dyes, paints, and pigments.

Today, she writes, thanks to industrialization, the colors you buy and wear are determined solely by your preferences. This obscures the fact that everyday, colored items -- like sweaters, piled up everywhere nowadays "in inviting retail stacks of purple, yellow, and dun brown," with all the colors priced the same -- are modern miracles. "An ordinary wonder like this would have stupefied dyers' guilds of any century before the Industrial Revolution," Stewart explains; brown would have been bargain priced, while purple would have been priceless, since "a single ounce of Tyrian purple dye required killing a quarter million snails."

Rubens, The Discovery of Purple: Tyrian purple is produced by Mediterranean sea snails.

The rise of cheap, safe, and plentiful industrial pigment, Stewart argues, has made color into something abstract, and purely aesthetic. For most of human history, though, color was artisanal, produced by guilds of "colormen." It was also resolutely material -- everyone that color came from the natural world. Colormen would start by gathering ingredients: inedible plants, like saffron and indigo; animals, including cochineal beetles (for red) and cuttlefish (for brown, which is in the ink); and huge quantities of rocks and crystals, like ocher, lapis lazuli, malachite, and lead. These ingredients would then be cooked up in elaborate, multi-day recipes to produce dye and paint.