The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  High-end modernists and minimalists, from Tadao Ando, the famous Japanese architect, to Calvin Klein, to Jonathan Ive at Apple, have drawn on white’s power and hauteur. (Steve Jobs was initially against the tide of white products that Ive began producing around the turn of the millennium. He eventually agreed to the signature headphones and keyboard in “Moon Gray” plastic. We think of them as white; technically, however, they are very pale gray.)6 And despite, or perhaps because, white so readily shows the dirt, it has also become associated with cleanliness. “White goods,” tablecloths, and lab coats are all defiant in their spotless impracticality, daring users to even think about spilling anything. American dentists complain that in a quest for teeth that appear sparkling clean, customers are now asking for teeth to be bleached so unrealistically white that whole new teeth-whitening palettes have had to be produced.7

  The foundations of the architectural idolization of white are built on a mistake. For centuries the bleached-bone color of classical Greek and Roman ruins provided the keystone for Western aesthetics. The inheritance of Andrea Palladio—the sixteenth-century Venetian architect who repopularized supposedly classical concepts—and his Palladian successors can be seen in every grand building in every major city in the West. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that researchers discovered that classical statuary and buildings were usually brightly painted. Many Western aesthetes refused to believe it. The sculptor Auguste Rodin is said to have beaten his chest in sorrow and said: “I feel it here that they were never colored.”8

  Lead white

  Today the tombs of the rulers of the Goguryeo region lie inconveniently over the border between North Korea and China. They were a tough people: the Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, resisted the vast armies of its northern neighbors to rule over the peninsula and some of southern Manchuria from the first century B.C. until the seventh century. But the occupant of Anak Tomb no. 3, depicted in a giant portrait on the wall, doesn’t look very warlike at all. In the fine-lined mural, he sits cross-legged in a litter wearing a dark robe decorated with bright red ribbons, an outfit that precisely matches the litter’s drapes. His expression is benign to the point of looking slightly tipsy: his lips curve up under a curlicue mustache and his eyes are bright and a little unfocused. What is really remarkable, though, is how fresh his image remains after sixteen centuries in damp tomb air. The secret to his longevity lies in the paint used by the artist as the base layer to prime the cave wall: lead white.1

  Lead white is a basic lead carbonate with a crystalline molecular structure. It is thick, opaque, and heavy, and there is strong evidence that it was being manufactured in Anatolia from around 2300 B.C.2 It has remained in production the world over ever since, using roughly the same method described by Pliny the Elder 2,000 years ago. Strips of lead were placed in a compartment inside a specially designed clay pot that was divided into two. Vinegar was poured into the other half; then the pots were surrounded with animal dung and placed inside a shed with a tightly fitting door for 30 days. During that time,a relatively simple chemical reaction would take place. Fumes from the vinegar reacted with the lead to form lead acetate; as the dung fermented it let off CO2, which, in turn, reacted with the acetate, turning it into carbonate (a similar process is used when making verdigris [here]). After a month some poor soul was sent into the stench to fetch the pieces of lead, by now covered in a puff-pastry-like layer of white lead carbonate, which was ready to be powdered, formed into patties, and sold.

  The resulting pigment was tremendously versatile. It was used in the enamel on ceramic dishes and bathroom fittings, in house paints and wallpapers, well into the twentieth century. Artists liked it because it was so opaque and adhered well to almost any surface, and, later, because it could work in oils (if the proportions of the mixture were right). It was also cheap—a key concern for any self-respecting artist. In 1471, when the well-known Florentine muralist Neri di Bicci was buying some pigments in his hometown, he paid two and a half times as much for a good azurite as for verde azzurro (probably malachite); giallo tedescho (lead-tin yellow, here) was one-tenth the price of the azurite; while lead white was a mere hundredth the cost.3 Artists were so generous with their use of lead white that, today, when paintings are X-rayed, its dense outline can form a kind of skeleton within a painting, allowing technicians to see alterations and later additions.

  Lead white, however, had a deadly flaw. Writing in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions journal in the winter of 1678, Sir Philibert Vernatti described the fate of those involved in the production of white lead:

  The Accidents to the Workmen are, Immediate pain in the Stomack, with exceeding Contorsions in the Guts and Costiveness that yields not to Catharticks . . . It brings them also to acute Fevers, and great Asthma’s or Shortness of Breath . . . Next, a Vertigo, or dizziness in the Head, with continual great pain in the Brows, Blindness, Stupidity; and Paralytick Affections; loss of appetite, Sickness and frequent Vomitings, generally of sincere Phlegm, sometimes mixed with Choler, to the extreamest weakning of the Body.4

  Lead poisoning was not a newly witnessed phenomenon, either. Nicander, a Greek poet and physician, describing the symptoms in the early second century B.C., condemned “the hateful brew . . . whose fresh color is like milk which foams all over when you milk it rich in the springtime.”

  It wasn’t just those grinding and producing the pigment that began showing the effects of lead poisoning. White lead had long been used as a cosmetic to make skin look smooth and pale. Xenophon wrote disapprovingly of women wearing a “plaster of ceruse (white lead) and minium (red lead)” here in Greece during the fourth century B.C., and there is evidence that their contemporaries in China were mixing a similar brew with rice powder to use as a foundation.5 Japanese archaeologists and professors are still discussing the role that poisonous makeup may have played in undermining the Shogun regime, which collapsed after nearly 300 years in power in 1868. Some scholars argue that breast-feeding infants were ingesting lead worn by their mothers; bone samples show that the skeletons of children under the age of three contain over 50 times more lead than those of their parents.6 Yet cosmetic ceruse or “Spirits of Saturn”—essentially a white-lead paste mixed with vinegar—remained alarmingly popular for centuries. While at least one sixteenth-century writer was already warning that it made the skin “withered and gray,”7 women in Queen Elizabeth’s court were painting blue veins over its parchment-pale base layer. In the nineteenth century ladies could still buy any number of lead-based skin brighteners with names like “Laird’s Bloom of Youth,” “Eugenie’s Favorite,” or “Ali Ahmed’s Treasure of the Desert,” even after well-publicized deaths, including that of the British society beauty Maria, the Countess of Coventry. Maria, a rather vain woman, who was known to be rather too heavy a user of white-lead foundation, died in 1760, aged just 27.8

  The irony of generations of women slowly killing themselves in an effort to look their best is of the darkest kind. Lead white may have helped the painted occupant of the Goguryeo tomb remain fresh, but then he was already dead. The pigment has seldom been a friend to the living.

  Ivory

  In 1831, a farmer on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, discovered treasure that had been hidden in a small stone chamber in a sandbank for 700 years. The hoard consisted of 78 chess pieces from different sets, 14 pieces for a game similar to backgammon, and a belt buckle.1

  The Lewis Chessmen, as they are now known, are mysterious. No one knows who made them, or how they came to be hidden on an obscure island.

  Each piece is a unique Romanesque sculpture, oozing expressive charm. One of the queens has a hand resting on her cheek, in dismay or in concentration; several of the rooks are biting their shields, and another looks nervously to the left, as if he’s just heard an unexpected sound. Each figure sports a subtly different hairstyle, and their clothes hang in stylized rumpled folds. They look as though they could be
conjured to life, and this is precisely what happened in their recent star turn as models for the wizards’ chess set in the first Harry Potter film. They were probably carved from walrus ivory (called “fish teeth” in Icelandic sagas), in Trondheim in Norway between 1150 and 1200. And while traces remain of the red some of the pieces were originally painted with, the color has worn away to reveal the natural color of the ivory itself.2

  Ivory, whether sourced from walruses, narwhals, or elephants, has long been prized. And when elephant hunts became a status symbol, ivory only grew in prestige. The color profited by association. Western wedding dresses were generally colorful until Queen Victoria wore ivory satin trimmed with British lace in 1840. Many brides eagerly followed suit. The September 1889 issue of Harper’s Bazaar recommended “[i]vory white satin and lampas [a type of woven fabric] . . . for autumn weddings.” Now it is more common than ever; the Sarah Burton–designed wedding dress worn by the Duchess of Cambridge was made of ivory duchess satin.

  Ivory itself was used for thousands of years to make costly decorative items, like the Lewis Chessmen, combs, and brush handles. Later it was used for piano keys, ornaments, and pool balls. Chinese craftsmen use it to make impossibly intricate sculptures, complete with trees, temples, and figures, which can sell for thousands of dollars. So fierce did demand become that by 1913 America alone was consuming around 200 tons of ivory annually. Because of their value, elephant tusks were called “white gold” and walrus tusks “Arctic gold.”3

  Demand for ivory took an inevitable toll on the animals supplying it. In 1800 there were an estimated 26 million elephants; before 1914 there were 10 million; by 1979, 1.3 million. A decade later, when the trade was finally banned in the West, 600,000 remained.4

  Demand remains enormous, particularly in Thailand and China, although the latter has vowed to ban the trade of ivory entirely by the end of 2017. This ban, if effectively enforced, will have come in the nick of time. Illegal poaching is rife, and seems to be accelerating. It has been estimated that in the three years to 2014 around 100,000 elephants were killed for their ivory, and around 25,000 more tuskless carcasses are found each year. At this rate, the elephant could be extinct in the wild within a decade or so; walruses too are on the endagered species list.

  A bizarre addition to the trade comes from an animal that became extinct nine thousand years before the Lewis Chessmen were carved. As the glaciers and icebergs melt across the Arctic tundra, woolly mammoth carcasses have emerged in the thousands. Exact figures are hard to come by—so much of the trade in ivory is conducted on the black market—but it has been estimated that over half of China’s current supply of ivory may have come from woolly mammoth tusks. In 2015 a single carved tusk weighing 200 pounds was sold in Hong Kong for $3.5 million.

  Silver

  It is not unusual for mountains to attract legends, but few are as rich in lore as Cerro Rico de Potosí, a soaring red peak in Bolivia. It isn’t its size that attracts attention—at just under 16,000 feet it is far from the largest mountain in the Andes—but what it contains. From root to summit, Cerro Rico is riddled with silver mines. According to tradition, its secret was discovered by a poor local man. While out searching for a lost llama in January 1545, Diego Huallpa built a fire to keep the chill of the alpine night at bay. As the fire burned, the ground beneath it began to ooze liquid silver, like blood from a wound.

  Owing to its value as a precious metal, silver has long held an important position in human culture, and we have never stopped seeking it out and finding uses for it. In the twentieth century it was used to evoke the future, space travel, and progress. From the shiny, zipped-up suits of the “Mercury 7,” the world’s first space crew, to Paco Rabanne’s metal minidresses and André Courrèges’s foil fashion in the 1960s, it seemed that silver was the color we would all be wearing once we’d become accustomed to zero gravity.

  But it has symbolic affiliations with old-fashioned superstitions as well as an imagined future. In Scottish folklore a silver branch, covered with white blossoms or bearing silver apples, could act as a kind of passport into the fairy otherworld.1 The metal was also thought to be able to detect poisons, changing color if it came into contact with one. This belief became so widespread that silver tableware became fashionable and then the standard. The first recorded appearance of the silver bullet being used to dispatch the forces of evil is from the mid-seventeenth century, when the town of Greifswald in northeastern Germany became all but overrun with werewolves. As the population dwindled it seemed as if the entire town might have to be abandoned, until a group of students made little musket balls from the precious metal. Silver is now firmly embedded in the semiotics of horror movies, effective against all manner of beings, from werewolves to vampires.2

  Perhaps such superstitions stem from silver’s link with the night. While its more illustrious sibling gold [here] is traditionally twinned with the sun, silver is equated with the moon. As a partnership this makes a great deal of sense. Silver also waxes and wanes in alternate cycles of polishing and tarnishing. One minute it is bright and reflective, the next it is eclipsed by a black film of silver sulfide. There is something in this imperfection that makes it more human: it seems to have a life cycle, and, just as we die, so its brilliance dies a little too.3

  Although the metal occurs naturally—finding a piece glinting in the dirt must seem like finding a gift from the earth itself—it is more frequently mixed with other elements in subtly sheened ores and alloys, and must be extracted by smelting. In Egypt, silver beads and other small objects have been found that date back to the Neolithic era, and these became more common in the twentieth and nineteenth centuries B.C.4 One Egyptian archaeological hoard contained 153 silver vessels, nearly 20 pounds of the metal in all.5 It has been used ever since in jewelry, medals, decorative elements on clothes, and coins.

  It was silver mined in South and Central America that allowed the Spanish Empire to flourish for nearly five hundred years. (The Spanish even named a country after it: Argentina’s name is derived from the Latin argentum, meaning silvery.) Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the conquistadors exported around 150,000 tons of the metal. This accounted for around 80 percent of the world’s supply, and funded a series of wars and further conquests, both colonial and against European rivals. To extract silver ore from Cerro Rico, one of the two most profitable mines in their empire, the Spanish exploited indigenous labor. Using a version of the mita forced-labor system the Inca had used to build temples and roads, the Spanish insisted locals over the age of 18 put in a year’s work for subsistence wages. Accidents and mercury poisoning were common. The Spanish boasted that with the silver extracted from Cerro Rico, they could have built a bridge across the Atlantic back to their homeland, and still have had silver to carry across it. For the locals, Cerro Rico had a rather different reputation. To them, it was “the mountain that eats men.”

  Whitewash

  In May 1894, fear swept through the narrow streets of Hong Kong. Plague. The disease, in its third and final grand pandemic, had been spreading sporadically through mainland China for forty years before materializing on the island.1 There was no mistaking the symptoms: first, flulike chills and fever, then headaches and muscle pain. The tongue would swell and become covered with a pale fur. The appetite would disappear. Vomiting and diarrhea—often bloody—would swiftly follow, and, most tellingly, smooth, painful swellings would develop in the lymph nodes in the groin, neck, or armpits.2 Death was common, and agonizing.

  With the precise cause and even the means of transmission still unknown, those fighting the disease despaired of stanching its course. Volunteers desperately searched back alleys for bodies, tended the sick in swiftly erected, camplike isolation hospitals, and began furiously whitewashing the streets and houses in the infected areas.3

  Whitewash is the cheapest of paints, made from a mixture of lime (crushed and heated limestone) and calcium chloride or salt, combined with w
ater. In 1848, when Britain was battling waves of influenza and typhus, it was estimated that using it to paint a whole tenement, inside and out, would cost seven pennies, five and a half without labor.4 Whitewash does the job, but not well: it flakes and has to be reapplied each year, and if the proportions of the constituent ingredients are not quite right, it can transfer onto clothes. Its disinfectant qualities mean that it has always been popular with dairy farmers, who coat the interiors of their barns and sheds with it. The saying “Too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint,” a phrase usually associated with poverty-riddled Kentucky, gives a good impression of the medium’s social standing. Its literary star turn is as a foil for the cunning of the eponymous hero of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, originally published in 1876. After Tom becomes very dirty in a fight, his Aunt Polly orders him to daub “[t]hirty yards of board fence nine feet high:”

  Sighing he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.5

  Tom, of course, manages to trick friends into finishing the job, but the symbolism of his punishment is telling.

  Aunt Polly was not the first to use whitewash to retaliate against perceived sin. During the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used it to obscure colorful murals and altarpieces that depicted saints in ways they now deemed impious. (Over the years, as the paint wore thin, the faces began peeking through again.) This practice perhaps explains the origin of the phrase “to whitewash,” which means to conceal unpleasant truths, usually political in nature.