The art history alchemy of precious minerals, metals, flora and fauna
Marina Viatkina · Follow
Published in · 9 min read · Jan 21, 2022
Back in the day, the perceived value of artwork was only based on the image of an artist and the marketing efforts behind it. Well, at least, not entirely, as it is often the case of today.
In the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and later centuries, painters often justified the high prices for their creations taking into account their rather earthly qualities, like, say, the materials used.
You could’ve commissioned a family portrait or a devotional picture to your favourite household name master and expected to pay a certain amount for it:
- an X for bust-length likeness,
- a double X for a full-length portrait [with an extra charge for painting hands].
“But wait, there’s more!”, — as a savvy salesman might put it.
If you were really looking into something special that would showcase your wealth and impeccable style and taste, you might’ve considered adding an extra layer of sophistication and refinement to the otherwise exquisite painting.
And that’s when you’d be offered the menu for some luxurious colour hues made of the most exclusive pigments that one could find in the world.
The divine azure blue, flaming reds, vibrant greens, or pure gold — your self-expression could only be limited by the depth of your pocket.
In this article, we will have a brief look at the most precious colours in art history and get to know what made them so special and expensive to use.
You probably know that the painting surface is usually composed of several layers of various components: binder [medium], additives, solvent and pigments. Each painter had his or her own secrets and could also add fungicides, driers, anti-oxidants, etc., and other ingredients.
Some slices of this pie deliver colour and tint [pigments, soluble dyes, and lacquers] and others ensure this scheme gets preserved for, luckily, centuries to come.
Pigments are powders that are insoluble in the mediums [egg yolk, oils, etc.] they are added to. They are responsible for the opaqueness and specific colour of this or that fragment in a painting.
Traditional old master pigments were usually made of minerals and clays.
Some pigments have been known since antiquity, and some were only discovered in the 19th or 20th century [inorganic ones in particular] — based on that knowledge, scientists can even determine the date of creation of important artworks when other pieces of evidence are absent or debatable.
Apart from being expensive for art collectors, some pigments were toxic to painters, and some destroyed other colours, and even lost their own hue completely with time.
The development of the commercial routes between the old Orient and the West brought new luxurious pigments to Europe that were yet unknown in the continent. No wonder, they were immediately absorbed into the workshop practices of the most prominent painters and became sought after by their wealthy clientele.
Lapis lazuli, or natural ultramarine, is a rare stone used in art since Antiquity and found only in the mountains of modern-day Afghanistan and Iran.
Think of all the hustle with searching for this mineral, then dealing with its shipment, grinding it to powder ensuring no impurities are left inside…
Sound’s like a quest even in the 21st century, imagine the scarcity of this pigment in the Renaissance epoch!
Yet the end result in the painting justified all the efforts and the price paid by the commissioner.
Although this pigment is quite stable in the light, some masterpieces that contained this pigment in the blue details of the image, gradually lost their initial glow and brightness and may not look so impressive today they did many centuries ago.
While lapis lazuli was used sporadically and in exceptional cases, the blue tint was mostly derived from another natural pigment called Azurite [basic copper carbonate, rather toxic]. It was known and widely applied since prehistoric times up (especially loved in Ancient Egypt) until the mid-17th century.
- Often, the painter would use azurite to lay a solid blue background in under-painting and then add a final touch of ultramarine in glazes [almost transparent layers of oil paint added one after another to achieve depth and interplay of light on the painting surface].
In 1710, the Prussian Blue was invented [the first modern synthetic pigment produced by oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts] and completely replaced the need for expensive lapis lazuli. The early 19th-century then came up with a Cobalt Blue for lighter hues of this celestial colour and painters then had a range of rather cheap alternatives for painting skies and exquisite drapery.
As “red” is often perceived as a signal of danger, the beautiful and vibrant red and orange hues in painting were rather risky and toxic to work with.
Cinnabar — a historic source for the scarlet pigment of vermilion — is a mineral that is born as a result of recent volcanic activity and alkaline hot springs. Apart from being perfectly red in colour, its crystals contain a heavy silvery-white toxic liquid metallic element of mercury.
Cinnabar, once called “dragon’s blood”, appears to be one of the most mystique pigments in art history.
A red sulphide of mercury, it may change its pattern due to reaction with chlorine salts in the air, and sulfur, mercury and salt are the quintessential elements of alchemy.
Cinnabar was used by alchemists to make quicksilver — that’s how they called mercury back in the day [the practice adopted by contemporary chemical industry].
Alchemists were convinced that mercury transcended both the solid and liquid states, both earth and heaven, both life and death.
On the contrary to lapis lazuli, cinnabar was widely used in art across Europe since Antiquity. However, this high demand and popularity lead to an eventual steep increase in its price.
“Nothing is more carefully guarded. It is forbidden to break up or refine the cinnabar on the spot. They send it to Rome in its natural condition, under seal, to the extent of some ten thousand pounds a year. The sales price is fixed by law to keep it from becoming impossibly expensive, and the price fixed is seventy sesterces a pound.” — Pliny
The market regulation wasn’t that effective, and the cost to cover a page in a manuscript with cinnabar or gold was the same.
There is another peculiar source of red colour. Cochineal insect was used as a natural source of Carmin red dye used in textiles, drugs and cosmetics.
An interesting story was captured by the famous English painter and botanic Marianne North (1830–1890) during her trip to Tenerife Island in the winter of 1875 where she painted local floral and Cactus-like plants in particular.
Back then, the terraces of cacti were artificially grown instead of palms and other trees to feed the cochineal insect.
“When I was in Teneriffe people were beginning to say that the gas-colours had taken all their trade away, and had begun to root the cactus up and plant tobacco instead; but they couldn’t re-grow the fine trees”, — she wrote in her memoirs.
Micro-crystals of this complex pigment were widely used to produce a transparent yellow paint used mainly in Indian frescoes [as well as cloth dyeing and other products] up until the beginning of the 20th century. Imported to Europe, it could be found in oil and watercolour painting.
- Technically speaking, it is a combination of euxanthic acid salts (magnesium euxanthate and calcium euxanthate), euxanthone and sulphonated euxanthone.
However, some sources argue that the secret ingredient was different and somewhat, err…, unusual.
The 19th-century observations made in rural India state that it was obtained from concentrated urine from cows fed on a diet of mango leaves.
Now the rumours that Indian Yellow produced a “disagreeable odour” suddenly don’t seem exaggerated, right?
They say, that urine would be collected and dried, producing foul-smelling hard dirty yellow balls of the raw pigment, called “purree”.
If the version with the animal origin of the pigment is correct [and it appears to be so], then it must’ve been really troublesome and expensive to get this vibrant hue into your palette.
At some point, the process was allegedly declared inhumane and apparently outlawed.
The following rarity was made neither of precious stones or metals nor of leaves or stems of a plant. The gorgeous Royal, or Imperial, purple was produced from a secretion of predatory sea snails [rock snails]!
The poor murex mollusks were squeezed to get the desired creamy liquid out of their specific gland! The coloured substance then turned red and then purple when exposed to the sun.
Think of the price for this paint since 12,000 mollusks had to be harvested to create just 1.4 grams of pigment — enough to dye the trim of a single garment!
Nevertheless, this biological ingredient was in high demand among those in power since ancient times — togas of the Roman Emperors were coloured with this non-fading hue until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 [perhaps, this is the origins of the general perception of a purple colour as a Royal one].
It has been used almost exclusively for dyeing textiles and not as a pigment for painting.
The old legend says that demigod Hercules [Heracles in the Roman version of his name] was once walking with his dog by the sea trying to court a nymph called Tyro [Greek mythology says she was a princess though]. The dog was hunting for snails and when he chewed one, suddenly his muzzle was coloured with purple stains.
Seeing this, the nymph demanded a gown of the same colour, and the result was the origin of purple dye.
Perhaps, the process was, indeed, first executed in Tyre, Phoenicia [modern Lebanon], a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’.
With the amazing Mummy Brown, or Egyptian Brown, you get precisely what it states! This astonishing earthly pigment contained bitumen [white pitch polymer], myrrh, and, yeah, ground-up remains of human and feline Ancient Egyptian mummies!
It’s rather fascinating why would anyone need such an extravagant way to derive brown colour when the cheap and wide-spread umber has never been an issue.
However, the demand was high, and sometimes, when there was a shortage of mummies [sounds weird, right?], the art supplies dealers substituted them with contemporary corpses of slaves or criminals.
They say, that artists did only discover the unusual contents of this pigment only in the 19th century and immediately the demand for it decreased dramatically.
The Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones allegedly buried his tube of mummy brown once he was told that it actually contained mummy.
