April 25, 2026 • 40 mins
This 2019 episode covers the color blue, the most popular color in many parts of the world. But many ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue, and some languages still don’t.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This week on Unearthed, we talked about Anatolia's oldest known
indigo dyed textile, and that reminded me that once we
did an entire episode about the history of the color blue,
which of course talked about indigo as a die. This
one is a live show that we did at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. In September
(00:25):
of twenty nineteen, and this episode came out on October sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hello and welcome to a podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are sharing our
live show from the National Gallery of Art Washington, which
we did in September as part of their MGA Nights programming.
And we actually did this show twice over the course
of the evening so that more people who attended that event,
which is very popular, could get in and see it.
And so today we are sharing the first of those two.
(01:08):
We're not going to share the second one because it
would effectively be the exact same show.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And I'm Holly Frye. Blue is my favorite color, and
that makes me not special. Blue is the most popular
color and a lot of the world. For example, there
was a survey that was conducted in twenty fifteen that
polled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all
(01:44):
of those places, blue was the most popular color by
a significant margin. So I am not alone in the
world in my love of blue. It can also feel
like we're really surrounded by blue all the time, because
we have the blue sky and the reflection of the
sky in the water, and then things like blue jens,
and then all the blue stuff that people buy because
it's everyone's favorite color. And yet a lot of ancient
(02:08):
languages did not have a word for blue at all.
Some languages still don't. For a lot of human history,
the process of making blue dyes and paints has been
pretty prohibitively expensive and complicated if people knew how to
do it at all. So blue used to be really rare.
And today we're going to talk about blues progression from
something that there wasn't even a name for because it
(02:31):
was so rare to something that seems really ubiquitous. And
like Tracy just said, there were a lot of ancient
languages that just had no word for blue whatsoever. And
this is something that folks started figuring out thanks to
William Ewart Gladstone, who spent four terms as Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen
ninety four, but he had also studied classics at Oxford,
(02:53):
and ten years before he became Prime minister, he published
a six hundred plus page book that was called Study
on Homer and the Homeric Age, and it had a
whole section in it titled Homer's Perceptions and.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Use of Color.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I really like that one of the jobs that you
can have had before being Prime minister as classicist.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
That seems cool.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I feel like if we had more of that and
less of other things, you'd be in great shape. So
in this section of the book, Gladstone outlined what he
interpreted as signs of immaturity. That was one of his
words for it, in Homer's ability to differentiate color. And
here is what he said. One the paucity of his colors, two,
(03:35):
the use of the same word to denote not only
different hues or tints of the same color, but colors which,
according to us, are essentially different. Three the description of
the same object under epithets of color fundamentally disagreeing with
one another, for the vast predominance of the most crude
and elemental forms of color black and white over every other,
(03:58):
and the decided tendency to treat other colors is simply
intermediates between those two extremes.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Five.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
The slight use of color and Homer as compared with
other elements of beauty for the purposes of poetic effect,
and its absence in certain cases we might confidently expect it.
So in other words, Homer's use of color descriptors seemed
kind of contradictory and frankly just haphazard. Homer's works mostly
referred to things as black or white, and sometimes referred
(04:27):
to the same object using different color descriptors at different times,
or he would describe things with strange colors, like he
described both blood and a rainbow with a word that
translates essentially as violet, or calling the sea wine dark,
which I know maybe he got criticized for, but it
sounds very poetic to me, Homer's writing also seems to
(04:49):
have had no word that specifically meant blue. And side note,
there is actually a lot of debate as well about
whether all of the writing that is attributed to Homer
now was really the wor one person, or if there
are multiple people involved that all kind of fell into
this umbrella.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
But that is a whole different.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Story and way outside the scope of what we're talking
about tonight.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
But just keep that in mind as we talk about
Homer's work.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, yeah, regardless of whether Homer was one person or
many people. This whole conversation led to some discussion about
whether people in the Homeric age were color blind or
otherwise we're perceiving color color differently than cited people in
the nineteenth century when Gladstone was writing, and we'll get
back to that idea. This also led to further study
(05:34):
about how ancient writers were describing and naming colors, and
it quickly became clear that other ancient writings also had
odd uses of color, including not having a word for
the color blue. Researchers studied these language patterns for decades,
and then in nineteen sixty nine, Brent Berlin and Paul
Key published basic color Terms, their universality and evolution, and
(05:57):
basic color terms are essentially single words that can be
applied to a wide range of objects and are understood
by most native speakers of a given language. So in English,
for example, there are all kinds of words describing different
shades and hues, but there are actually only eleven basic
color terms, and those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink,
(06:19):
and thank goodness, purple. One of the important things about
basic color terms is that there's an agreed on shade
that they are describing. So even though violet was one
of the words that Homer was using, the fact that
it was sort of being applied to seemingly random objects
would mean that that wasn't really functioning as a basic
color word or a basic color term. All the languages
(06:42):
that Berlin in k studied had a minimum of two
basic color terms black and white, sometimes described as light
and dark, and here is something that I think it's
really cool. And languages that had three basic color terms,
the third one was red, and languages with four the
fourth one was either yellow or green, and then the
other of those was the fifth one. In languages that
(07:02):
had five it's only when a language had six basic
color terms that it had a color term for blue,
and then from there the pattern didn't hold up much
Farther There was brown as the seventh color, and then
colors beyond that just followed in no particular order. And
this nineteen sixty nine work had studied a relatively small
(07:23):
group of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and
most of them lived in industrial areas, and this naturally
led to a lot of discussion and questions about whether
these results could really be considered universal. So in the
late nineteen seventies, Berlin and k started working on their
World Color Survey, which asked more than twenty five hundred
native speakers of unwritten languages around the world to identify
(07:47):
various colors. Berlin and k published a monograph on this
in July of two thousand and nine, and they reported
that more than eighty percent of the world's languages followed
this pattern of black and white and then and then
yellow or green, and then the other one of those,
and then blue. And these ancient languages without a word
for blue seems to follow these same patterns. A lot
(08:10):
of them have the black, white, and red and that's
it sounds like my wedding, not at all like Game
of Thrones, and way before that. There has been a
lot of research since then into why this pattern actually
exists and how to interpret all of this information. And
there's also been research into whether that pattern is evidence
that ancient people saw fewer colors, like William Ewert Gladstone suggested,
(08:34):
as well as whether people living today whose languages have
fewer color terms are actually perceiving fewer colors or if
they're perceiving them differently. So a lot of that research
is really contradictory and inconclusive. There are lots of questions
that we don't have one hundred percent agreed upon answers
to yet, like are their physiological differences in the eyes
(08:57):
or brains of people who speak languages that include different
numbers of basic color terms. There's some research that suggests yes,
and other research that suggests to know if there are
physiological differences, are those differences a result of the language
differences or is it the other way around? How much
of this is physiological, how much is socially constructed? Are
(09:19):
colors as sighted people perceive them universal or are they relative?
And it might seem a little bit weird that there
are so many unanswered questions about colors, because it's really
easy to imagine that colors are unchanging physical traits.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I know what purple looks like. It's purple. But it's true.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
There's an element of physics to all of this. Isaac
Newton started working with the visible spectrum of light in
the sixteen sixties, and he used a prism to refract
sunlight into a spectrum that he described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
and violet. But before this, societies around the world had
their own ideas about what light was made of and
where colors came from, and even Newton's work, which became
(10:01):
the foundation of how we all talk about color and light,
was influenced by his own preconceived ideas. For example, the
reason that there is an indigo in his list is
because he just thought there needed to be seven colors. Yeah,
there's seven days of the week, seven notes at a musical scale.
Seven's like an auspicious number. Clearly there have to be
seven colors. So, in other words, colors just aren't static,
(10:26):
unchanging traits that exist all by themselves. Our understanding of
colors is socially constructed, and the way people describe the
colors around them can vary dramatically based on language and culture.
Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings, and those meetings
change and evolve over time in response to all kinds
of factors, including what pigments are available, how expensive those
(10:48):
pigments are, whether there were laws about how they could
be used, and what's in fashion at the moment. So
when we look back into colors in the past, this
can of course get really complicated. An ancient culture may
have had no word for blue, and if they did,
it might have been used for a different range of
shades that an English speaker living today might imagine. And
(11:09):
even if we have examples of that culture's physical objects
like jewelry or textiles or works of art, their colors
can change over time thanks to things like fading and
oxidation and just dirt getting on them. And exactly how
they fade and shift can really vary depending on what
an object is made of, what pigment was used to
color it, the binders that were used with those pigments,
(11:32):
how it was handled since then, and what pollutants have
been in the air, and on and on. There's so
many factors.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
On top of all of.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
That, when we look at a work of art, especially
a work of art that was made long ago in
the past, we are almost certainly seeing it under totally
different lighting conditions than the artists who than the artists
who created had when they were making it. And one
of the hypotheses for why so many ancient languages did
not have a word for blue is that they just
didn't need one. Most ancient cultures did not have a
(12:01):
way to make blue pigment. And while there is blue
in nature, of course, thanks to things like flowers and
berries and butterflies and birds and the sky, it's not
nearly as common as other colors are. And we're going
to talk about how people worked out a way to
make their own blue. After we first pause for what
will be a little sponsor break, we're.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Going to talk a bit about pains and pigments.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
If you look at some paleolithic rock art and cave art,
you will notice a pretty similar use of color no
matter where in the world you're looking, because the palette
tends to be really earthy. There's lots of brown and
yellow and red and black, and there are naturally occurring
pigments that produce these colors and are pretty abundant in
a lot of the world, like ochre, which is made
(12:53):
from iron oxide and various earthy materials. Different cultures have
had their own ceremonial and some methods of preparing and
using these pigments, but basically you can really just grind
up some rocks and put water in there and paint
with it. Do you ever have a teacher like an
our teacher, Have you do that? I think so probably
not a lot. Uh, you can't really do that with
blue though. It turns out there are not many blue minerals,
(13:16):
and the ones that do exist typically cannot just be
crushed and mixed with water like you could do with ochre.
Mashing up blueberries or blue flowers might seem like a
great idea, and you could try to use that.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And paint with it, but it's actually.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Usually going to turn out kind of brownish or gray,
and often it's also going to fade really quickly, so
you're going to lose that blue color you were chasing.
And ancient peoples could carve objects out of blue stones
or minerals or shells, or make decorative objects with feathers,
but that was about it. Even substances like lapis lazulie,
which were eventually made into pigments, were first used just
(13:50):
primarily to make carvings and inlays, rather than actually trying
to use them as dyes or paints. So that changed
with the development of the first synthetic pigment, which happened
by a about thirty one hundred BCE that came to
be known as Egyptian blue, and according to Roman writer Vitruvius,
it was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is
(14:10):
a naturally occurring sodium carbonate compound. Modern experiments have pinpointed
the likely ingredients as silica, copper, and calcium. Usually the
silica probably came from sand and the calcium came from limestone,
although it was also possible for sand to include calcite
or flex of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to
(14:31):
be mixed with a small amount of alkali and then
be heated to between eight hundred and fifteen one thousand
degrees celsius. And when we were running through this script
earlier today, I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot?
And I was in my hotel room as we were
getting ready confirming it with like five different sources.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yes, it was that hot, which just seems like it
would all be on fire to me. But that's why
I'm not a scientist.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
We don't really know who worked out recipe or what
their process was for figuring it out.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We don't know if it was an accidental.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Discovery or if it was the result of a more
methodical process to try to get to this final result.
It may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly
in Mesopotamia. Yeah, it could have been anywhere on a
spectrum between like the kids through some sand in the kiln.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
To I'm going to figure this out, like no idea.
It's a lot of room.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Egyptian blue was used in Egyptian art from its discovery
until the end of the Roman Era, and there is
still a lot of artwork that exists today that was
made with it. The blue coloring isn't necessarily visible on
all of it, though. In two thousand and nine, it
was discovered that Egyptian blue has a near infrared luminescence
that can help researchers find traces of it that aren't
(15:48):
visible to the naked eye anymore. So. About that same time,
conservation scientists used that discovery to confirm that there are
traces of Egyptian blue on the Parthenon marbles, and we
have artwork where we can see this pigment that is
at least three thousand years old, and the pigment itself
has held up. The binders that have been used with
(16:09):
it have not always fared as well, though, For example,
pieces that used a lot of gum arabic as a
binder have tended to blacken or turn green over time.
The Egyptian term for Egyptian blue translates to artificial lapis lazilie,
and the next pigment we're going to talk about is ultramarine,
which was made out.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Of lapis lazolie.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Lapis lazilie is a metamorphic rock that's found primarily in
one place in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that's the premier
mountains in Central Asia. People in what's now Afghanistan were
mining lapis as early as seven thousand BCE, and by
thirty five hundred BCE was being carried thousands of miles
along trade routes through Asia and Europe and Africa. And
(16:51):
as we said earlier, the first uses of lapis lazolie
were mostly to make carved objects in inlays. Although lapis
could be crushed into powder and used as a pigment,
that pigment was not very pure because lapis is made
up of a mixture of different minerals, and these minerals,
depending on what their concentrations were, would all affect the
final color. So if there were impurities present and again
(17:14):
those concentrations, different preparations could look completely different from one another,
and then they would also look completely different. Over time,
people still tried it, though there is evidence of lapis
being used as a paint in the Karnak Temple complex
in Egypt. By about the sixth century, though, people had
worked out how to purify lapis lasalie into a pure
(17:36):
blue pigment now known as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue,
we do have the recipe for this. One artist and
writer Tanino Chanini, who lived between about thirteen seventy and
fourteen forty, wrote the process down in a lot of detail.
And you may have heard that ultramarine was worth more
than gold and Chininocinini's method really illustrates why it wasn't
(17:58):
just because lapis lasilie was only being mind in one
area of Afghanistan at the time. The process was also
long and really complicated, and it yield a very small
amount of usable pigment. So here's how he described it
in his book of art. Quote, First, take some lap
as lazily, and if you would know how to distinguish
the best stones, take those which contain most of the
(18:20):
blue color. So it is for it is mixed with
what is like ashes. That which contains least of this
ash pigment is best. But be careful that you do
not mistake it for azuo deela magna, which is beautiful
to the eye as enamel. Azurodela magna is as you rite,
which is copper carbonate carbonate material. It was being used
(18:41):
to make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
although it was hard to mine and it was also
tricky to work with, but it was cheaper than ultramarine,
although it was not as stable or vibrant as a pigment.
So going back to the recipe, once you've got your
lap as lassily, you pound it in a bronze mortar
covered so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You
grind it and you strain it, and you sift it,
(19:03):
and you pound it. Quote again as much as is required.
But bear in mind that though the more you grind,
the more finely powdered the A zero will be, yet
it will not be so beautiful and rich and deep
in color. And all of this pounding and grinding and
straining and sifting was difficult because lapis lasoli is physically
hard to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning.
(19:26):
He went on to write, Quote, when the powder is prepared,
procure from the druggist six ounces of resin of the pine,
three ounces of mastic, and three ounces of new wax
to each pound of lapis lasili. Put all these ingredients
into a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take
a piece of white linen and strain these things into
a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder
(19:49):
of lapis laslie. Mix it all well together into a paste,
and that you may be able to handle the paste.
Take linseed oil, and keep your hands always well anointed
with this oil. This pae must be kept at least
three days and three nights, kneeding it a little every day.
And remember that you may keep it for fifteen days
or a month, or as long as you please. I
(20:11):
like how it's like three days, but like forever's cool. Yeah,
it's totally fine. Also, it's not lap as lasli yet,
or it's not ultramarine yet. You still need to extract
the pigment from the pace that you just made and
left from between three days and forever. You do this
by putting the pace in a glazed basin, quote with
(20:31):
a porringer ful of lie moderately warm, and then you
work that with two rounded wooden sticks. So he describes
this quote. With these two sticks, one in each hand,
turn and squeeze and knead the paste thoroughly, exactly in
the manner that you would need bread. Now I need
to take a minute. I've never used sticks to need bread.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I picture you so much, just poking at It's like.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
In a bread machine. It's a paddle like that. Uh okay,
so sticks as you and knee bread. When you see
that the lye is thoroughly blue, pour it, uh, pour
it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of
fresh lie, pour it over the paste, and work it
with the sticks as before. When this lie is very blue,
(21:21):
pour it into another glazed basin and continue to do
so for several days until the paste no longer tinges
the lye. Then throw it away, for it is good
for nothing. Hey, guess what, You still don't have ultramarine yet.
The substance in each of these basins will be a
different shade of blue depending on when in the process
(21:41):
you filled it, and you need to combine them together
based on how many shades of ultramarine you are trying
to make. You have to be careful when you're doing this.
The basins that were filled first are the best quality,
and quote the last two extracts are worse than ashes.
May your eyes therefore be experienced so as not to
spoil the good as you're by mixing it with the bad,
(22:02):
and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry.
So from there, Tanini offers some advice about what to
do if none of your ultramarine has the beautiful deep
color that you're expecting, and essentially that's mixing it with
a little bit of crimson dye and allowing that all
to dry again. Then once you have your finished ultramarine,
we get to the part of this that is the
(22:23):
unexpected sexism moment of the show quote, put it into
a skinner purse, and rejoice in it, for it is
good and perfect. And bear in mind that it is
a rare gift to know how to make it well.
And you must know that it is rather the art
of maidens than of men to make it, because they
remain continually in the house and are more patient and
their hands more delicate. But beware of old women. I'm
(22:50):
just out here ruining your Acca marine. Yeah, I don't
think he'd be cool with me making a Socco marine
or ultramarine either. Ultramarine is beautiful and expensive and rare,
so during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was
mostly used by the most skilled, respected artists and artisans.
Some artists would try to make it stretch by saving
(23:13):
their ultramarine for their last final touches on whatever work
they were making, and others used ultramarine only on subjects
that seemed worthy of it. And this is when blue
started to take on a symbolic meaning, such as the
color of the Virgin Mary's clothing. And you can also
see an example of this here in the National Gallery
of Art in Raphael's the album Madonna, which was created
(23:34):
in about fifteen ten. That is on view in gallery
twenty of the main floor of the West Building, that
is the other building from where we are tonight. That
is a very good reason for you to come back
to this amazing place. Yeah, don't try to go over
there right now. That building is closed.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Get in all the trouble.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Some artists, though dated, neither of these things, to try
to conserve it or make it stretch. An example is
Johannis Permir who just spent enormous amounts of money on
ultramarine and used an extent simply everywhere. The vermiers are
in Gallery fifty A of the West Building also still
the other building spectacular.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
They are beautu I get the vapors over seat. You
can see them on the internet.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Also, thanks to its colossal expense and rarity, people were
really eager for some kind of substitute for ultramarine. It
needed to be equally good quality, but also cheaper and
easier to get. In eighteen twenty four, the French Society
for the Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize of
six thousand francs to whoever figured out an industrial process
(24:34):
to make synthetic ultramarine and it also had to cost
less than three hundred francs a kilogram, and there were
two competing claims on this prize, which was ultimately awarded
to Jean Baptiste Guimet in eighteen twenty eight. And that
is made from cowlin, sodium carbonate, bitumen and sulfur, prepared
and heated in a furnace or kiln. So once there
(24:55):
was this widely available, much less expensive blue pigment, the
color blue became way more common in artwork and for
more mundane topics a lot of the time. By the
start of the Impressionist movement, most painters were working in
synthetic ultramarine rather than made from lapis lazuli, And then
we get all those beautiful monaise that are all full
of blue everywhere. To be clear, ultramarine was not the
(25:18):
only blue pigment that was in use at this point.
Cobalt blue was introduced in eighteen oh two and cerulean
blue in the eighteen sixties. Prussian blue had been developed
back at the start of the seventeen hundreds, quite by accident.
There is some fuzziness as to the details about this,
but the conventional story is that an alchemist named Johann
Kanrad Dipple was working with potash and animal blood, and
(25:41):
Johann Jakub Diesbach was a dye maker who used podash
as part of making a red dye, and Deezbach ran
out and he either bought or borrowed some from Dipple,
and it was the podash that had been adulterated with
animal blood. And because of this, instead of making the
red dye that he was expecting, Diesbach wound up.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
The vivid blue.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I like to imagine that he was like, he won't
notice if I just take some of it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
We'll give it. Why is this blue now?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Tipple used his knowledge of chemistry to work out how
to replicate these box results, and then another man, Johann
Leonard Frisch, also claims to have invented this in a
letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in seventeen fifteen. Although these
men tried to keep their recipe a secret so they
could cash in on the incredibly lucrative blue pigment trade,
John Woodward published a method of making it in seventeen
(26:32):
twenty four, so anybody could make as much as they wanted,
and the development of Prussian blue also sometimes called Berlin Blue,
affected the use of blue in artwork much the way
that synthetic ultramarine did. For example, it led to a
whole style of woodblock prints in Japan called ai zurie.
Those were printed mostly or entirely in blue, and these
(26:52):
prints made use of Prussian blue as well as indigo
and other blue pigments. And a particularly famous example is
Katushiko's Hoku sais thirty six views of Mount Fuji that
includes the Great Wave of Kanagawa, and the first prints
of this series we're all in blue, and blue is
really prominent in the rest of them that are not
those first ones that are one hundred percent blue. Yeah,
(27:14):
I love that whole series. And hey, we just mentioned indigo,
which means that's a good segue into talking about the
mysteries of blue dyes, which are going to do after
another quick break. In a lot of the world, the
oldest surviving examples of dyed textiles are dyed red, but
(27:39):
blue dye has been around for a pretty long time
as well. One example is to kell It, which is repent,
which is mentioned repeatedly in Jewish scripture and was in
use at least thirty five hundred years ago. Knowledge of
how to make it was lost some time after the
Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today its
sources believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
(28:01):
Other blue dyes are even older. In twenty sixteen, researchers
announced that they had dated a piece of cotton textile
found in Juaca, Peru, and found that it was sixty
two hundred years old. It had been dyed with indigo,
making it the oldest known use of indigo dye and
one of the oldest surviving cotton textiles. And there were
other blue dyes in the Americas as well. For example,
(28:23):
there is evidence that the Navajo Nation had a natively
produced blue plant dye, which was eventually replaced with indigo
that was introduced from further south in what is now Mexico.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
So today indigo.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Is more often associated with what's now India, but the
plant genus Indigofera includes hundreds of flowering plants that live
in tropical and subtropical areas all around the world, and
a lot of them can and have been used to
make purple and blue dyes. Indigo has been used to
make paints as well. For example, Maya blue was used
as a paint in pre colonial meso America, and that
(28:58):
was made from indigo and a clay called paligor skite
and at least one other ingredient who's or at least
one other ingredient whose identity is.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Still a little bit debated.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
And as another example of usage, Peter Paul Rubens used
both ultramarine and indigo in the Fall of Phaeton, which
is here at the National Gallery of Art in the
West Building's Gallery forty five. Melanie Gifford, who is a
research conservator here, described his process in painting this to
us in an email. She said Rubens used indigo paint
(29:28):
indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting
in Italy in sixteen oh four, and then when he
revised the painting in Antwerp a few years later, he
switched to the brighter ultramarine. So when it comes to
making dye, the historical details of how the plants were
processed and how the dye was used could really vary
based on where the indigo was being grown. Often the
(29:48):
steps had a cultural or religious significance, and regardless of
the specifics, it tended to be a pretty involved process.
That required a whole lot of plant material to make
a very small amount of dye. And as an example,
here is how indigo was processed in Suriname, as described
by John Gabriel Studman quote. When all the verdure is
(30:10):
cut off, the whole crop is tied in bunches and
put into a very large tub with water covered over
with very heavy logs of wood by way of pressers.
Thus kept, it begins to ferment. In less than eighteen hours.
The water seems to boil and becomes of a violet
or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring
matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is
(30:32):
drawn off into another tub, which is something less. When
the remaining trash is carefully picked up and thrown away,
and the very noxious smell of this refuse, it is
that occasions the peculiar unhealthiness which is always incident to
this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash
is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose, not just
(30:53):
poky sticks, untill by a skillful maceration, all the grain
separates from the water, the first sinking like mud to
the bottom, while the ladder separates while the ladder appears
clear and transparent on the surface, this water being carefully
removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor is
drawn off into a third tub to let what indigo
(31:15):
it may contain also settle in the bottom, after which
the last drops of water here being also removed, the
sediment or indigo is put into proper vessels to dry, where,
being divested of its last remaining moisture and formed into small,
round and oblong square pieces, it has become a beautiful
dark blue and fit for exportation. It's a lot of
(31:36):
work all these I'm like, do we need the blue?
Though I know I would be, I'd be like any
other color. I'm out, I can't. Fortunately, it's a day
we have chemistry, and chemists do these things rather than
having I mean, you can still mash a lot of
plants and get indigo dye. People do that, some of
them for fun. As a cool side note, when you
(31:57):
dye something with true indigo made from indigo plants, it
is green when it comes out of the vat, and
then it turns blue while it's exposed to the air.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Magic chemistry. It looks really cool.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Indigo was being cultivated in the Indian subcontinent by two
thousand BCE, and indigo became an important part of the
spice trade. During processing, the plant's leaves were pulverized into
a paste and the extracted dye was shaped into blocks
and dried. And these resulting blocks were so stone like
that when they arrived in Europe people actually assumed that
(32:29):
they were some kind of stone similar to lapis. Indigo
wasn't that common in Europe until after an Indian navigator
led Vasco da Gama to a sea route to the
Indian subcontinent in fourteen ninety eight, and before that point,
wade was more commonly used as a blue dye in Europe.
This was also known as pastel. That can make reading
(32:51):
old die manuals a little confusing for people who aren't
familiar with that term being used in that way rather
than for crayons made out of powdery pigment.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Or white colors. Woad is also a.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Flowering plant that requires an involved process to be made
into a dye.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Ethel M.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Merritt's, a book on vegetable dyes, which was published in
nineteen nineteen, described it this way.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
The leaves, when cut are reduced to a paste kept
in heaps for about fifteen days to ferment and formed
into balls which are dried in the sun. These balls
are subjected to a further fermentation of nine weeks before
being used by the dyer. Seems less complicated, but also
nine weeks of further fermentation.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Well, it could be forever, so it could be forever.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
When theo When indigo became more accessible in Europe after
fourteen ninety eight, it really upended the dye industry. This
was at a time when various crafts and trades are
being regulated through the guild system, and a lot of
europe dyer's guilds had very strong opinions about this sudden
availability of indigo dye. Although processing the indigo plants into
(33:58):
a dye was very difficult and time I'm consuming, it
was getting to Europe ready to use rather than people
in Europe having to be the ones to make it
ready to use. The resulting dye was also a lot
easier to work with than woad and it made a
better quality blue overall. As indigo dye became more available,
guilds and governments in Europe had to negotiate a sudden shift.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
In supply and demand.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Blue had already been increasing in popularity as people had
gotten better at processing woad into a good quality dye.
But then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted
blue cloth for everything from clothing to coats of arms.
And it got to the point that, in places where
dyeing and weaving had been completely different trades governed by
totally different guilds, weavers started to be allowed to dye
(34:44):
their own cloth, but only if they were dying at blue. Meanwhile,
indigo was being banned in various parts of Europe as
dyers tried to protect their trade, and regions whose economies
depended on growing and processing wod tried to protect their
life livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second published an
edict against indigo in fifteen seventy seven, in which he
(35:07):
called it cheating, corrosive, devouring and diabolical. Seems pretty harsh.
Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in
fifteen ninety eight, and in Saxony in sixteen fifty, and
then Rome prohibited the use of indigo throughout Italy in
sixteen fifty two.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I kind of agree with Rudolph A second, I just
indigo's not for me. I don't.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No shade to anybody that loves indigo. I'm just kidding.
It's fine, it shouldn't be illegal. On the other hand,
Queen Elizabeth the First banned the cultivation of wode in
England in fifteen eighty five. Although people disparagingly say that
this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad,
what this was really about was being motivated by fears
that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated
(35:55):
and lucrative wode. So these laws didn't stop this spread
of indigo into Europe or the rise of blue as
a popular color in textiles and art, both because of
the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of
those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before
the fourteenth century, about seventy five percent of the dying
(36:16):
manuals in Europe had been about the color red, and
then blue became more and more common in these manuals
from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries with the increased
availability of indigo and other blue pigments, and eventually blue
overtook red and apprentice dyers when they did their masterpiece
to show that they were ready to practice their craft
(36:37):
on their own had to do their masterpiece in blue
dye rather than red. The consequences of this skyrocketing popularity
of indigo blue in Europe were far reaching. Indigo was
one of the primary exports of what is now India,
so as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies
became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry, and this affected
(36:59):
everything from human rights to the movement for India's independence
from Britain, as farmers who were forced to grow indigo
demanded to be allowed to grow food crops instead, and
then on the total other side of the planet, indigo
became a major crop in parts of the Americas, where
it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers.
(37:19):
The description that we read earlier on how indigo was
being processed in Surinam actually came from a book that
was titled Quote Narrative of five Years Expedition against the
Revolted Negroes of Surinam, and that recounted Steedman's experiences in
Surinam from seventeen seventy two to seventeen seventy seven, and
much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced by sugarcane,
(37:41):
and it became a major cash crop in South Carolina,
where it was introduced by Eliza Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied
on the knowledge and skill of enslaved labors to refine
how the indigo there was being cultivated and processed, and
synthetic indigo was developed in the late nineteenth century, but
it wasn't until the early twentieth century that it really
(38:01):
just became super practical to make. Today's synthetic indigo is
almost entirely has almost entirely replaced indigo that is made
from plant sources. And there are just so many other
notable uses of blue that we could talk about in
this show. Today we haven't at all touched on blue
glass or blue ceramics. There's the cobalt that was used
(38:22):
to make that was used to make blue glass and glazes,
or the blue and white porcelain that was so popular
in China during the Yuan and Being dynasties, or the
many attempts to try to replicate that look that were
made in Europe and North America. There is blue jasperware
that was developed by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken
a different focus, we could have had a totally different
(38:46):
look at the color blue today rather than having the
focus beyond paints and dies and that's the.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Mysteries of the color blue.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
So thank you to the National Gallery of Art Washington
for invite us to be here tonight. Yeah, it's been
such a delight and we get to do it all
again in a minute. Yeah, so we especially one of
the thanks Sherry Williams, who is the manager of community programming,
and Christina Brown who's a publicist, and then Melanie Gifford
and Chelsea Ususa who were the people that we talked
(39:17):
to in advance of tonight. And then we also want
to thank the folks that we have been working with tonight.
So Kathleen walking around with us a lot, Yeah, taking
care of us. Robert who's here in the front, took
great care of us leading up to this, and then
I think Olivia's back in the back doing sound making
me not sound like a cackling hen ah. So thanks
(39:37):
so much everyone for coming. Yeah, thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
(39:58):
the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
M
Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This week on Unearthed, we talked about Anatolia's oldest known
indigo dyed textile, and that reminded me that once we
did an entire episode about the history of the color blue,
which of course talked about indigo as a die. This
one is a live show that we did at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. In September
(00:25):
of twenty nineteen, and this episode came out on October sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hello and welcome to a podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are sharing our
live show from the National Gallery of Art Washington, which
we did in September as part of their MGA Nights programming.
And we actually did this show twice over the course
of the evening so that more people who attended that event,
which is very popular, could get in and see it.
And so today we are sharing the first of those two.
(01:08):
We're not going to share the second one because it
would effectively be the exact same show.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And I'm Holly Frye. Blue is my favorite color, and
that makes me not special. Blue is the most popular
color and a lot of the world. For example, there
was a survey that was conducted in twenty fifteen that
polled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all
(01:44):
of those places, blue was the most popular color by
a significant margin. So I am not alone in the
world in my love of blue. It can also feel
like we're really surrounded by blue all the time, because
we have the blue sky and the reflection of the
sky in the water, and then things like blue jens,
and then all the blue stuff that people buy because
it's everyone's favorite color. And yet a lot of ancient
(02:08):
languages did not have a word for blue at all.
Some languages still don't. For a lot of human history,
the process of making blue dyes and paints has been
pretty prohibitively expensive and complicated if people knew how to
do it at all. So blue used to be really rare.
And today we're going to talk about blues progression from
something that there wasn't even a name for because it
(02:31):
was so rare to something that seems really ubiquitous. And
like Tracy just said, there were a lot of ancient
languages that just had no word for blue whatsoever. And
this is something that folks started figuring out thanks to
William Ewart Gladstone, who spent four terms as Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen
ninety four, but he had also studied classics at Oxford,
(02:53):
and ten years before he became Prime minister, he published
a six hundred plus page book that was called Study
on Homer and the Homeric Age, and it had a
whole section in it titled Homer's Perceptions and.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Use of Color.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
I really like that one of the jobs that you
can have had before being Prime minister as classicist.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
That seems cool.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
I feel like if we had more of that and
less of other things, you'd be in great shape. So
in this section of the book, Gladstone outlined what he
interpreted as signs of immaturity. That was one of his
words for it, in Homer's ability to differentiate color. And
here is what he said. One the paucity of his colors, two,
(03:35):
the use of the same word to denote not only
different hues or tints of the same color, but colors which,
according to us, are essentially different. Three the description of
the same object under epithets of color fundamentally disagreeing with
one another, for the vast predominance of the most crude
and elemental forms of color black and white over every other,
(03:58):
and the decided tendency to treat other colors is simply
intermediates between those two extremes.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Five.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
The slight use of color and Homer as compared with
other elements of beauty for the purposes of poetic effect,
and its absence in certain cases we might confidently expect it.
So in other words, Homer's use of color descriptors seemed
kind of contradictory and frankly just haphazard. Homer's works mostly
referred to things as black or white, and sometimes referred
(04:27):
to the same object using different color descriptors at different times,
or he would describe things with strange colors, like he
described both blood and a rainbow with a word that
translates essentially as violet, or calling the sea wine dark,
which I know maybe he got criticized for, but it
sounds very poetic to me, Homer's writing also seems to
(04:49):
have had no word that specifically meant blue. And side note,
there is actually a lot of debate as well about
whether all of the writing that is attributed to Homer
now was really the wor one person, or if there
are multiple people involved that all kind of fell into
this umbrella.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
But that is a whole different.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Story and way outside the scope of what we're talking
about tonight.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
But just keep that in mind as we talk about
Homer's work.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, yeah, regardless of whether Homer was one person or
many people. This whole conversation led to some discussion about
whether people in the Homeric age were color blind or
otherwise we're perceiving color color differently than cited people in
the nineteenth century when Gladstone was writing, and we'll get
back to that idea. This also led to further study
(05:34):
about how ancient writers were describing and naming colors, and
it quickly became clear that other ancient writings also had
odd uses of color, including not having a word for
the color blue. Researchers studied these language patterns for decades,
and then in nineteen sixty nine, Brent Berlin and Paul
Key published basic color Terms, their universality and evolution, and
(05:57):
basic color terms are essentially single words that can be
applied to a wide range of objects and are understood
by most native speakers of a given language. So in English,
for example, there are all kinds of words describing different
shades and hues, but there are actually only eleven basic
color terms, and those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink,
(06:19):
and thank goodness, purple. One of the important things about
basic color terms is that there's an agreed on shade
that they are describing. So even though violet was one
of the words that Homer was using, the fact that
it was sort of being applied to seemingly random objects
would mean that that wasn't really functioning as a basic
color word or a basic color term. All the languages
(06:42):
that Berlin in k studied had a minimum of two
basic color terms black and white, sometimes described as light
and dark, and here is something that I think it's
really cool. And languages that had three basic color terms,
the third one was red, and languages with four the
fourth one was either yellow or green, and then the
other of those was the fifth one. In languages that
(07:02):
had five it's only when a language had six basic
color terms that it had a color term for blue,
and then from there the pattern didn't hold up much
Farther There was brown as the seventh color, and then
colors beyond that just followed in no particular order. And
this nineteen sixty nine work had studied a relatively small
(07:23):
group of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and
most of them lived in industrial areas, and this naturally
led to a lot of discussion and questions about whether
these results could really be considered universal. So in the
late nineteen seventies, Berlin and k started working on their
World Color Survey, which asked more than twenty five hundred
native speakers of unwritten languages around the world to identify
(07:47):
various colors. Berlin and k published a monograph on this
in July of two thousand and nine, and they reported
that more than eighty percent of the world's languages followed
this pattern of black and white and then and then
yellow or green, and then the other one of those,
and then blue. And these ancient languages without a word
for blue seems to follow these same patterns. A lot
(08:10):
of them have the black, white, and red and that's
it sounds like my wedding, not at all like Game
of Thrones, and way before that. There has been a
lot of research since then into why this pattern actually
exists and how to interpret all of this information. And
there's also been research into whether that pattern is evidence
that ancient people saw fewer colors, like William Ewert Gladstone suggested,
(08:34):
as well as whether people living today whose languages have
fewer color terms are actually perceiving fewer colors or if
they're perceiving them differently. So a lot of that research
is really contradictory and inconclusive. There are lots of questions
that we don't have one hundred percent agreed upon answers
to yet, like are their physiological differences in the eyes
(08:57):
or brains of people who speak languages that include different
numbers of basic color terms. There's some research that suggests yes,
and other research that suggests to know if there are
physiological differences, are those differences a result of the language
differences or is it the other way around? How much
of this is physiological, how much is socially constructed? Are
(09:19):
colors as sighted people perceive them universal or are they relative?
And it might seem a little bit weird that there
are so many unanswered questions about colors, because it's really
easy to imagine that colors are unchanging physical traits.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I know what purple looks like. It's purple. But it's true.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
There's an element of physics to all of this. Isaac
Newton started working with the visible spectrum of light in
the sixteen sixties, and he used a prism to refract
sunlight into a spectrum that he described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
and violet. But before this, societies around the world had
their own ideas about what light was made of and
where colors came from, and even Newton's work, which became
(10:01):
the foundation of how we all talk about color and light,
was influenced by his own preconceived ideas. For example, the
reason that there is an indigo in his list is
because he just thought there needed to be seven colors. Yeah,
there's seven days of the week, seven notes at a musical scale.
Seven's like an auspicious number. Clearly there have to be
seven colors. So, in other words, colors just aren't static,
(10:26):
unchanging traits that exist all by themselves. Our understanding of
colors is socially constructed, and the way people describe the
colors around them can vary dramatically based on language and culture.
Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings, and those meetings
change and evolve over time in response to all kinds
of factors, including what pigments are available, how expensive those
(10:48):
pigments are, whether there were laws about how they could
be used, and what's in fashion at the moment. So
when we look back into colors in the past, this
can of course get really complicated. An ancient culture may
have had no word for blue, and if they did,
it might have been used for a different range of
shades that an English speaker living today might imagine. And
(11:09):
even if we have examples of that culture's physical objects
like jewelry or textiles or works of art, their colors
can change over time thanks to things like fading and
oxidation and just dirt getting on them. And exactly how
they fade and shift can really vary depending on what
an object is made of, what pigment was used to
color it, the binders that were used with those pigments,
(11:32):
how it was handled since then, and what pollutants have
been in the air, and on and on. There's so
many factors.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
On top of all of.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
That, when we look at a work of art, especially
a work of art that was made long ago in
the past, we are almost certainly seeing it under totally
different lighting conditions than the artists who than the artists
who created had when they were making it. And one
of the hypotheses for why so many ancient languages did
not have a word for blue is that they just
didn't need one. Most ancient cultures did not have a
(12:01):
way to make blue pigment. And while there is blue
in nature, of course, thanks to things like flowers and
berries and butterflies and birds and the sky, it's not
nearly as common as other colors are. And we're going
to talk about how people worked out a way to
make their own blue. After we first pause for what
will be a little sponsor break, we're.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Going to talk a bit about pains and pigments.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
If you look at some paleolithic rock art and cave art,
you will notice a pretty similar use of color no
matter where in the world you're looking, because the palette
tends to be really earthy. There's lots of brown and
yellow and red and black, and there are naturally occurring
pigments that produce these colors and are pretty abundant in
a lot of the world, like ochre, which is made
(12:53):
from iron oxide and various earthy materials. Different cultures have
had their own ceremonial and some methods of preparing and
using these pigments, but basically you can really just grind
up some rocks and put water in there and paint
with it. Do you ever have a teacher like an
our teacher, Have you do that? I think so probably
not a lot. Uh, you can't really do that with
blue though. It turns out there are not many blue minerals,
(13:16):
and the ones that do exist typically cannot just be
crushed and mixed with water like you could do with ochre.
Mashing up blueberries or blue flowers might seem like a
great idea, and you could try to use that.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
And paint with it, but it's actually.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Usually going to turn out kind of brownish or gray,
and often it's also going to fade really quickly, so
you're going to lose that blue color you were chasing.
And ancient peoples could carve objects out of blue stones
or minerals or shells, or make decorative objects with feathers,
but that was about it. Even substances like lapis lazulie,
which were eventually made into pigments, were first used just
(13:50):
primarily to make carvings and inlays, rather than actually trying
to use them as dyes or paints. So that changed
with the development of the first synthetic pigment, which happened
by a about thirty one hundred BCE that came to
be known as Egyptian blue, and according to Roman writer Vitruvius,
it was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is
(14:10):
a naturally occurring sodium carbonate compound. Modern experiments have pinpointed
the likely ingredients as silica, copper, and calcium. Usually the
silica probably came from sand and the calcium came from limestone,
although it was also possible for sand to include calcite
or flex of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to
(14:31):
be mixed with a small amount of alkali and then
be heated to between eight hundred and fifteen one thousand
degrees celsius. And when we were running through this script
earlier today, I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot?
And I was in my hotel room as we were
getting ready confirming it with like five different sources.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yes, it was that hot, which just seems like it
would all be on fire to me. But that's why
I'm not a scientist.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
We don't really know who worked out recipe or what
their process was for figuring it out.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We don't know if it was an accidental.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Discovery or if it was the result of a more
methodical process to try to get to this final result.
It may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly
in Mesopotamia. Yeah, it could have been anywhere on a
spectrum between like the kids through some sand in the kiln.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
To I'm going to figure this out, like no idea.
It's a lot of room.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Egyptian blue was used in Egyptian art from its discovery
until the end of the Roman Era, and there is
still a lot of artwork that exists today that was
made with it. The blue coloring isn't necessarily visible on
all of it, though. In two thousand and nine, it
was discovered that Egyptian blue has a near infrared luminescence
that can help researchers find traces of it that aren't
(15:48):
visible to the naked eye anymore. So. About that same time,
conservation scientists used that discovery to confirm that there are
traces of Egyptian blue on the Parthenon marbles, and we
have artwork where we can see this pigment that is
at least three thousand years old, and the pigment itself
has held up. The binders that have been used with
(16:09):
it have not always fared as well, though, For example,
pieces that used a lot of gum arabic as a
binder have tended to blacken or turn green over time.
The Egyptian term for Egyptian blue translates to artificial lapis lazilie,
and the next pigment we're going to talk about is ultramarine,
which was made out.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Of lapis lazolie.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Lapis lazilie is a metamorphic rock that's found primarily in
one place in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that's the premier
mountains in Central Asia. People in what's now Afghanistan were
mining lapis as early as seven thousand BCE, and by
thirty five hundred BCE was being carried thousands of miles
along trade routes through Asia and Europe and Africa. And
(16:51):
as we said earlier, the first uses of lapis lazolie
were mostly to make carved objects in inlays. Although lapis
could be crushed into powder and used as a pigment,
that pigment was not very pure because lapis is made
up of a mixture of different minerals, and these minerals,
depending on what their concentrations were, would all affect the
final color. So if there were impurities present and again
(17:14):
those concentrations, different preparations could look completely different from one another,
and then they would also look completely different. Over time,
people still tried it, though there is evidence of lapis
being used as a paint in the Karnak Temple complex
in Egypt. By about the sixth century, though, people had
worked out how to purify lapis lasalie into a pure
(17:36):
blue pigment now known as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue,
we do have the recipe for this. One artist and
writer Tanino Chanini, who lived between about thirteen seventy and
fourteen forty, wrote the process down in a lot of detail.
And you may have heard that ultramarine was worth more
than gold and Chininocinini's method really illustrates why it wasn't
(17:58):
just because lapis lasilie was only being mind in one
area of Afghanistan at the time. The process was also
long and really complicated, and it yield a very small
amount of usable pigment. So here's how he described it
in his book of art. Quote, First, take some lap
as lazily, and if you would know how to distinguish
the best stones, take those which contain most of the
(18:20):
blue color. So it is for it is mixed with
what is like ashes. That which contains least of this
ash pigment is best. But be careful that you do
not mistake it for azuo deela magna, which is beautiful
to the eye as enamel. Azurodela magna is as you rite,
which is copper carbonate carbonate material. It was being used
(18:41):
to make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
although it was hard to mine and it was also
tricky to work with, but it was cheaper than ultramarine,
although it was not as stable or vibrant as a pigment.
So going back to the recipe, once you've got your
lap as lassily, you pound it in a bronze mortar
covered so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You
grind it and you strain it, and you sift it,
(19:03):
and you pound it. Quote again as much as is required.
But bear in mind that though the more you grind,
the more finely powdered the A zero will be, yet
it will not be so beautiful and rich and deep
in color. And all of this pounding and grinding and
straining and sifting was difficult because lapis lasoli is physically
hard to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning.
(19:26):
He went on to write, Quote, when the powder is prepared,
procure from the druggist six ounces of resin of the pine,
three ounces of mastic, and three ounces of new wax
to each pound of lapis lasili. Put all these ingredients
into a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take
a piece of white linen and strain these things into
a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder
(19:49):
of lapis laslie. Mix it all well together into a paste,
and that you may be able to handle the paste.
Take linseed oil, and keep your hands always well anointed
with this oil. This pae must be kept at least
three days and three nights, kneeding it a little every day.
And remember that you may keep it for fifteen days
or a month, or as long as you please. I
(20:11):
like how it's like three days, but like forever's cool. Yeah,
it's totally fine. Also, it's not lap as lasli yet,
or it's not ultramarine yet. You still need to extract
the pigment from the pace that you just made and
left from between three days and forever. You do this
by putting the pace in a glazed basin, quote with
(20:31):
a porringer ful of lie moderately warm, and then you
work that with two rounded wooden sticks. So he describes
this quote. With these two sticks, one in each hand,
turn and squeeze and knead the paste thoroughly, exactly in
the manner that you would need bread. Now I need
to take a minute. I've never used sticks to need bread.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I picture you so much, just poking at It's like.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
In a bread machine. It's a paddle like that. Uh okay,
so sticks as you and knee bread. When you see
that the lye is thoroughly blue, pour it, uh, pour
it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of
fresh lie, pour it over the paste, and work it
with the sticks as before. When this lie is very blue,
(21:21):
pour it into another glazed basin and continue to do
so for several days until the paste no longer tinges
the lye. Then throw it away, for it is good
for nothing. Hey, guess what, You still don't have ultramarine yet.
The substance in each of these basins will be a
different shade of blue depending on when in the process
(21:41):
you filled it, and you need to combine them together
based on how many shades of ultramarine you are trying
to make. You have to be careful when you're doing this.
The basins that were filled first are the best quality,
and quote the last two extracts are worse than ashes.
May your eyes therefore be experienced so as not to
spoil the good as you're by mixing it with the bad,
(22:02):
and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry.
So from there, Tanini offers some advice about what to
do if none of your ultramarine has the beautiful deep
color that you're expecting, and essentially that's mixing it with
a little bit of crimson dye and allowing that all
to dry again. Then once you have your finished ultramarine,
we get to the part of this that is the
(22:23):
unexpected sexism moment of the show quote, put it into
a skinner purse, and rejoice in it, for it is
good and perfect. And bear in mind that it is
a rare gift to know how to make it well.
And you must know that it is rather the art
of maidens than of men to make it, because they
remain continually in the house and are more patient and
their hands more delicate. But beware of old women. I'm
(22:50):
just out here ruining your Acca marine. Yeah, I don't
think he'd be cool with me making a Socco marine
or ultramarine either. Ultramarine is beautiful and expensive and rare,
so during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was
mostly used by the most skilled, respected artists and artisans.
Some artists would try to make it stretch by saving
(23:13):
their ultramarine for their last final touches on whatever work
they were making, and others used ultramarine only on subjects
that seemed worthy of it. And this is when blue
started to take on a symbolic meaning, such as the
color of the Virgin Mary's clothing. And you can also
see an example of this here in the National Gallery
of Art in Raphael's the album Madonna, which was created
(23:34):
in about fifteen ten. That is on view in gallery
twenty of the main floor of the West Building, that
is the other building from where we are tonight. That
is a very good reason for you to come back
to this amazing place. Yeah, don't try to go over
there right now. That building is closed.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Get in all the trouble.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Some artists, though dated, neither of these things, to try
to conserve it or make it stretch. An example is
Johannis Permir who just spent enormous amounts of money on
ultramarine and used an extent simply everywhere. The vermiers are
in Gallery fifty A of the West Building also still
the other building spectacular.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
They are beautu I get the vapors over seat. You
can see them on the internet.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Also, thanks to its colossal expense and rarity, people were
really eager for some kind of substitute for ultramarine. It
needed to be equally good quality, but also cheaper and
easier to get. In eighteen twenty four, the French Society
for the Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize of
six thousand francs to whoever figured out an industrial process
(24:34):
to make synthetic ultramarine and it also had to cost
less than three hundred francs a kilogram, and there were
two competing claims on this prize, which was ultimately awarded
to Jean Baptiste Guimet in eighteen twenty eight. And that
is made from cowlin, sodium carbonate, bitumen and sulfur, prepared
and heated in a furnace or kiln. So once there
(24:55):
was this widely available, much less expensive blue pigment, the
color blue became way more common in artwork and for
more mundane topics a lot of the time. By the
start of the Impressionist movement, most painters were working in
synthetic ultramarine rather than made from lapis lazuli, And then
we get all those beautiful monaise that are all full
of blue everywhere. To be clear, ultramarine was not the
(25:18):
only blue pigment that was in use at this point.
Cobalt blue was introduced in eighteen oh two and cerulean
blue in the eighteen sixties. Prussian blue had been developed
back at the start of the seventeen hundreds, quite by accident.
There is some fuzziness as to the details about this,
but the conventional story is that an alchemist named Johann
Kanrad Dipple was working with potash and animal blood, and
(25:41):
Johann Jakub Diesbach was a dye maker who used podash
as part of making a red dye, and Deezbach ran
out and he either bought or borrowed some from Dipple,
and it was the podash that had been adulterated with
animal blood. And because of this, instead of making the
red dye that he was expecting, Diesbach wound up.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
The vivid blue.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I like to imagine that he was like, he won't
notice if I just take some of it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
We'll give it. Why is this blue now?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Tipple used his knowledge of chemistry to work out how
to replicate these box results, and then another man, Johann
Leonard Frisch, also claims to have invented this in a
letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in seventeen fifteen. Although these
men tried to keep their recipe a secret so they
could cash in on the incredibly lucrative blue pigment trade,
John Woodward published a method of making it in seventeen
(26:32):
twenty four, so anybody could make as much as they wanted,
and the development of Prussian blue also sometimes called Berlin Blue,
affected the use of blue in artwork much the way
that synthetic ultramarine did. For example, it led to a
whole style of woodblock prints in Japan called ai zurie.
Those were printed mostly or entirely in blue, and these
(26:52):
prints made use of Prussian blue as well as indigo
and other blue pigments. And a particularly famous example is
Katushiko's Hoku sais thirty six views of Mount Fuji that
includes the Great Wave of Kanagawa, and the first prints
of this series we're all in blue, and blue is
really prominent in the rest of them that are not
those first ones that are one hundred percent blue. Yeah,
(27:14):
I love that whole series. And hey, we just mentioned indigo,
which means that's a good segue into talking about the
mysteries of blue dyes, which are going to do after
another quick break. In a lot of the world, the
oldest surviving examples of dyed textiles are dyed red, but
(27:39):
blue dye has been around for a pretty long time
as well. One example is to kell It, which is repent,
which is mentioned repeatedly in Jewish scripture and was in
use at least thirty five hundred years ago. Knowledge of
how to make it was lost some time after the
Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today its
sources believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
(28:01):
Other blue dyes are even older. In twenty sixteen, researchers
announced that they had dated a piece of cotton textile
found in Juaca, Peru, and found that it was sixty
two hundred years old. It had been dyed with indigo,
making it the oldest known use of indigo dye and
one of the oldest surviving cotton textiles. And there were
other blue dyes in the Americas as well. For example,
(28:23):
there is evidence that the Navajo Nation had a natively
produced blue plant dye, which was eventually replaced with indigo
that was introduced from further south in what is now Mexico.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
So today indigo.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Is more often associated with what's now India, but the
plant genus Indigofera includes hundreds of flowering plants that live
in tropical and subtropical areas all around the world, and
a lot of them can and have been used to
make purple and blue dyes. Indigo has been used to
make paints as well. For example, Maya blue was used
as a paint in pre colonial meso America, and that
(28:58):
was made from indigo and a clay called paligor skite
and at least one other ingredient who's or at least
one other ingredient whose identity is.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Still a little bit debated.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
And as another example of usage, Peter Paul Rubens used
both ultramarine and indigo in the Fall of Phaeton, which
is here at the National Gallery of Art in the
West Building's Gallery forty five. Melanie Gifford, who is a
research conservator here, described his process in painting this to
us in an email. She said Rubens used indigo paint
(29:28):
indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting
in Italy in sixteen oh four, and then when he
revised the painting in Antwerp a few years later, he
switched to the brighter ultramarine. So when it comes to
making dye, the historical details of how the plants were
processed and how the dye was used could really vary
based on where the indigo was being grown. Often the
(29:48):
steps had a cultural or religious significance, and regardless of
the specifics, it tended to be a pretty involved process.
That required a whole lot of plant material to make
a very small amount of dye. And as an example,
here is how indigo was processed in Suriname, as described
by John Gabriel Studman quote. When all the verdure is
(30:10):
cut off, the whole crop is tied in bunches and
put into a very large tub with water covered over
with very heavy logs of wood by way of pressers.
Thus kept, it begins to ferment. In less than eighteen hours.
The water seems to boil and becomes of a violet
or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring
matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is
(30:32):
drawn off into another tub, which is something less. When
the remaining trash is carefully picked up and thrown away,
and the very noxious smell of this refuse, it is
that occasions the peculiar unhealthiness which is always incident to
this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash
is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose, not just
(30:53):
poky sticks, untill by a skillful maceration, all the grain
separates from the water, the first sinking like mud to
the bottom, while the ladder separates while the ladder appears
clear and transparent on the surface, this water being carefully
removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor is
drawn off into a third tub to let what indigo
(31:15):
it may contain also settle in the bottom, after which
the last drops of water here being also removed, the
sediment or indigo is put into proper vessels to dry, where,
being divested of its last remaining moisture and formed into small,
round and oblong square pieces, it has become a beautiful
dark blue and fit for exportation. It's a lot of
(31:36):
work all these I'm like, do we need the blue?
Though I know I would be, I'd be like any
other color. I'm out, I can't. Fortunately, it's a day
we have chemistry, and chemists do these things rather than
having I mean, you can still mash a lot of
plants and get indigo dye. People do that, some of
them for fun. As a cool side note, when you
(31:57):
dye something with true indigo made from indigo plants, it
is green when it comes out of the vat, and
then it turns blue while it's exposed to the air.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Magic chemistry. It looks really cool.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Indigo was being cultivated in the Indian subcontinent by two
thousand BCE, and indigo became an important part of the
spice trade. During processing, the plant's leaves were pulverized into
a paste and the extracted dye was shaped into blocks
and dried. And these resulting blocks were so stone like
that when they arrived in Europe people actually assumed that
(32:29):
they were some kind of stone similar to lapis. Indigo
wasn't that common in Europe until after an Indian navigator
led Vasco da Gama to a sea route to the
Indian subcontinent in fourteen ninety eight, and before that point,
wade was more commonly used as a blue dye in Europe.
This was also known as pastel. That can make reading
(32:51):
old die manuals a little confusing for people who aren't
familiar with that term being used in that way rather
than for crayons made out of powdery pigment.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Or white colors. Woad is also a.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Flowering plant that requires an involved process to be made
into a dye.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Ethel M.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Merritt's, a book on vegetable dyes, which was published in
nineteen nineteen, described it this way.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
The leaves, when cut are reduced to a paste kept
in heaps for about fifteen days to ferment and formed
into balls which are dried in the sun. These balls
are subjected to a further fermentation of nine weeks before
being used by the dyer. Seems less complicated, but also
nine weeks of further fermentation.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Well, it could be forever, so it could be forever.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
When theo When indigo became more accessible in Europe after
fourteen ninety eight, it really upended the dye industry. This
was at a time when various crafts and trades are
being regulated through the guild system, and a lot of
europe dyer's guilds had very strong opinions about this sudden
availability of indigo dye. Although processing the indigo plants into
(33:58):
a dye was very difficult and time I'm consuming, it
was getting to Europe ready to use rather than people
in Europe having to be the ones to make it
ready to use. The resulting dye was also a lot
easier to work with than woad and it made a
better quality blue overall. As indigo dye became more available,
guilds and governments in Europe had to negotiate a sudden shift.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
In supply and demand.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Blue had already been increasing in popularity as people had
gotten better at processing woad into a good quality dye.
But then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted
blue cloth for everything from clothing to coats of arms.
And it got to the point that, in places where
dyeing and weaving had been completely different trades governed by
totally different guilds, weavers started to be allowed to dye
(34:44):
their own cloth, but only if they were dying at blue. Meanwhile,
indigo was being banned in various parts of Europe as
dyers tried to protect their trade, and regions whose economies
depended on growing and processing wod tried to protect their
life livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second published an
edict against indigo in fifteen seventy seven, in which he
(35:07):
called it cheating, corrosive, devouring and diabolical. Seems pretty harsh.
Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in
fifteen ninety eight, and in Saxony in sixteen fifty, and
then Rome prohibited the use of indigo throughout Italy in
sixteen fifty two.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I kind of agree with Rudolph A second, I just
indigo's not for me. I don't.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No shade to anybody that loves indigo. I'm just kidding.
It's fine, it shouldn't be illegal. On the other hand,
Queen Elizabeth the First banned the cultivation of wode in
England in fifteen eighty five. Although people disparagingly say that
this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad,
what this was really about was being motivated by fears
that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated
(35:55):
and lucrative wode. So these laws didn't stop this spread
of indigo into Europe or the rise of blue as
a popular color in textiles and art, both because of
the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of
those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before
the fourteenth century, about seventy five percent of the dying
(36:16):
manuals in Europe had been about the color red, and
then blue became more and more common in these manuals
from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries with the increased
availability of indigo and other blue pigments, and eventually blue
overtook red and apprentice dyers when they did their masterpiece
to show that they were ready to practice their craft
(36:37):
on their own had to do their masterpiece in blue
dye rather than red. The consequences of this skyrocketing popularity
of indigo blue in Europe were far reaching. Indigo was
one of the primary exports of what is now India,
so as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies
became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry, and this affected
(36:59):
everything from human rights to the movement for India's independence
from Britain, as farmers who were forced to grow indigo
demanded to be allowed to grow food crops instead, and
then on the total other side of the planet, indigo
became a major crop in parts of the Americas, where
it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers.
(37:19):
The description that we read earlier on how indigo was
being processed in Surinam actually came from a book that
was titled Quote Narrative of five Years Expedition against the
Revolted Negroes of Surinam, and that recounted Steedman's experiences in
Surinam from seventeen seventy two to seventeen seventy seven, and
much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced by sugarcane,
(37:41):
and it became a major cash crop in South Carolina,
where it was introduced by Eliza Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied
on the knowledge and skill of enslaved labors to refine
how the indigo there was being cultivated and processed, and
synthetic indigo was developed in the late nineteenth century, but
it wasn't until the early twentieth century that it really
(38:01):
just became super practical to make. Today's synthetic indigo is
almost entirely has almost entirely replaced indigo that is made
from plant sources. And there are just so many other
notable uses of blue that we could talk about in
this show. Today we haven't at all touched on blue
glass or blue ceramics. There's the cobalt that was used
(38:22):
to make that was used to make blue glass and glazes,
or the blue and white porcelain that was so popular
in China during the Yuan and Being dynasties, or the
many attempts to try to replicate that look that were
made in Europe and North America. There is blue jasperware
that was developed by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken
a different focus, we could have had a totally different
(38:46):
look at the color blue today rather than having the
focus beyond paints and dies and that's the.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Mysteries of the color blue.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
So thank you to the National Gallery of Art Washington
for invite us to be here tonight. Yeah, it's been
such a delight and we get to do it all
again in a minute. Yeah, so we especially one of
the thanks Sherry Williams, who is the manager of community programming,
and Christina Brown who's a publicist, and then Melanie Gifford
and Chelsea Ususa who were the people that we talked
(39:17):
to in advance of tonight. And then we also want
to thank the folks that we have been working with tonight.
So Kathleen walking around with us a lot, Yeah, taking
care of us. Robert who's here in the front, took
great care of us leading up to this, and then
I think Olivia's back in the back doing sound making
me not sound like a cackling hen ah. So thanks
(39:37):
so much everyone for coming. Yeah, thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
us a note our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
(39:58):
the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
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