The Secret Lives of Color

by Kassia St. Clair

  Bes is one of over 50 such kohl pots in the Louvre’s collection. Some, like this one, are decorative and come in the form of servants or cattle or gods; others are more functional, just little jars of alabaster or breccia (a kind of rock).1 Pots like these turn up in a lot of museum collections, because everyone in ancient Egypt, from pharaohs to peasants, male and female, rimmed their eyes with thick black lines; many were buried with jars of kohl so that they could continue to do so in the afterlife. Kohl was believed to have magical protective properties, and, as it does today, played the visual trick of making the whites of the eyes stand out, which was then, as now, considered distinctive and attractive.2

  The kind of kohl used depended on wealth and social status. The poor might use mixtures of soot and animal fats, but, as ever, the wealthy demanded something rather more special. Theirs would predominantly be made of galena, the dark metallic mineral form of lead sulfide. This would be crushed and mixed with powdered pearls, gold, coral, or emeralds to give sheen and subtle color. Frankincense, fennel, or saffron might then be added for their scent. To make the powder usable, it was bound with a little oil or milk so that it could be daubed with feather or finger.3

  In 2010, French researchers analyzing the traces of powder found in kohl pots discovered that they also contained something even more precious: man-made chemicals, including two kinds of lead chlorides that would have taken around a month to brew. Mystified, they conducted further tests. To their astonishment, these chemicals were found to stimulate the skin around the eye to produce around 240 percent more nitric oxide than usual, significantly reducing the risk of eye infections.4 In a time before antibiotics, such simple infections could easily lead to cataracts or blindness. Kohl, like the little pot in the shape of the fearsome Bes, was a very practical form of protection.

  Payne’s gray

  “Stalin,” an early political opponent once wrote, “gave me the impression . . . of a gray blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace. There is really nothing more to be said about him.”1 It’s a stinging line: in our individualistic age it is almost better not to be remembered at all than to be remembered as dull and insubstantial. Of course the opponent could not have been more wrong: Stalin has left a long and burdensome legacy and humanity is unlikely to forget him in a hurry.

  One eighteenth-century gentleman, on the other hand, had faded from memory almost before he died. All that remains is the pigeon-plumage shade of gray to which he lent his name. It is still a firm artists’ favorite, even if little is known about the man himself. William Payne was born in Exeter in 1760 and raised in Devon before moving to London. Maybe . . . possibly. A pamphlet on the painter produced in 1922 by one Basil Long spends the first 10 pages alternating between putting forward biographical theories and apologizing for a lack of actual evidence.2

  We do know that after spending some time as a civil engineer Payne traveled to London and began painting full-time. He was a member of the Old Water-Color Society, where he exhibited in the years from 1809 to 1812, and also showed work at the Royal Academy. Joshua Reynolds is even said to have admired some of his landscapes. Payne, however, was most in demand as a teacher. As his contemporary William Henry Pyne put it: his paintings “were no sooner seen than admired, and almost every family of fashion were anxious that their sons and daughters should have the benefit of his tuition.”3 We will never know if it was the strain of dealing with the untalented offspring of London’s elite that drove him to find a replacement for true black pigments, but we do know that he was proud enough of this precise mixture of Prussian blue, yellow ocher, and crimson lake to make sure his name stuck to it.

  Why is Payne’s gray so beloved by artists? It is at least partially because of a phenomenon now known as “atmospheric perspective.” Think of hills and mountains fading off into the distance, for example: the farther away things are, the paler and bluer they appear. This effect is caused by particles of dust, pollution, and water droplets scattering the shortest, bluest light wavelengths, and it is exacerbated by fog, rain, and mist. It is small wonder that a landscape painter working in Devon was the first to mix the deep blue-black gray so peculiarly suited for capturing this effect.

  Obsidian

  There are many intriguing objects in the collection of the British Museum in London, but one of the most mysterious has to be a thick, dark, and highly polished disk with a small, hooped handle. The Aztecs forged the mirror from obsidian in honor of their god Tezcatlipoca (his name means “smoking mirror”), and it was brought over to the Old World after Cortés’s conquest of the region that is now Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century.1 Obsidian, also known as volcanic glass, is formed when molten lava, erupting from the earth, comes into contact with ice or snow, and cools very quickly.2 It is very hard, glossy, brittle, and either black or a very dark bronze-green, sometimes with a golden or iridescent sheen caused by layers of tiny gas bubbles that become trapped in the magma as it solidifies. Although there is some doubt about this particular mirror’s provenance, Sir Horace Walpole, the British antiquarian who acquired it in 1771, was under no doubt about its previous owner and what it had been used for. On the label attached to the object’s handle he wrote a curious inscription: “The Black Stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits.”3

  Dr. John Dee was Elizabethan England’s foremost mathematician, astrologer, and natural philosopher. He was a Cambridge graduate, and the queen’s philosopher and adviser; he also spent many years talking to angels about the natural order and the end of the world. These conversations were held using his collection of “shewstones”—of which this mirror may have been one—and through several mediums, most famously Edward Kelley. It is not so remarkable that a man of Dee’s intelligence believed in the occult—most people did. Indeed, nearly a century later one of the greatest scientific minds in history—belonging to one Isaac Newton—expended the greater part of its energy searching for the philosopher’s stone. What is remarkable is that anything is known about Dee’s mystical investigations at all.

  He died in 1608 or 1609, disgraced and in poverty, after having had to sell off the majority of his possessions, including most of his famous library. His papers, too, were scattered or destroyed. In 1586 an angel, speaking through Kelley, ordered Dee to burn all 28 volumes of his painstaking records of their previous conversations, which was convenient timing seeing as envoys from the papacy were just about to begin questioning the pair about their involvement with witchcraft, a very serious charge indeed.4 If they had discovered his obsidian mirror, it might well have been enough to land Dee on the rack or the pyre.

  The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed the widespread return of the most disturbing, paranoid, and pessimistic aspects of Christianity: belief in the potency of the devil on earth, and that his envoys—witches—were busy working to overthrow order and bring him to power. In this context blacks of all shades took on disturbing new meanings. Not only was the devil usually depicted (and described by witnesses at witch trials) as black and hairy, but the idea of the sabbat, which so obsessed Europe and later North America, was filled with darkness. From their venues—often forests at night—to their black-clad participants and the retinue of animals that attended Satan—crows, bats, and cats—sabbats were veritable orgies of blackness.5 Obsidian, a dark rock spewed forth from the fiery bowels of the earth, was naturally deeply suspect.

  Obsidian crops up in occult company time and time again. In the fiction of George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, blades made from the volcanic glass have magical powers. Historically, Native American tribes have used it in rituals. As recently as the 1990s, women from the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico dressed in black and carried long obsidian blades in their right hands and an obsidian spear point, or tsi wi, in their left during witch-destruction ceremonies.6 Ancient and prehistoric obsidian artifacts—often blades—have been found around the Red Sea, Ethiopia, Sardinia, and the Andes. The name of the Aztec patron
ess of witches, Itzpapalotl, means “obsidian butterfly.” More damning still for Dee, Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god for whom his own mirror was made, was the god of warriors, rulers, and sorcerers.7

  Ink

  It is one thing for humans to have complex thoughts and plans; it is quite another to transmit them over long distances. That requires a system of marks that the sender knows the receivers can understand. For most cultures this has meant writing, which in turn has meant creating decent ink.

  Inks have tended to be black because they need to be very fluid to write with easily—far more so than paint; most pigments would not be sufficiently legible at such high levels of dilution.

  Sometime around 2600 B.C. in ancient Egypt, Ptahhotep, a Fifth Dynasty vizier, began to think about retirement. His reason was old age, and his litany of complaints will be familiar to anyone with elderly relatives: “Sleep is upon him in discomfort every day. / Eyes are grown small, ears deaf, / Mouth silent, unable to speak.” A few lines on he begins to give touching advice to his son: “Do not be proud on account of your knowledge, / But discuss with the ignorant as with the wise. / The limits of art cannot be delivered; / There is no artist whose talent is fulfilled.”1 (It must have been good advice: his son later became a vizier himself.) We know about Ptahhotep, his aches and pains, and his son because he committed his thoughts to papyrus with black ink that remains perfectly legible today.2 It was made using lampblack, a very fine pigment that was easily produced by burning a candle or lamp; to this would be added water and gum arabic, which helped the particles of lampblack disperse through the water rather than clumping together.3

  The Chinese, who ascribed the invention of ink to Tien-Tchen, who lived between 2697 and 2597 B.C., also used lampblack for their ink (sometimes also confusingly known as India ink).4 The pigment was produced in huge amounts: row upon row of special funnel-shaped lamps were tended every half hour or so by workers who scraped soot off the sides of the lamps using feathers. For special-occasion ink they used the soot of pine logs, ivory, lacquer resin, or the deposits of dead yeast left over at the end of wine fermentation, but the end product was essentially the same.5 With the exception of the initial raw material, the recipe for most ink remained stable until the nineteenth century. Even the invention of the printing press had little impact on it. When the 42-line Bible began spilling off Gutenberg’s presses in around 1455, the smell of ink in the air would have been much the same as in countless monastic scriptoriums. The principal tweak to the recipe was the use of linseed oil as the base medium, which made for thicker ink that would adhere more easily to the paper.6

  Other kinds of dark ink involved extracting the bitter tannins from vegetable material. A particularly famous and long-lasting kind, iron-gall ink, was the product of the acrimonious relationship between a wasp and an oak tree. The Cynips quercusfolii lays its eggs in the young buds or leaves of the oak tree, along with a chemical that causes the oak to form a hard, nutlike growth around the larvae. This growth—often called an oak apple—is rich in bitter tannic acid. When combined with iron sulfate, water, and gum arabic, the acid produces a velvety blue-black and very permanent ink.7 A variant on this recipe, recorded by Theophilus in the twelfth century, uses the tannic acid in the sap of crushed buckthorn.8

  For many cultures, however, the practicalities of ink—legibility, permanency, and consistency—have gone hand in glove with rather more diffuse, emotional, even reverential considerations. The ancient Chinese used inks perfumed with cloves, honey, and musk.9 The scents, it is true, helped cover the odor of the binders used—yak skin and fish intestines were common—but these inks sometimes also contained powdered rhinoceros horn, pearls, or jasper. In medieval Christian monasteries, the act of copying and illuminating libraries of manuscripts, of putting wisdom and prayer to paper, was seen as a spiritual process in itself.

  Black ink also had a devotional relationship with Islam: the Arabic word for ink, midãd, is closely related to that for divine substance or matter. An early seventeenth-century recipe in a treatise on painters and calligraphers contained 14 ingredients; some, like soot and gallnuts, are obvious enough, but others—saffron, Tibetan musk, and hemp oil—are far less so. The author, Qadi Ahmad, was under little doubt of ink’s numinous power. “The ink of the scholar,” he wrote, “is more holy than the blood of the martyr.”10

  Charcoal

  Émile Cartailhac was a man who could admit when he was wrong. This was fortunate, because in 1902 the French prehistorian found himself writing an article for L’Anthropologie in which he did just that. In “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” he recanted the views he had spent the previous 20 years forcefully and scornfully maintaining: that prehistoric man was incapable of fine artistic expression and that the cave paintings found in Altamira, northern Spain, were forgeries.1

  The Paleolithic paintings at Altamira, which were produced around 14,000 B.C., were the first examples of prehistoric cave art to be officially discovered. It happened by chance in 1879, when a local landowner and amateur archaeologist was busily brushing away at the floor of the caves, searching for prehistoric tools. His nine-year-old daughter, Maria Sanz de Sautuola—a grave little thing with cropped hair and lace-up booties—was exploring farther on when she suddenly looked up, exclaiming, “Look, Papa, bison!” She was quite right: a veritable herd, subtly colored with black charcoal and ocher, ranged over the ceiling.2 When her father published the finding in 1880, he was met with ridicule. The experts scoffed at the very idea that prehistoric man—savages really—could have produced sophisticated polychrome paintings. The esteemed Monsieur Cartailhac and the majority of his fellow experts, without troubling to go and see the cave for themselves, dismissed the whole thing as a fraud. Maria’s father died, a broken and dishonored man, in 1888, four years before Cartailhac admitted his error.3

  After the discovery of many more caves and hundreds of lions, handprints, horses, women, hyenas, and bison, the artistic abilities of prehistoric man are no longer in doubt. It is thought that these caves were painted by shamans trying to charm a steady supply of food for their tribes. Many were painted using the pigment most readily available in the caves at the time: the charred stick remnants of their fires.4 At its simplest, charcoal is the carbon-rich by-product of organic matter—usually wood—and fire. It is purest and least ashy when oxygen has been restricted during its heating.

  As an energy source, charcoal powered the Industrial Revolution. Such vast quantities were used to smelt iron that whole forests were decimated and smoke filled the air around cities. Charcoal is thus indirectly responsible for one of the classic exemplars of natural selection. The Biston betularia f. typica, or peppered moth, is usually a speckled white and black. During the nineteenth century a previously unknown variety with an all-black body and bitter chocolate wings began appearing more frequently around northern towns, while numbers of the white-speckled kind declined sharply. By 1895 a study around Manchester found that 95 percent of the peppered moths were dark.5 Against the bark of the sooty trees, the dark moths were harder for predators to see—hiding, like the Altamira bison, in plain sight.

  Jet

  In its original sense, the word jet may be on the cusp of disappearing. Plug the word into a search engine and squadrons of stumpy airplanes appear. And while people still say “jet black,” it is beginning to acquire the worn-thin feeling of something too often repeated.

  Actually, the black kind of jet is anything but insubstantial. Also known as lignite, it is a kind of coal formed over millennia from highly pressurized wood; when fine enough, it is so hard it can be carved and polished to an almost glasslike sheen.1 The most highly prized jet comes from Whitby, a small town on the northeast coast of England.

  The Romans were the first to exploit Whitby’s jet. It was, until the nineteenth century, so abundant that great lumps could be gathered from the beaches. From there it was probably taken to Eboracum (York), the Roman provincial capital, to be carved and
then exported to the rest of the empire. One figurine, found at the beginning of the twentieth century in Westmorland, dates from around A.D. 330, just as the Roman grip on Britain was beginning to slip. The statuette shows a woman leaning on what appears to be a barrel. She wears a mantle that is hitched over her left shoulder, and seems to be wiping away tears with her left hand. If it is, as has been supposed, a depiction of a Roman goddess to be given as an offering when grieving, then it could be the first example of jet’s involvement in what became something of a Victorian obsession.2

  Ancient Greeks and Romans may have started the tradition of wearing special, drab clothes when a friend, relative, or ruler died, but, for the Victorians, rules and conventions governed every color of every stitch of clothing people could wear from the time their loved one died until the niceties of grief were exhausted, up to two years later. Because glossy pieces of black jet jewelry—no matter how elaborate the design—could be worn throughout the mourning period, they became immensely popular. As with mauve [here], Queen Victoria was at least partially responsible for the trend. Within a week of Prince Albert’s sudden death from typhoid fever on December 14, 1861, the crown jewelers had been commissioned to produce commemorative black jewelry, which the distraught queen continued to press on relatives for years afterward. She herself remained in mourning for the rest of her life.3 (A photograph of the dead prince was integrated into all royal portraits until 1903.)