Color: A Natural History of the Palette (27 page)

To make a lute the translucent color of rich egg yolk, Martinengo would have bought madder—
Rubia tinctorum
—in its root form, each piece the thickness of a pencil, although much longer. The roots grow so long and so quickly that in seventeenth-century Holland, for example—when the Dutch were the European leaders in madder production—farmers working on reclaimed land were legally obliged to harvest their crop after two years, in case the roots grew too deeply into the dykes and caused floods. The lute-maker would have dried it in the sunshine—to give it a richness that northern European madder could never quite achieve from its sunless drying rooms—and then he would have pounded it with a pestle and mortar. The first pounding would separate the cheap madder, the second would be the average grade, and the third pounding would powder the heart of the madder root, the finest grade, which the Dutch would call “krap” and the English would adapt to “crop.”

Most artists today would be bewildered to find madder in a chapter entitled “orange”: for painters it tends to signify bright pink paint. But if dyers put white wool in a madder dye bath, with a little bit of alum to make the color stick, then it comes out the vibrant shade of a redhead’s hair. I remember seeing fragments of an antique Japanese robe shown at an exhibition in New York about Frank Lloyd Wright’s fascination with Japan.
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They had been found “wadded together like dishrags, crumpled and soiled” in an old suitcase two decades after the architect’s death. The seventeenth-century madder in those abused textiles had mostly faded to brown, but here and there, at those edges that had never been touched by the sun, there were glorious traces of what the cloth would once have looked like. It would have been brilliant orange, as bright as autumn.

The technique for making madder into pink paint by using filtration under pressure was invented by London colorman George Field at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Winsor & Newton make it almost the same way today. When I visited their factory in Harrow I found the “madder room” was really a madder barn: it was huge, and the whole place was spattered with rose paint. It was too pretty ever to seem like the scene of a massacre, although if it had been darker that would have been exactly the image. Instead it was more as if we had fallen through a dressing-room mirror and found ourselves in a box of theatrical rouge powder.

Even today, with mechanization, the whole process is extremely time-consuming. It takes more than three months from the time the shipment arrives from Iran to the day the tubes of watercolor labelled “Rose Madder Genuine” leave the factory. “When artists say it’s expensive, I tell them that they’re lucky they’re not living two hundred years ago and they don’t have to clean it and crush it and find the right gum,” said Joan Joyce, who has been a guide through the paintbox factory for many years. I looked doubtfully at the huge apparatus busily crushing, cooking, mixing, drying and pressing over two floors, and wondered how easy it would be to prepare rose madder at home. According to Field’s biographer John Gage, the colorman was perhaps inspired by William Harvey’s seventeenth-century discovery of the circulation of blood—and certainly the room inspired by Field was full of tubes and pumps and a fairly regular mechanical pulse.
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Field’s process—briefly—involves washing the crushed roots in oak barrels and then mixing the dye with alum and water until it looks like watermelon juice with a foaming cap. It is then drained through fine Irish linen for five days, after which it feels like the most luxurious face cream—so silky it is barely tangible. The water is then squeezed out of it, with Field’s patent wooden press, after which it is sent to an oven. At no point can any metal touch the mixture, as it would react and change the final color. Instrument-makers would have followed a similar basic recipe—although in the fifteenth century they would have done it with little glass flasks burning slowly over fires for days. Some people may have thought they were alchemists, cooking up strange recipes to turn plain wood into gold.

Could I look upstairs? I asked, intrigued at the boilers and barrels I could see. “Sorry, it’s a secret” was the friendly but firm response. It was intriguing that even today—when so much information is in the public domain—a major paintmaker is able to keep the recipe for an old-fashioned paint to itself.

And “sorry, it’s a secret” would have been the reaction in Turkey too if Martinengo had asked to see the process of making the luminous orange-red dye that he would have seen on the carpets of Constantinople, although probably the Ottoman dyers would have been less polite. After all, “Turkey Red” was one of the best-kept secrets of the dyeing world, and it would take European dyers several centuries of bribery, negotiation and no doubt not a small amount of spying to discover it. At one point in the early eighteenth century a young chemist called Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau approached the answer, finding that if he fed pigeons on madder their bones would become red in a spread that was consistent with the theory that it was the calcium which was holding the color. But it was the Dutch who found the full answer first—in the 1730s— closely followed by the French in 1747.
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The British were slow to follow and were finally helped by two brothers from Rouen, Louis and Abraham Henry Borelle, who turned up in Manchester in 1787 offering the secret of Turkey Red to the city’s Committee of Trade.

The recipe had arrived in Britain just in time, because the 1790s were the decade of the Red Bandanna. Today these bright cotton handkerchiefs are worn only occasionally, but once upon a time there were 1,500 looms and several dye factories in Glasgow alone that were dedicated to them. They were mostly for export to poor people in India, the Far East and West Africa. Others went to the recently independent America, and were often bought for slaves— they were good as sweatbands or for tying up food for midday meals. Others were worn by British sailors. Just a few months after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1806, the celebrity painter Benjamin West held a public viewing at his own home of a huge documentary painting entitled The Death of Nelson.
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The hero dies dramatically at the center, but all around the edges are ordinary sailors living through their own dramas as the battle rages behind. And to a man they are wearing red bandannas—on their heads, tied like belts at their waists, or most popularly in a loose knot around their necks. It is strange to think that factors like the ability to make little cloths with white spots on a red background can make or break a company, but such is the truth of the fashion business. It was done by the then very new technique of “discharge printing,” which involved printing the cloth with madder, then bleaching out patterns with acid, and later printing other dyes on top. Logwood for black, Persian berries for yellow and Prussian blue were the most effective.

The bandanna boom ended in the early nineteenth century, but not before the madder dyers had moved out of Glasgow to the Vale of Leven. There were two reasons. The first is that Glasgow had become far too dirty for bleaching and dyeing—I imagine acres of little red-and-white handkerchiefs hanging out to dry and being covered by black particles before anybody had even thought to blow their nose on them. And the second was that the dyeing had become too dirty for Glasgow. Because the secret of Turkey Red was not a nice one at all for the neighbors. It involved applying alum, tin, calcium, tannin, ox blood and—most unpleasantly— sheep or cow dung to yarn that had been steeped in rancid castor oil. After the three weeks or more of going through one of the most complicated dyeing processes ever invented, the cloth and the dye works emitted a very peculiar stench indeed.
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The secret of dyeing “krap” madder bright red, Europeans realized (although they didn’t yet have the word to create the pun), was—partly—the crap that was in it.

The boom couldn’t last, despite the success of orange mango-inspired patterns in the Scottish town of Paisley, and the Emperor Louis Philippe’s command that soldiers’ caps and trousers should be dyed red to keep the French madder industry in business. The death knell for this natural dye was not, in the end, rung by fashion but by science. In 1868 the price of madder in London was 30 shillings a hundred-weight. In 1869 it was just eight. The 22 shillings were lost in a triumphant moment in a German laboratory when Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann found the formula for alizarin—the chemical in madder that makes it red. Suddenly the world’s madder crops were doomed—until recently, that is, when there has been a small but significant revival.

In 1976 a German chemistry teacher called Harald Boehmer went to teach in Turkey. He was shocked at how hideous the carpets were. “I thought what a waste of time to make such ugly things. Why can’t they use the old dyes?” But then he realized that nobody even knew how. A few women in remote villages used madder for dowry carpets, but these tended to come out brown and badly colored. So Boehmer did his own detective work—with books, experiments and the friendly advice of professional dyers— and, metaphorically speaking, he found his own “lost varnish.” He even found a way of making madder violet—although for a long time he kept that quiet, as his own trade secret.
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Three years later he and his wife returned to Turkey with files full of recipes. They set up a cooperative called DoBAG, and twenty years on it now employs a hundred weavers and has inspired hundreds of others to use natural dyes. Dr. Boehmer explained the appeal. “Synthetic dyes just contain one color. But in madder there is red, of course, but blue and yellow are in there as well. It makes it softer, and at the same time more interesting.” I was reminded of a photograph I saw at the Winsor & Newton factory—of a piece of madder that had been magnified 240 times. It was orange and blue and red, like a kingfisher’s wings, and seemed like a celebration of every color imaginable.

Today the impact of DoBAG has spread as far as the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan—where weavers are learning to make the dyes their great-great-great-grandmothers were using. “They have to,” a carpet dealer in Peshawar told me. “Synthetic carpets aren’t selling.” And even the madder industry has stirred again. At first Dr. Boehmer and his colleagues were digging up the roots from wild plants growing by the roadside. “But within a year a madder trade started in Turkey: just to keep up with our demand,” he told me. For him the biggest changes have been in the villages. “Suddenly women have money and so at last they have some power.” And the dowry carpets? “Those?” He laughed. “Oh, the main things in dowries today are not carpets. They are refrigerators.”

ITALY

If Europe was going through a transition in the late fifteenth century, Italy was leading it. Almost no area of human endeavor was left untouched: architecture, technology, science, art—and music. In 1498 Ottaviano Petrucci of Venice printed sheet music using movable type; in a curious twist to my story, Ferdinand Columbus, the son of the explorer, was to become one of the great collectors of his volumes. The Ottoman Empire was culturally barren, but it was all just beginning to happen musically in Italy. How could our lute-maker resist? So he set off again, this time to the port of Venice.

Martinengo’s bags would be full of samples by now, and in Venice he would find more. There was the famous Venetian turpentine from larches (in those days he would have bought it as solid sap, and would have distilled it himself) and even more exciting would have been the expensive amber from the north— thirty-million-year-old pieces of resin that bubbled up from the bed of the Baltic and in their time caused as much grief 20 to the residents of that seashore as mastic had caused to the people of Chios. Amber has the curious characteristic of attracting dust to it when it is rubbed vigorously. The Greek called it “electron,” and from that we get our modern word “electricity.”

Whether or not amber was used on Cremonese violins has been hotly debated for two hundred years. In 1873 a man called Charles Reade wrote an eloquent and opinionated letter to the
Pall Mall
Gazette
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about the mystery of Stradivari’s varnish, and how it had obsessed so many people. “Some have even cried Eureka!” he wrote. But the moment they publicized their theory, “Inextinguishable laughter shook the skies.” Some, he said, were sure the recipe included amber that had been boiled with turpentine. “To convince me they used to rub the worn part of a cremona with their sleeves, and then put the fiddle to their noses and smell amber. Then I, burning with love of knowledge, used to rub the fiddle very hard and whip it to my nose and not smell amber.” His own conclusion, incidentally, was that the secret was in laying down three or four layers of varnish and finishing off the fiddle with a final coat of mastic and dragon’s blood (“little lumps deeper in color than a carbuncle, clear as crystal and fiery as a ruby”). It was hard to find, he added, “but you can get it by groping in the City as hard as Diogenes had to grope for an honest man in a much less knavish town than London.”

But Venice too was a knavish town; people there were prejudiced against Jews—as they would continue to be a century later when Shakespeare created the cruelly stereotyped Shylock in his
Merchant of Venice
—and Martinengo wouldn’t have wanted to be noticed. So he would have kept on moving. And then one day, for reasons that have been lost to history, he arrived in Cremona. There he found a friendly enough welcome and sufficient interest in music to make him think he could stay.

Once he had found a good workshop, Martinengo would have bought or borrowed some benches, tables and clamps, and—after laying out his precious materials in jars—would have started work. In Cremona there were other useful pigments and materials—turpentine from local pines, which some people still say is among the finest in the world, and propolis, the sticky substance that bees collect from tree resins and then use to protect their cities from invasion. If a mouse enters the hive then the bees will kill it. But because its body is too large for little insects to shift, and because they don’t want it to stink up their home, they mummify it in propolis. People use it as an antiseptic—or as an ingredient in varnish that has the bonus of scaring woodworm away. Like honey, every propolis is different, depending on the local vegetation, and the one from Cremona is said to be very fine.