October 16, 2019 • 42 mins
Blue is the most popular color in many parts of the world, and it can seem like it's everywhere. . But many ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue, and some languages still don’t. This show was recorded live at a National Gallery of Art's NGA Nights event.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy v Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we are sharing our live show from the National
Gallery of Art Washington, which we did in September as
(00:23):
part of their n g A 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.
We're not going to share the second one because it
would effectively be the exact same show. Hello, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
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 that pulled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China,
(01:06):
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all
of those places, blue was the most popular color by
a significant margin. Uh So I am not alone in
the world and 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 and the water, and then things like blue
(01:28):
jeans and then all the blue stuff that people buy
because it's everyone's favorite color. And yet a lot of
ancient 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
(01:49):
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
was so rare, to some thing 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
(02:10):
to William You were 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 and ten years before he became Prime Minister,
he published a six hundred plus page book that was
called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, and it
had a whole section in it titled Homer's Perceptions and
(02:33):
Use of Color. I really like that one of the
jobs that you can have had before being prime ministers classicist.
That seems cool. I feel like if we had more
of that and less of other things, you'd be in
great shape. Uh So. In this section of the book,
Gladstone outlined what he interpreted as signs of immaturity that
(02:54):
was one of his words for it, and Homer's ability
to differentiate color. And here is what he said, one
the paucity of his colors, to the use of the
same word to denote not only different hues or tense
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
(03:19):
the vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms
of color, black and white over every other, and the
decided tendency to treat other colors as simply intermediates. Between
those two extremes five, the slight use of color and
Homer as compared with other elements of beauty for the
purposes of poetic effect, and it's absence in certain cases
(03:40):
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 to the same object using
different color descriptors at different times, or huge describe things
with strange colors, like he described both um blood and
(04:05):
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 have had no word that
specifically meant blue. And side note, there's actually a lot
of debate as well about whether all of the writing
that is attributed to Homer now was really the work
(04:27):
of one person or if there are multiple people involved
that all kind of fell into this umbrella. But that
is a whole different story and way outside the scope
of of what we're talking about tonight. But just keep
that in mind as we talk about Homer's work. Yeah, yeah,
regardless of whether Homer was one person or many people.
This whole conversation led to some discussion about whether people
(04:47):
in the Homeric age were color blind or otherwise we're
perceiving color color differently than sighted people in the nineteenth
century when Gladstone was writing, and we'll get back to
that idea. The also led to further study about how
ancient writers were describing and naming colors, and it quickly
became clear that other ancient writings also had odd uses
(05:10):
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 basic color terms
are essentially single words that can be applied to a
wide range of objects and are understood by most native
(05:31):
speakers of a given language. So in English, for example,
they are all kinds of words describing different shades and hues,
but they are actually only eleven basic color terms, and
those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink,
and thank goodness, purple. One of the important things about
basic color terms is that like, there's an agreed on
(05:53):
shade that they are describing. So even though violet was
one of the words that Homer was using, like the
fact that it was sort of being applied since seemingly
random objects would mean that that wasn't really functioning as
a basic color word or a basic color term. All
the languages that Berlin and k studied had a minimum
of two basic color terms black and white, sometimes described
(06:15):
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 had five, it's only when a language had six
basic color terms that it had a color term for blue.
(06:36):
And then from there the pattern didn't hold up much further.
There were there was brown as the seventh color, and
then colors beyond that just followed in no particular order.
In this nine work had studied a relatively small group
of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and most
of them lived in industrial areas, and this naturally led
(06:58):
to a lot of discussion and questions about whether these
results could really be considered universal. Uh So, in the
late nineteen seventies, Berlin and Kay started working on their
World Color Survey, which asked more than twenty native speakers
of unwritten languages around the world to identify various colors.
Berlin and Kay published a monograph on this in July
(07:19):
of two thousand nine, and they reported that more than
eighty percent of the world's languages followed this pattern of
black and white and then red, and then yellow or green,
and then the other one of those, uh, and then blue.
And these ancient languages without a word for blue seems
to follow these same patterns. A lot of them have
the black, white, and red and that's it. It sounds
(07:41):
like my wedding, um, not at all like Game of
Thrones in way before that. UM. 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 Youwret Gladston suggested,
(08:02):
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 a hundred percent agreed upon answers
to yet, Like are there physiological differences in the eyes
(08:24):
or brains of people who speak languages that include different
numbers of basic color terms. There's some research 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?
(08:46):
Our colors as cited, people perceive them universal or are
they relative? And it might seem a little bit weird, uh,
that there are so many unanswered questions about colors, because
it's really easy to imagine that colors are changing physical traits.
I know what purple looks like his purple um. But
it's true there's an element of physics to all of this.
(09:07):
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, society is around the world
had their own ideas about what light was made of
and where colors came from. And even Newton's work, which
(09:28):
became 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.
There's seven days of the week, seven notes in a
musical scale, sevens like an auspicious number. Clearly there have
to be seven colors. Uh So, in other words, colors
(09:52):
just start static, unchanging traits that exist all by themselves
are understanding of colors is socially constructed, and the way
people described the colors around them can vary dramatically based
on language and culture. Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings,
and those meetings changed and evolve over time in response
to all kinds of factors, including what pigments are available,
(10:14):
how expensive those 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
(10:35):
might imagine. And 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
(10:55):
used to color it, the binders that were used with
those pigments, how it was handled since then, and what
pollutants have been in the air, and on and on.
There's so many factors on top of all of 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 then the artists who created
(11:18):
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 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
(11:40):
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 going to talk a bit about paints
and pigments. If you look at some paleolithic rock art
(12:00):
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 from iron oxide and various earthy materials.
(12:21):
Different cultures have had their own ceremonial and symbolic 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 in our teacher, have you do that? I
think so probably a lot. You can't really do that
with blue though. It turns out there are not many
blue minerals, and the ones that do exist typically cannot
(12:43):
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 can try to
use that and paint with it, but it's actually usually
gonna turn out kind of brownish or gray, and often
it's also going to fade really quickly, so you're gonna
lose that blue color you were chasing. And ancient people's
could carve objects out of blue stones or minerals or shells,
(13:06):
or make decorative objects with feathers, but that was about it.
Even substances like lapis lazuli, which were eventually made into pigments,
were first used just 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 about thirty BC that came to be
(13:28):
known as Egyptian blue, and according to Roman writer Vitruvius.
It was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is
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,
(13:49):
although it was also possible for sand to include calcite
or flex of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to
be mixed with a small amount of alkali and then
be heated to between eight and fifteen thousand degrees celsius.
And when we were running through this script earlier today,
I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot? And
(14:09):
I was in my hotel room as we were getting
ready confirming it with like five different sources. 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. Um, we don't really know who worked out
this recipe or what their process was for figuring it out.
We don't know if it was an accidental discovery or
(14:30):
if it was the result of a more methodical process
to try to get to this this final result. It
may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly in Mesopotamia. Yeah,
it's it could have been anywhere on a spectrum to
keep between like the kids through some sand in the
kiln too. I'm going to figure this out like no
idea a lot of room. Uh. Egyptian blue was used
(14:53):
in Egyptian art from its discovery until the end of
the Roman Area 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 nine, it was discovered that Egyptian blue
has a near infrared luminescence that can help researchers find
traces of it that aren't visible to the naked eye anymore. So.
(15:16):
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. Uh.
And the pigment itself has held up. The binders that
have been used with it have not always fared as well, though.
(15:36):
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 lazily. And the next pigment we're going to
talk about is ultramarine, which was made out of lap
lapis lazily. Lapis lazily is a metamorphic rock that's found
(15:57):
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 lapists as early as seven thousand b
c E and by thirty five hundred BC was being
carried thousands of miles along trade routes through Asia and
Europe and Africa. And as we said earlier, the first
(16:18):
uses of lapis lazli 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 lapist 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,
(16:38):
and again those concentrations uh different lapis preparations could look
completely different from one another, uh 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 lazzle into a pure blue pigment now known
(17:02):
as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue, we do have the
recipe for this. One artist and writer Chanino Tanini, 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
chenino Chaninese method really illustrates why it wasn't just because
(17:23):
lapis laslie was only being mined in one area of
Afghanistan at the time. The process was also long and
really complicated, and it yields a very small amount of
usable pigment. So here's how he described it in his
book of art. Quote, first, take some lapis lazily, and
if you would know how to distinguish the best stones,
take those which contain most of the blue color. So
(17:46):
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
azure o'della magna, which is beautiful to the eye as
enamel as you're o'della magna is as you're right, which
is copper carbonate carbonate material. It was being used to
(18:06):
make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, although
it was hard to mind, 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
laps lazily, you pound it in a bronze mortar covered
so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You grind it,
(18:27):
and you strain it, and you sift it, and you
pound it quote again as much as is required. But
bear in mind that the that though the more you grind,
the more finely powdered the 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 lap is lazily is physically hard
(18:48):
to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning. 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. Lazily. Put all these ingredients
into a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take
a piece of white linen and strain these things into
(19:10):
a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder
of lapis lazily 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 paste must be kept at least
three days and three nights, needing it a little every day.
And remember that you may keep it for fifteen days
(19:32):
or a month, or as long as you please. I
like how it's like three days, but like forever's cool. Yeah,
it's totally fine. Also, it's not lapis lazily yet, or
it's not ultramar ultramarine yet. You still need to extract
the pigment from the paste that you just made and
left from between three days and forever. Uh. You do
(19:53):
this by putting the paste in a glazed basin. Quote
with a porringerful 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 need the paste thoroughly, exactly in
the manner that you would need bread. Now I need
(20:14):
to take a minute. I've never used sticks to need bread.
I pictures someone just poking at it like like even
in a bread machine. It's a paddle like that. Okay,
so sticks as you would need bread. When you see
that the lie is thoroughly blue, pour it, uh, pour
(20:37):
it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of
fresh lie, pour it over the paste, and work it
with the sticks is before. When this lie is very blue,
pour it into another glazed basin, and continue to do
so for several days until the paste no longer tinges
the lie. Then throw it away, for it is good
for nothing. Hey, guess what, You still don't have ultramarine yet.
(21:01):
The substance in each of these basins will be a
different shade of blue depending on when in the process
you filled it, and you need to combine them together
based on how many shades of ultramarine you're 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
(21:24):
the good as you're by mixing it with the bad,
and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry.
So from there to Nini 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,
(21:45):
we get to the part of this that is the
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
(22:08):
their hands more delicate. But beware of old women I'm
just out here ruining your aqua marine. Yeah, I don't.
I don't think he'd be cool with me making a
zacka marine or ultra marine. Rather, um ultra marine is
beautiful and expensive and rare, so during the Middle Ages
(22:29):
and the Renaissance it was mostly used by the most skilled,
respected artists and artisans. Some artists would try to make
it stretched by saving 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, uh,
(22:50):
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 about of teen 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. You don't try
(23:10):
to go over there right now. That building is closed
in all the trouble. Uh. Some artists, though, dated, neither
of these things to try to conserve it or make
it stretch. An example is your Harnes, you honest Vermier,
who just spent enormous amounts of money on ultramarine and
used it extensively everywhere. The Vermiers are in Gallery fifty
A of the West Building. Also still the other building spectacular. Uh.
(23:33):
They are beautful. You can see them on the internet. Also. Uh.
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 four, the French Society for the Encouragement
(23:53):
of National Industry offered a prize of six thousand francs
to whoever figured out an industrial process 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 gumay In.
And that is made from cowlan, sodium carbonate, bitumen and sulfur,
(24:17):
prepared and heated in a furnace or kiln. So once
there 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 lazily. And
then we get all those beautiful moonates that are all
(24:39):
full of blue everywhere. Uh. To be clear, ultramarine was
not the only blue pigment that was in use at
this point. Cobalt blue was introduced in eighteen o two
and cerulean blue in the eighteen sixties. Prussian blue had
been developed back at the start, at the seventeen hundreds,
quite by accident. Uh. There is some fuzziness as to
the details about this, but the can mentional story is
(25:01):
that an alchemist named Johan Conrad Dipple was working with
potash and animal blood, and Johan Jakob ds Bach was
a dye maker who used potash as part of making
a red die, and des Bac ran out and he
either bought or borrowed some from Dipple, and it was
the potash that had been adulterated with animal blood, and
because of this, instead of making the red dye that
(25:22):
he was expecting these, Bach wound up with a vivid blue.
I like to imagine that he was like, he won't
notice if I just take some of it. Oh give it?
Why is this blue now? Dipple used his knowledge of
chemistry to work out how to replicate these box results,
and then another man, Johan Leonard Frisch, also claims to
(25:42):
have invented this in a letter to Gottfried bill him
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 twenty four, so anybody
could make as much as they wanted, and the development
of Prussian blue, also sometimes called Berlin blue, affected the
(26:04):
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 Azuria. Those were printed
mostly or entirely in blue, and these prints made use
of Prussian blue as well as indigo and other blue pigments.
In A particularly famous example is Katsushiko Hoko, size thirty
(26:27):
six of views of Mount Fuji that includes the Great
Wave of Konagawa and the first princes 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 blue. Yeah, 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
(26:56):
of the world, the oldest surviving examples have died. Hextiles
are dyed red, but blue dye has been around for
a pretty long time as well. One example is to
tell It, which is repent, which is mentioned repeatedly in
Jewish scripture and was in use at least thirty years ago.
Knowledge of how to make it was lost sometime after
(27:17):
the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today
its sources believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
Other blue dyes are even older. Researchers announced that they
had dated a piece of cotton textile found in Huaka, Peru,
and found that it was sixty two hundred years old.
It had been dyed with indigo, making it the oldest
(27:39):
known use of indigo die and one of the oldest
surviving cotton textiles, and there were other blue dyes in
the America's as well. For example, 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. So today indigo
is more often as so ciated with what's now India,
(28:01):
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 Mesoamerica, and that
(28:22):
was made from indigo and a clay called pallagor skype
and at least one other ingredient who's or at least
one other ingredient whose identity is still a little bit debated.
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
(28:44):
research conservator here, described his process in painting this to
us in an email. She said, Rubens used indigo paint
indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting
in Italy in sixteen o 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 die, the historical details of how the plants were
(29:06):
processed and how the dye was used could really vary
based on where the indigo was being grown. Often the
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 die. And as an example,
(29:26):
here is how indigo was processed in Surinam as described
by John Gabriel Steadman quote. When all the verdure is
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
(29:48):
or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring
matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is
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
(30:09):
this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash
is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose, not just
pokey sticks. Un till 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
(30:31):
carefully removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor
is drawn off into a third tub to let what
indigo 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
(30:51):
into small, round and oblong square pieces. It has become
a beautiful dark blue and fit for exportation. So to
work all these I'm like, do we 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, today
we have chemistry, and chemists do these things rather than
(31:12):
having I mean, you can still mash a lot of
plants and get indigo. Die. People do that, some of
them for fun um as a cool side note, when
you die 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.
Magic chemistry, it was. Indigo was being cultivated in the
(31:34):
Indian subcontinent by two thousand b c E, and Indco
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 they were some kind
of stone similar to lapus. Indigo wasn't that common in
(31:58):
Europe until after an Indian navigator led Vasco da gamma
to a c root to the Indian subcontinent and four
and before that point, wode was more commonly used as
a blue dye. In Europe, this was also known as pastel.
That can make reading old die manuals a little confusing
for people who aren't familiar with that term being used
(32:19):
in that way rather than for crayons made out of
powdery pigment or white colors. Wade is also a flowering
plant that requires an involved process to be made into
a die. Ethel M Merits, a book on vegetable dyes,
which was published in nineteen nineteen, described it this way.
Quote The leaves, when cut, are reduced to a paste,
(32:40):
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 you being used by the dyre seems less complicated,
but also nine weeks of further fermentation. Well, it could
be forever, So it could be forever. Uh when the indigo.
(33:01):
When indigo became more accessible in Europe after it really
up ended the die 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 die.
Although processing the indigo plants into a die was very
(33:22):
difficult and time 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
die was also a lot easier to work with than wode,
and it made a better quality blue overall. As indigo
die became more available, guilds and governments in Europe had
to negotiate a sudden shift in supply and demand. Blue
(33:45):
had already been increasing in popularity as people had gotten
better at processing lode into a good quality die, but
then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted blue
cloth for everything from clothing two coats of arms. And
it got to the point that in ass we're dying
and weaving had been completely different trades, governed by totally
different guilds. Weavers started to be allowed to die their
(34:07):
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 protect their trade, and regions whose
economies depended on growing and processing wode tried to protect
their livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the second published an
edict against indigo in fifteen seventy seven, in which he
(34:30):
called it cheating, corrosive, devouring and diabolical. It seems pretty harsh.
Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in
in in Saxony in sixteen fifty and then Rome prohibited
the use of indigo throughout Italy in sixteen fifty two.
(34:50):
I kind of agree with Rudolph the Second. I just indigoes,
not for me. Um, no shade to anybody that loves indigo.
I'm just kidding. It's fine, it shouldn't illegal. On the
other hand, Queen Elizabeth the First banned the cultivation of
wode in England in five although people disparagingly say that
this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad,
(35:12):
But this was really about was being motivated by fears
that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated
and lucrative wode. So these laws didn't stop this spread
of indigo into Europe or the rise of blue as
a popular color. And textiles and art, both because of
the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of
(35:33):
those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before
the fourteenth century, about seventy five percent of the dying
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
(35:53):
overtook red, and apprentice dyers when they did their masterpiece
to show that they were ready to practice their craft
on their own, had to do their masterpiece in blue
dye rather than read. 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,
(36:14):
so as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies
became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry, and this affected
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
(36:36):
became a major crop in parts of the America's where
it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers.
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 Suriname and that recounted Steadman's experiences in
(36:57):
Surinam from seventeen seventy two to seven. In teen seventy
seven and much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced
by by sugar cane, and it became a major cash
crop in South Carolina, where it was introduced by Eliza
Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied on the knowledge and and skill
of enslaved labors to refine how the indigo there was
being cultivated and processed, and synthetic indigo was developed in
(37:21):
the late nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the early
twentieth century that it really 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
(37:44):
cobalt that was used to make uh that was used
to make blue glass and glazes, or the blue and
white porcelain that was so popular in China during the
yawn and being dynasties, or the many attempts to try
to replicate that look that were made in your been
North America. There is blue jasper ware that was developed
by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken a different focus,
(38:07):
we could have had a totally different look at the
color blue today rather than having the focus beyond paints
and dies. And that's the mysteries of the color blue.
So thank you to the National Gallery of Art, Washington
for inviting us to be here tonight. Yeah, it's been
such a delight and we had to do it all
(38:27):
again in a minute, so we especially one of the
thanks Sherry Williams, who was the manager of community Programming,
and Christina Brown who's publicist, and then Melanie Gifford and
Chelsea SUSA, who were the people that we talked to
in advance of tonight. And then we also wanted to
thank the folks that we have been working with tonight,
So Kathleen walking around with us a lot. Yeahs Robert
(38:49):
who's here in the front, took great care of us
leading up to this, and then I think Olivia is
back in the back doing sound making me not sound
like a cackling hen. So thanks so much everyone for coming.
Thank you again to the National Gallery of Our Washington
for inviting us to be part of their n g
(39:11):
A Nights programming, and thanks so much to everybody who
came to see the show. We had two really fun crowds. Yeah,
we had a great time doing both of those. We
have not done a show back to back like that before,
so that was a new experience and it was a delight.
We had so much fun. It was I also have
a tiny bit of listener mails to take us out
that's related tangentially to what we talked about at the
(39:35):
National Gallery of Art. It is from Rachel. Rachel says, hi, guys,
listening to your podcast on the Guatemalan coup as I
type and coming to see you at n g a
nights on Thursday. That's not actually the connection. Connection is
what comes next. I paused in your mention of the
decreasing importance of coconel as a crop. Maybe you all
already knew this, but coconel is a tiny insect that
(39:57):
grows on cacti in Central and South America and as
harvested for the red pigment that it produces. I'm a
natural yarn dyer, and coconeal gives bright reds and pinks.
I'm attaching some of the yarn I've died with cokeneal
as an example. Love you both, Rachel. I sent Rachel
a note back into this, also letting her know, and
I'll also now let other listeners know. We did a
(40:19):
podcast called A Brief History of Colors way back in
the past. We talked a bit about cokeneal in that one,
because our live show at the Nashville Gallery of Art
was just about the color blue and its history, and
our Brief History of Colors is more like a broad
look at different colors and dies and the earliest examples
of different uh colors that people figured out how to
(40:43):
use as paints and dyes and things like that, and
One of the things we talked about is coconeal and
it does sound a little weird to talk about cokeneal
as a crop because, as Rachel said in the letter, uh,
it's little insects, But because that was what the export
product was still sort of looped into the crops that
Guatemala was producing, even though like the cactus that the
(41:07):
insect grows on isn't really like the crop as you
think of it, even though it's what's being grown, if
that makes sense. So thank you Rachel for that note.
Thanks again everyone who came out to that show. I
hope everybody had a great time. And if you would
like to write to us about this or anither podcast
or history podcast at how stuff works dot com. And
(41:27):
then we're all over social media at Missed in History.
That is where you will find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. And you can find our show on any
podcast platform that you like, and you can subscribe to
it on things like Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app,
really anywhere else you want to get podcasts. Stuff you
(41:50):
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy v Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
Today we are sharing our live show from the National
Gallery of Art Washington, which we did in September as
(00:23):
part of their n g A 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.
We're not going to share the second one because it
would effectively be the exact same show. Hello, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
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 that pulled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China,
(01:06):
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all
of those places, blue was the most popular color by
a significant margin. Uh So I am not alone in
the world and 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 and the water, and then things like blue
(01:28):
jeans and then all the blue stuff that people buy
because it's everyone's favorite color. And yet a lot of
ancient 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
(01:49):
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
was so rare, to some thing 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
(02:10):
to William You were 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 and ten years before he became Prime Minister,
he published a six hundred plus page book that was
called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, and it
had a whole section in it titled Homer's Perceptions and
(02:33):
Use of Color. I really like that one of the
jobs that you can have had before being prime ministers classicist.
That seems cool. I feel like if we had more
of that and less of other things, you'd be in
great shape. Uh So. In this section of the book,
Gladstone outlined what he interpreted as signs of immaturity that
(02:54):
was one of his words for it, and Homer's ability
to differentiate color. And here is what he said, one
the paucity of his colors, to the use of the
same word to denote not only different hues or tense
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
(03:19):
the vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms
of color, black and white over every other, and the
decided tendency to treat other colors as simply intermediates. Between
those two extremes five, the slight use of color and
Homer as compared with other elements of beauty for the
purposes of poetic effect, and it's absence in certain cases
(03:40):
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 to the same object using
different color descriptors at different times, or huge describe things
with strange colors, like he described both um blood and
(04:05):
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 have had no word that
specifically meant blue. And side note, there's actually a lot
of debate as well about whether all of the writing
that is attributed to Homer now was really the work
(04:27):
of one person or if there are multiple people involved
that all kind of fell into this umbrella. But that
is a whole different story and way outside the scope
of of what we're talking about tonight. But just keep
that in mind as we talk about Homer's work. Yeah, yeah,
regardless of whether Homer was one person or many people.
This whole conversation led to some discussion about whether people
(04:47):
in the Homeric age were color blind or otherwise we're
perceiving color color differently than sighted people in the nineteenth
century when Gladstone was writing, and we'll get back to
that idea. The also led to further study about how
ancient writers were describing and naming colors, and it quickly
became clear that other ancient writings also had odd uses
(05:10):
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 basic color terms
are essentially single words that can be applied to a
wide range of objects and are understood by most native
(05:31):
speakers of a given language. So in English, for example,
they are all kinds of words describing different shades and hues,
but they are actually only eleven basic color terms, and
those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink,
and thank goodness, purple. One of the important things about
basic color terms is that like, there's an agreed on
(05:53):
shade that they are describing. So even though violet was
one of the words that Homer was using, like the
fact that it was sort of being applied since seemingly
random objects would mean that that wasn't really functioning as
a basic color word or a basic color term. All
the languages that Berlin and k studied had a minimum
of two basic color terms black and white, sometimes described
(06:15):
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 had five, it's only when a language had six
basic color terms that it had a color term for blue.
(06:36):
And then from there the pattern didn't hold up much further.
There were there was brown as the seventh color, and
then colors beyond that just followed in no particular order.
In this nine work had studied a relatively small group
of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and most
of them lived in industrial areas, and this naturally led
(06:58):
to a lot of discussion and questions about whether these
results could really be considered universal. Uh So, in the
late nineteen seventies, Berlin and Kay started working on their
World Color Survey, which asked more than twenty native speakers
of unwritten languages around the world to identify various colors.
Berlin and Kay published a monograph on this in July
(07:19):
of two thousand nine, and they reported that more than
eighty percent of the world's languages followed this pattern of
black and white and then red, and then yellow or green,
and then the other one of those, uh, and then blue.
And these ancient languages without a word for blue seems
to follow these same patterns. A lot of them have
the black, white, and red and that's it. It sounds
(07:41):
like my wedding, um, not at all like Game of
Thrones in way before that. UM. 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 Youwret Gladston suggested,
(08:02):
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 a hundred percent agreed upon answers
to yet, Like are there physiological differences in the eyes
(08:24):
or brains of people who speak languages that include different
numbers of basic color terms. There's some research 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?
(08:46):
Our colors as cited, people perceive them universal or are
they relative? And it might seem a little bit weird, uh,
that there are so many unanswered questions about colors, because
it's really easy to imagine that colors are changing physical traits.
I know what purple looks like his purple um. But
it's true there's an element of physics to all of this.
(09:07):
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, society is around the world
had their own ideas about what light was made of
and where colors came from. And even Newton's work, which
(09:28):
became 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.
There's seven days of the week, seven notes in a
musical scale, sevens like an auspicious number. Clearly there have
to be seven colors. Uh So, in other words, colors
(09:52):
just start static, unchanging traits that exist all by themselves
are understanding of colors is socially constructed, and the way
people described the colors around them can vary dramatically based
on language and culture. Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings,
and those meetings changed and evolve over time in response
to all kinds of factors, including what pigments are available,
(10:14):
how expensive those 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
(10:35):
might imagine. And 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
(10:55):
used to color it, the binders that were used with
those pigments, how it was handled since then, and what
pollutants have been in the air, and on and on.
There's so many factors on top of all of 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 then the artists who created
(11:18):
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 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
(11:40):
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 going to talk a bit about paints
and pigments. If you look at some paleolithic rock art
(12:00):
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 from iron oxide and various earthy materials.
(12:21):
Different cultures have had their own ceremonial and symbolic 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 in our teacher, have you do that? I
think so probably a lot. You can't really do that
with blue though. It turns out there are not many
blue minerals, and the ones that do exist typically cannot
(12:43):
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 can try to
use that and paint with it, but it's actually usually
gonna turn out kind of brownish or gray, and often
it's also going to fade really quickly, so you're gonna
lose that blue color you were chasing. And ancient people's
could carve objects out of blue stones or minerals or shells,
(13:06):
or make decorative objects with feathers, but that was about it.
Even substances like lapis lazuli, which were eventually made into pigments,
were first used just 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 about thirty BC that came to be
(13:28):
known as Egyptian blue, and according to Roman writer Vitruvius.
It was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is
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,
(13:49):
although it was also possible for sand to include calcite
or flex of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to
be mixed with a small amount of alkali and then
be heated to between eight and fifteen thousand degrees celsius.
And when we were running through this script earlier today,
I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot? And
(14:09):
I was in my hotel room as we were getting
ready confirming it with like five different sources. 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. Um, we don't really know who worked out
this recipe or what their process was for figuring it out.
We don't know if it was an accidental discovery or
(14:30):
if it was the result of a more methodical process
to try to get to this this final result. It
may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly in Mesopotamia. Yeah,
it's it could have been anywhere on a spectrum to
keep between like the kids through some sand in the
kiln too. I'm going to figure this out like no
idea a lot of room. Uh. Egyptian blue was used
(14:53):
in Egyptian art from its discovery until the end of
the Roman Area 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 nine, it was discovered that Egyptian blue
has a near infrared luminescence that can help researchers find
traces of it that aren't visible to the naked eye anymore. So.
(15:16):
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. Uh.
And the pigment itself has held up. The binders that
have been used with it have not always fared as well, though.
(15:36):
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 lazily. And the next pigment we're going to
talk about is ultramarine, which was made out of lap
lapis lazily. Lapis lazily is a metamorphic rock that's found
(15:57):
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 lapists as early as seven thousand b
c E and by thirty five hundred BC was being
carried thousands of miles along trade routes through Asia and
Europe and Africa. And as we said earlier, the first
(16:18):
uses of lapis lazli 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 lapist 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,
(16:38):
and again those concentrations uh different lapis preparations could look
completely different from one another, uh 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 lazzle into a pure blue pigment now known
(17:02):
as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue, we do have the
recipe for this. One artist and writer Chanino Tanini, 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
chenino Chaninese method really illustrates why it wasn't just because
(17:23):
lapis laslie was only being mined in one area of
Afghanistan at the time. The process was also long and
really complicated, and it yields a very small amount of
usable pigment. So here's how he described it in his
book of art. Quote, first, take some lapis lazily, and
if you would know how to distinguish the best stones,
take those which contain most of the blue color. So
(17:46):
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
azure o'della magna, which is beautiful to the eye as
enamel as you're o'della magna is as you're right, which
is copper carbonate carbonate material. It was being used to
(18:06):
make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, although
it was hard to mind, 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
laps lazily, you pound it in a bronze mortar covered
so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You grind it,
(18:27):
and you strain it, and you sift it, and you
pound it quote again as much as is required. But
bear in mind that the that though the more you grind,
the more finely powdered the 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 lap is lazily is physically hard
(18:48):
to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning. 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. Lazily. Put all these ingredients
into a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take
a piece of white linen and strain these things into
(19:10):
a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder
of lapis lazily 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 paste must be kept at least
three days and three nights, needing it a little every day.
And remember that you may keep it for fifteen days
(19:32):
or a month, or as long as you please. I
like how it's like three days, but like forever's cool. Yeah,
it's totally fine. Also, it's not lapis lazily yet, or
it's not ultramar ultramarine yet. You still need to extract
the pigment from the paste that you just made and
left from between three days and forever. Uh. You do
(19:53):
this by putting the paste in a glazed basin. Quote
with a porringerful 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 need the paste thoroughly, exactly in
the manner that you would need bread. Now I need
(20:14):
to take a minute. I've never used sticks to need bread.
I pictures someone just poking at it like like even
in a bread machine. It's a paddle like that. Okay,
so sticks as you would need bread. When you see
that the lie is thoroughly blue, pour it, uh, pour
(20:37):
it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of
fresh lie, pour it over the paste, and work it
with the sticks is before. When this lie is very blue,
pour it into another glazed basin, and continue to do
so for several days until the paste no longer tinges
the lie. Then throw it away, for it is good
for nothing. Hey, guess what, You still don't have ultramarine yet.
(21:01):
The substance in each of these basins will be a
different shade of blue depending on when in the process
you filled it, and you need to combine them together
based on how many shades of ultramarine you're 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
(21:24):
the good as you're by mixing it with the bad,
and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry.
So from there to Nini 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,
(21:45):
we get to the part of this that is the
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
(22:08):
their hands more delicate. But beware of old women I'm
just out here ruining your aqua marine. Yeah, I don't.
I don't think he'd be cool with me making a
zacka marine or ultra marine. Rather, um ultra marine is
beautiful and expensive and rare, so during the Middle Ages
(22:29):
and the Renaissance it was mostly used by the most skilled,
respected artists and artisans. Some artists would try to make
it stretched by saving 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, uh,
(22:50):
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 about of teen 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. You don't try
(23:10):
to go over there right now. That building is closed
in all the trouble. Uh. Some artists, though, dated, neither
of these things to try to conserve it or make
it stretch. An example is your Harnes, you honest Vermier,
who just spent enormous amounts of money on ultramarine and
used it extensively everywhere. The Vermiers are in Gallery fifty
A of the West Building. Also still the other building spectacular. Uh.
(23:33):
They are beautful. You can see them on the internet. Also. Uh.
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 four, the French Society for the Encouragement
(23:53):
of National Industry offered a prize of six thousand francs
to whoever figured out an industrial process 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 gumay In.
And that is made from cowlan, sodium carbonate, bitumen and sulfur,
(24:17):
prepared and heated in a furnace or kiln. So once
there 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 lazily. And
then we get all those beautiful moonates that are all
(24:39):
full of blue everywhere. Uh. To be clear, ultramarine was
not the only blue pigment that was in use at
this point. Cobalt blue was introduced in eighteen o two
and cerulean blue in the eighteen sixties. Prussian blue had
been developed back at the start, at the seventeen hundreds,
quite by accident. Uh. There is some fuzziness as to
the details about this, but the can mentional story is
(25:01):
that an alchemist named Johan Conrad Dipple was working with
potash and animal blood, and Johan Jakob ds Bach was
a dye maker who used potash as part of making
a red die, and des Bac ran out and he
either bought or borrowed some from Dipple, and it was
the potash that had been adulterated with animal blood, and
because of this, instead of making the red dye that
(25:22):
he was expecting these, Bach wound up with a vivid blue.
I like to imagine that he was like, he won't
notice if I just take some of it. Oh give it?
Why is this blue now? Dipple used his knowledge of
chemistry to work out how to replicate these box results,
and then another man, Johan Leonard Frisch, also claims to
(25:42):
have invented this in a letter to Gottfried bill him
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 twenty four, so anybody
could make as much as they wanted, and the development
of Prussian blue, also sometimes called Berlin blue, affected the
(26:04):
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 Azuria. Those were printed
mostly or entirely in blue, and these prints made use
of Prussian blue as well as indigo and other blue pigments.
In A particularly famous example is Katsushiko Hoko, size thirty
(26:27):
six of views of Mount Fuji that includes the Great
Wave of Konagawa and the first princes 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 blue. Yeah, 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
(26:56):
of the world, the oldest surviving examples have died. Hextiles
are dyed red, but blue dye has been around for
a pretty long time as well. One example is to
tell It, which is repent, which is mentioned repeatedly in
Jewish scripture and was in use at least thirty years ago.
Knowledge of how to make it was lost sometime after
(27:17):
the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today
its sources believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
Other blue dyes are even older. Researchers announced that they
had dated a piece of cotton textile found in Huaka, Peru,
and found that it was sixty two hundred years old.
It had been dyed with indigo, making it the oldest
(27:39):
known use of indigo die and one of the oldest
surviving cotton textiles, and there were other blue dyes in
the America's as well. For example, 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. So today indigo
is more often as so ciated with what's now India,
(28:01):
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 Mesoamerica, and that
(28:22):
was made from indigo and a clay called pallagor skype
and at least one other ingredient who's or at least
one other ingredient whose identity is still a little bit debated.
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
(28:44):
research conservator here, described his process in painting this to
us in an email. She said, Rubens used indigo paint
indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting
in Italy in sixteen o 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 die, the historical details of how the plants were
(29:06):
processed and how the dye was used could really vary
based on where the indigo was being grown. Often the
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 die. And as an example,
(29:26):
here is how indigo was processed in Surinam as described
by John Gabriel Steadman quote. When all the verdure is
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
(29:48):
or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring
matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is
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
(30:09):
this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash
is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose, not just
pokey sticks. Un till 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
(30:31):
carefully removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor
is drawn off into a third tub to let what
indigo 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
(30:51):
into small, round and oblong square pieces. It has become
a beautiful dark blue and fit for exportation. So to
work all these I'm like, do we 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, today
we have chemistry, and chemists do these things rather than
(31:12):
having I mean, you can still mash a lot of
plants and get indigo. Die. People do that, some of
them for fun um as a cool side note, when
you die 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.
Magic chemistry, it was. Indigo was being cultivated in the
(31:34):
Indian subcontinent by two thousand b c E, and Indco
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 they were some kind
of stone similar to lapus. Indigo wasn't that common in
(31:58):
Europe until after an Indian navigator led Vasco da gamma
to a c root to the Indian subcontinent and four
and before that point, wode was more commonly used as
a blue dye. In Europe, this was also known as pastel.
That can make reading old die manuals a little confusing
for people who aren't familiar with that term being used
(32:19):
in that way rather than for crayons made out of
powdery pigment or white colors. Wade is also a flowering
plant that requires an involved process to be made into
a die. Ethel M Merits, a book on vegetable dyes,
which was published in nineteen nineteen, described it this way.
Quote The leaves, when cut, are reduced to a paste,
(32:40):
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 you being used by the dyre seems less complicated,
but also nine weeks of further fermentation. Well, it could
be forever, So it could be forever. Uh when the indigo.
(33:01):
When indigo became more accessible in Europe after it really
up ended the die 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 die.
Although processing the indigo plants into a die was very
(33:22):
difficult and time 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
die was also a lot easier to work with than wode,
and it made a better quality blue overall. As indigo
die became more available, guilds and governments in Europe had
to negotiate a sudden shift in supply and demand. Blue
(33:45):
had already been increasing in popularity as people had gotten
better at processing lode into a good quality die, but
then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted blue
cloth for everything from clothing two coats of arms. And
it got to the point that in ass we're dying
and weaving had been completely different trades, governed by totally
different guilds. Weavers started to be allowed to die their
(34:07):
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 protect their trade, and regions whose
economies depended on growing and processing wode tried to protect
their livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the second published an
edict against indigo in fifteen seventy seven, in which he
(34:30):
called it cheating, corrosive, devouring and diabolical. It seems pretty harsh.
Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in
in in Saxony in sixteen fifty and then Rome prohibited
the use of indigo throughout Italy in sixteen fifty two.
(34:50):
I kind of agree with Rudolph the Second. I just indigoes,
not for me. Um, no shade to anybody that loves indigo.
I'm just kidding. It's fine, it shouldn't illegal. On the
other hand, Queen Elizabeth the First banned the cultivation of
wode in England in five although people disparagingly say that
this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad,
(35:12):
But this was really about was being motivated by fears
that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated
and lucrative wode. So these laws didn't stop this spread
of indigo into Europe or the rise of blue as
a popular color. And textiles and art, both because of
the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of
(35:33):
those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before
the fourteenth century, about seventy five percent of the dying
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
(35:53):
overtook red, and apprentice dyers when they did their masterpiece
to show that they were ready to practice their craft
on their own, had to do their masterpiece in blue
dye rather than read. 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,
(36:14):
so as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies
became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry, and this affected
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
(36:36):
became a major crop in parts of the America's where
it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers.
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 Suriname and that recounted Steadman's experiences in
(36:57):
Surinam from seventeen seventy two to seven. In teen seventy
seven and much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced
by by sugar cane, and it became a major cash
crop in South Carolina, where it was introduced by Eliza
Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied on the knowledge and and skill
of enslaved labors to refine how the indigo there was
being cultivated and processed, and synthetic indigo was developed in
(37:21):
the late nineteenth century, but it wasn't until the early
twentieth century that it really 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
(37:44):
cobalt that was used to make uh that was used
to make blue glass and glazes, or the blue and
white porcelain that was so popular in China during the
yawn and being dynasties, or the many attempts to try
to replicate that look that were made in your been
North America. There is blue jasper ware that was developed
by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken a different focus,
(38:07):
we could have had a totally different look at the
color blue today rather than having the focus beyond paints
and dies. And that's the mysteries of the color blue.
So thank you to the National Gallery of Art, Washington
for inviting us to be here tonight. Yeah, it's been
such a delight and we had to do it all
(38:27):
again in a minute, so we especially one of the
thanks Sherry Williams, who was the manager of community Programming,
and Christina Brown who's publicist, and then Melanie Gifford and
Chelsea SUSA, who were the people that we talked to
in advance of tonight. And then we also wanted to
thank the folks that we have been working with tonight,
So Kathleen walking around with us a lot. Yeahs Robert
(38:49):
who's here in the front, took great care of us
leading up to this, and then I think Olivia is
back in the back doing sound making me not sound
like a cackling hen. So thanks so much everyone for coming.
Thank you again to the National Gallery of Our Washington
for inviting us to be part of their n g
(39:11):
A Nights programming, and thanks so much to everybody who
came to see the show. We had two really fun crowds. Yeah,
we had a great time doing both of those. We
have not done a show back to back like that before,
so that was a new experience and it was a delight.
We had so much fun. It was I also have
a tiny bit of listener mails to take us out
that's related tangentially to what we talked about at the
(39:35):
National Gallery of Art. It is from Rachel. Rachel says, hi, guys,
listening to your podcast on the Guatemalan coup as I
type and coming to see you at n g a
nights on Thursday. That's not actually the connection. Connection is
what comes next. I paused in your mention of the
decreasing importance of coconel as a crop. Maybe you all
already knew this, but coconel is a tiny insect that
(39:57):
grows on cacti in Central and South America and as
harvested for the red pigment that it produces. I'm a
natural yarn dyer, and coconeal gives bright reds and pinks.
I'm attaching some of the yarn I've died with cokeneal
as an example. Love you both, Rachel. I sent Rachel
a note back into this, also letting her know, and
I'll also now let other listeners know. We did a
(40:19):
podcast called A Brief History of Colors way back in
the past. We talked a bit about cokeneal in that one,
because our live show at the Nashville Gallery of Art
was just about the color blue and its history, and
our Brief History of Colors is more like a broad
look at different colors and dies and the earliest examples
of different uh colors that people figured out how to
(40:43):
use as paints and dyes and things like that, and
One of the things we talked about is coconeal and
it does sound a little weird to talk about cokeneal
as a crop because, as Rachel said in the letter, uh,
it's little insects, But because that was what the export
product was still sort of looped into the crops that
Guatemala was producing, even though like the cactus that the
(41:07):
insect grows on isn't really like the crop as you
think of it, even though it's what's being grown, if
that makes sense. So thank you Rachel for that note.
Thanks again everyone who came out to that show. I
hope everybody had a great time. And if you would
like to write to us about this or anither podcast
or history podcast at how stuff works dot com. And
(41:27):
then we're all over social media at Missed in History.
That is where you will find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. And you can find our show on any
podcast platform that you like, and you can subscribe to
it on things like Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app,
really anywhere else you want to get podcasts. Stuff you
(41:50):
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
Popular Podcasts
Good Game with Sarah Spain
Good Game is your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women’s sports. Every day, host Sarah Spain gives you the stories, stakes, stars and stats to keep up with your favorite women’s teams, leagues and athletes. Through thoughtful insight, witty banter, and an all around good time, Sarah and friends break down the latest news, talk about the games you can’t miss, and debate the issues of the day. Don’t miss interviews with the people of the moment, whether they be athletes, coaches, reporters, or celebrity fans.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.