Color: A Natural History of the Palette (17 page)

There was a famous case study of a housewife in St. Louis, mentioned in Maggie Angeloglou’s
A History of Makeup
, who bought several bottles of Bloom of Youth. She applied it diligently and in 1877 she died of lead poisoning. She was by no means the first. Lead white had been used unsparingly in face cream and makeup since Egyptian times: the Roman ladies swore by it; Japanese geishas used it—it contrasted beautifully with their teeth which they had fashionably blackened with oak galls and vinegar.
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But even in the nineteenth century, when the dangers must have been better known, it was common on the dressing tables of women of all complexions.

Today too, women die for beauty: they starve themselves too thin, or employ surgeons to tuck their skin too tightly. Was the white lead death any more monstrous? I wondered. One of the problems was that in the beginning—as with consumption—the damage caused would sometimes even make its victim feel more attractive. Lead exposure made women seem like ethereal spirits, almost like angels—which was part of its fraud. By the time the truth was clear, it was probably already too late.

I consulted a book on poisons
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and imagined being one of those nineteenth-century fashion victims. If I had assiduously applied Bloom of Youth every morning, I would first feel a sense of lethargy: I’d probably blame it on those wretched corsets. I would then, perhaps, stop sleeping, which would give a pallid hollow to my cheeks. My Victorian suitors might even find this an attractive look, fitting the idea of what a woman should be like: “dead-pale,” but with a lovely face, a Lady of Shalott. And then my legs might begin to feel a bit wobbly, so I might take to my bed, like the consumptive heroine of a Puccini opera. Rather romantic really, I’d joke with my girlfriends.

At this point I would pull down the sleeves on my dress to hide the little blue marks—tiny plumb lines—that were forming on my wrists. At least no one would notice the ones on my ankles, I’d think. And then—and this would be more of a secret—my need for the chamber pot would change. Constipation would set in early and I would no longer need to urinate much either—but the pot would be useful for containing the vomit, which I would produce biliously and often. That sounds bad, but it would be just the beginning of the discomfort, which could later involve kidney collapse and what are kindly described as “behavioral abnormalities.” Not even the champions of the accidental beauty of the consumptive could support such painful final hours as those suffered by a woman who had smoothed a surfeit of white lead into her cheeks. I wonder at what point I would have realized what was wrong.

The sickness had two names. It was called either “plumbism,” because of the lead content, or “saturnism”—because lead has traditionally been associated with the planet Saturn, which apparently brings gloominess to anyone born under its influence. One popular remedy was a liter of milk. In the early 1900s a French toxicologist called Georges Petit spent a day at a lead white factory in France and reported on what safety precautions they were taking.
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He saw three distributions of free milk. The first was at 6 A.M., the second at 9 A.M. and the third at 3 P.M., when everyone knocked off work. Using a healthy white thing—milk—to stop the effects of an unhealthy white thing—lead powder—seems at first like a bizarre example of sympathetic magic. But in fact milk contains a good natural antidote to lead poisoning—calcium—and it was probably one of the best things the workers could have done in those days before protective masks. The other effective precaution was for workers to hand-grind lead while next to a roaring fire so that the updraft would carry the dust away.
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THE STORY OF THE SKELETONS

Lead is not only poisonous; it is also—when suspended in water-based media—not even particularly stable. When Cennino described this particular “brilliant” paint in his
Handbook
he included a warning. It should be avoided “as much as you can . . . For in the course of time it turns black.” There are many examples of when an artist has not heeded his advice and the lead carbonate has lost its oxygen and turned into black lead sulphide. But the most startling examples of lead blackening I have seen were in paintings done six hundred years before Cennino lived and an entire trade route away—in the sacred caves of Dunhuang, in western China.

Dunhuang today is a remote town in Gansu province, an hour’s flight and about 1,800 kilometers by camel from the start of the Silk Road in Xian. If it weren’t for its famous caves, it would now be forgotten. But in the eighth century this oasis in the Gobi desert was one of the busiest towns in China, full of merchants, monks and mendicants. It was the place where the northern and southern Silk Road routes divided, and it was known for its good food, excellent markets and, most importantly, the chance it gave to buy favors with fate by becoming an art patron through sponsoring a fresco.

The Mogao caves are 20 kilometers from Dunhuang across a desert full of graveyards. Today the Chinese government presents them as a series of art galleries, great painted treasure houses in the desert. But thirteen hundred years ago they were holy places, and Mogao was a city of shrines. At one point there were more than a thousand caves here, painted between the fifth and eleventh centuries. They were mostly paid for by people making bargains with the divine. The pacts would often be on the lines of: “if I get to Kashgar with my camels/ if I have a son/ if I win an inheritance . . . then I will sponsor a new painted cave.” Some caves, of course, were painted for more spiritual reasons. These were a celebration of the transcendent, without earthly terms and conditions, and they are probably the finest.

As recently as the 1970s, the 492 remaining caves were visited only by the lucky few. In his book about the raids on ancient Chinese cities—
Foreign Devils along the Silk Road
—published in 1979, Peter Hopkirk described how occasional tour groups and scholars would traipse freely around the picturesquely rickety scaffolding. They could mostly shine their torches wherever they wanted, to discover for themselves the magical images of azure fairies swooshing energetically over the ceiling, or ancient depictions of the Buddha sacrificing his body to save starving tiger cubs.

Today the caves are rather like a cultural motel. The exteriors have been squared up and covered with a pebble-dashed façade, each grotto accessed by a metal hotel-style door, with a room number outside. Young female guides in short turquoise skirts trip along the concrete balcony paths with torches, visiting the same ten or so caves each time. Every year the authorities sensibly change the tour itinerary, to preserve the murals. On a summer’s day, with so many humans breathing in them, the smaller ones can be like a sauna.

The guide escorting my group was so bored that while she was waiting for us to move from one cave to the next she kept having a little snooze with her head resting against the door. But her sense of tedium was not contagious, and inside, once the nasty door had opened, the caves were full of visual treasure. It was hard not to be entranced by the ancient Buddhas painted in bright malachite greens, their haloes luminous with blue or even with real gold leaf—in the places where the fleeing White Russians didn’t scrape it off with their penknives in the 1920s. We had to stay alert to see even half of the murals: a few minutes’ chat, some quick flicks with the flashlight, and the group was ushered out blinking into the desert sunlight.

In some caves I had to be dragged out of the grotto, the last to leave. But others were disappointing. This was among the most prized Buddhist art in China, and some of it, especially some of the paintings from the Northern Zhou period in the sixth century, looked like slightly ludicrous children’s cartoons, with harsh black outlines. In cave 428 there were pictures of enlightened beings who looked like joke skeletons in reverse. Their crudely daubed black bones, limbs and bellies contrasted curiously with the delicate folds of their headwear and robes—it looked as if a primary school student had helped with the artwork. Meanwhile cave 419 was full of holy men and Buddhist fairies whose faces were startlingly black. And, even more odd, outside cave 455 there were some frescos painted minimally in navy, black and white, looking more like an indigo textile from Nigeria than a Buddhist painting from China. What had gone wrong? Had they been overpainted by later restorers? Or was this just the style of the Northern Zhou?

Cennino warned his artists not to use lead white on frescos at all. But then he warned them not to use yellow orpiment, red vermilion, blue azurite, red lead (which is what you get when you heat white lead) or green verdigris either. So the fresco painters of Dunhuang—who used all of the above—seem to have got off remarkably lightly, considering. Most of the paintings are still almost as bright as they were 1,400 years ago. But the worst damage can be seen where white lead or red lead
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paints have come into contact with hydrogen sulphide, and have oxidized.
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Those odd figures I saw in cave 428 had once been a pale shade of pink, the lead paint just a subtle lowlight on the skin in an attempt to make the paintings more realistic.
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It was only over the years that the pink flesh turned to blackened bone: an intriguing example from 1,400 years ago of how art follows life.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE FIVE-PIGMENT GIRL

The local people of Dunhuang have their own version of where the pigments came from. It contains the elements of the best folk stories: a crisis, a deity who appears in a dream with a dangerous solution, and a virgin who is willing to risk everything for what she believes in. It was recorded by Chinese anthropologist Chen Yu in the 1980s, and was set in the eighth century. At the time, Mogao was attracting tens of thousands of people, who came to seek their fortune there. Among them were the widower Zhang and his teenage daughter. Zhang was one of the most talented artists in China, known for his exquisite
apsaras
fairy figures, which floated over turquoise skies as if the breath of the Buddha were guiding them. The most powerful warlord in the area, His Excellency Cao, had heard of the reputation of this father-daughter team, and had hired them to paint a new cave. There was one condition. They had to finish by the Buddha’s birthday on the eighth of April. Easy, thought Zhang, and said yes. They spent days balancing on scaffolding, painting the most exquisite images. But the most beautiful painting of all was their deity Guanyin, who radiated compassion throughout the cave.

And then, disaster. They ran out of paint. They ran out of the white for the Buddha’s body, and the green for his ribbons. There was no blue for the robes of his attendants, no red ochre for his face, and no black to draw the outlines of his enlightenment. It should not have been a problem: Dunhuang was a major stopping point on the Silk Road. In a normal year there would always be merchants in the marketplace selling sachets of vermilion and malachite and orpiment and all the other precious pigments that artists needed. But this was not a normal year: hundreds of artists were staked out in the caves and in tent cities around them, painting to the same deadline. The only paints available were cut with dross to make them go farther, and were unusable.

Zhang and his daughter knew the penalties for not finishing on time. His Excellency Cao was not a man known for his kindness and patience. They were sick with worry. Then one night the daughter dreamed she was in a high valley of the San Wei Mountain, not far from Dunhuang. In her dream she was surrounded by powdered pigments of every possible hue, but every time she tried to pick them up they would slip out of her hand. Then the Guanyin of her cave painting appeared. There were plenty of pigments in this valley, the deity said. But only if the girl had the courage to find them. She said she did, and was given instructions to go to the bottom of a well, a special well, which was hidden beneath white sand and protected by black cliffs. Only a girl could descend the well, the deity said. Only someone who was pure could find the pure colors.

The next day the girl and her father and their two assistants went on an expedition to this monochrome landscape. They tied her carefully to a piece of rope and eased her down. She was only halfway into the well when the knot slipped and she tumbled to the bottom. The last thing she must have felt was the thin stone at the base as her body crashed through it, because when the grieving father looked down all he could see was a gushing new spring, from which flowed the five pigments he had prayed for. Black and red, green and blue and, of course, the precious and pure white, all flowing out in a magical waterfall of paints.

It is of course a superbly Confucian morality tale of individuals sacrificing their lives for the good of society. But it also shows that the local people were asking the same question that art scholars would later ask: where could all those wonderful colors have come from?

THE ADVENTURES OF LANGDON WARNER

My guide at Dunhuang was most animated in cave 16, where there were some hideous early-twentieth-century restorations, making some of the Buddhas look like Teletubbies, with unskillfully touched-up eye-dots. But it was not this that she was referring to. “One of our statues is missing,” she said ominously, waving her hands to where a Tang dynasty Buddha was waited on by an asymmetrical gathering of just three attendants rather than four. “The American stole our treasure.”

“The American” was a young explorer-archaeologist called Langdon Warner, who had gone to Dunhuang in 1925, sponsored by Harvard. And the main reason he had been sponsored to travel so far and for so long, risking his life journeying through a country that was going through a particularly violently anti-foreigner phase,
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was because the university was anxious to learn about the pigments. Were they local colors, or were they carried for long distances? Did the colors change or did they stay the same for the six hundred years that there were artists at Dunhuang? The story of the paints was the story of the ancient trade routes, Warner’s pay-masters at Harvard had decided. And they wanted to know it.