Jan van Eyck, "Portrait of a Man" (1433), National Gallery, London
Social anthropologists tell us that the color red is the first color which was able to be synthesized by the human eye — the first color we could see. When it comes to its application in the world of art, the discovery of North America made its use more and more accessible. You see, for the medieval and early Renaissance periods, the color red was rarely used in paintings. This was because the dye used for red oil paint was extracted from a cactus beetle (yes, a beetle) called a cochineal. ”People made their living trading this dye,” says Rebecca Stevens, former curator of Red, an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. “It was as good as gold.” Spain, with its domination Mexico and the southwestern U.S. found easy access to the bug that was so rare in other parts of the world. Traders would scrape the bugs off of the cacti, let them dry and smash the bugs into a smell pellet. When they reached Europe merchants weren’t able to figure out what these pellets were made of (a berry? a pigment?) and therefore the Spanish secret and monopoly was safe.
Later, as synthetic dyes became easily producable, the bottom dropped out on the cochineal market. But with red’s innate brilliance and tone, it was still used selectively: “A textile is not dyed red by chance,” Stevens says. “No, you use red for a specific reason whether it’s for love, for fertility, for happiness — you made it red on purpose.”
For an interesting read on red, check out Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red: Empire Espionage and the Quest of the Color of Desire.
On another note, I thought I would close with this great quote I read by 19th-Century French poet Charles Baudelaire: “A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
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