Color: A Natural History of the Palette (55 page)

On the other side of the covered street there was an old man dressed immaculately in white, pulling pale cloth-like bits of inner cow from a bucket of offal, stretching them out. He was the village leader and he spoke no Spanish, only Mixtec. We felt we had either slipped a century or were on a film set. For a dedicated searcher of purple skirts it was heaven: almost all the women over forty were wearing them, although some definitely had an aniline look. Most of the women wore aprons, but one septuagenarian, tending her cauldron in the background, was bare breasted in the old style. “Is it always like this?” I asked a friendly-looking young man on the next-door trestle table. “Oh no,” he said, with a broad smile. “This is my wedding.”

After we had got over our horror, he introduced me to his friend’s mother, Elvira Leyva, who he said might be able to tell us about the significance of the stripes in her skirts. I had been told the patterns of blue, red and purple in the weave might vary, depending on what village it was made in. “No,” she said, laughing. “The stripes don’t matter, we just choose the design we like.” She owned five
posahuancos
, which she wore in succession, with one kept back for “best.” She could remember her own mother giving yarn to the itinerant dyers, who would go down to the coast, and return a few months later having “painted” the thread. “That doesn’t happen much anymore: most of these are synthetic.” It was a shame, she said, as the more you washed the old
posahuancos
, the better the purple color became.

Elvira had never worn any other clothes, and laughed when I asked whether she got tired of them. “The people who wear it, we wear it forever,” she said. She was sitting next to a woman dressed in black, who was introduced as her
consuegra
, the mother-in-law of her child. They were the same age and had gone to the same school, but one had worn only Spanish clothes, the other only Mixtec. “It’s always been like that in Pinotepa,” Elvira explained. “Some people do wear purple, and some people never do. The Spanish people never do.”

One of the never do’s is her own daughter, who is in her early twenties and has never worn a purple skirt in her life, not even when she was little. “She didn’t want to,” Elvira explained. Did Elvira also feel it was a shame that the custom would end with her generation? She laughed. “Oh no. My daughter is independent. She can do as she likes.” Then she added: “I’m not sad at all. This is just the way life is; things change.”

THE SECRET OF TEKHELET

Sometimes you travel a long way to find something, and yet when you find it, it is closer to home than you think. That’s what happened to me with “Tyrian” purple. I thought I would find it in Tyre, and I found only empty vats and a steep hill built out of seashells—and even the fragment of dyed wool I saw was not purple at all. I then thought I would find it in Mexico, but although I was entranced by watching that transparent stain turning mauve in the sunshine, I knew the Romans had used a different method.

In England I met a dyer called John Edmonds. I contacted him because I had heard he had experimented with two hundred different dye recipes (including woad) for a project at the Chiltern Open Air Museum—and he ended up helping me on my indigo quest. But what really fascinated me were more recent experiments he had done with a quite different kind of blue—a seashell color that was used to make the sacred tassels on the Jewish
tsitsit
shawl. Its story is one of loss and rediscovery—several times over.

Here was the problem. According to the Torah—the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament—God told Moses to tell the Israelites to make “fringes in the borders of their garments [and] put upon the fringe of each corner a thread of blue.”
²⁵
The Talmud, which is the book of Jewish laws, went farther and specified that the blue had to come from a special source. It was vague about exactly what that source should be, although it was emphatic that it should be from a particular kind of sea creature with a shell.

The purpose of the fringe and the shawl are to remind Jewish men of their sacred responsibilities. The twelfth-century sage, Maimonides suggested the blue was “similar to the sea which is similar to the sky which is similar to God’s holy throne.” Another explanation from a modern-day commentator
²⁶
suggests that the white on the
tsitsit
represents logical things, and blue represents mystical things, and only together can they fully remind us of the wonders of the universe. Whatever the symbolism, all these color-coded reminders were forgotten in around the seventh century, at the time of the Muslim conquests. It had probably been the exclusive domain of Jewish dyers to dye these sacred fringes—non-Jews were probably not trusted not to use indigo—and none of them had thought to write the formula down for posterity.

So for 1,300 years the Jews had no blue on their
tsitsit
, or if they did have blue, then it was the wrong one. But then Perkin’s discovery of coal-tar colors began to stir long-forgotten memories.
²⁷
Inspired by the new dyes, a Rabbi Leiner in Poland decided to do some investigations into the old ones.
²⁸
Leiner’s theory was that the “
hillazon
,” mentioned in the Talmud as the source of the
tsitsit
’s proper blue, was a squid, and in the 1880s he was delighted when chemists showed him that it was indeed possible to make a very fine blue from squid sepia—by adding a few iron filings to the brew—and within a few months thousands of Jews were wearing blue sacred threads.

But there was a problem with Leiner’s recipe—a problem that was not discovered until 1913, when a London University student decided to make this the subject of his postgraduate thesis. Isaac Herzog was no ordinary student—he would later become the first Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, and his son Chaim would become its President. And he was fascinated by the problem of purple, especially after sending some of Leiner’s dye to the laboratory, only to find to his amazement that it wasn’t even organic. In fact, the laboratory told him, he was in proud possession of an excellent example of Prussian blue. The squid wasn’t essential at all for the dyeing; the color depended far more on the iron filings.
²⁹

Over the years Jewish scholars experimented with other species. The problem they faced was that however they put the pigment from the shellfish in the vat, everything usually came out purple— and although the Hebrew word
tekhelet
can suggest both violet and blue, they were convinced the historical color veered much more toward the latter. In 1908 a scientist called Paul Friedlaender discovered that imperial purple is chemically very closely related to indigo: no wonder the early Jews had so much trouble telling the two apart.

Then, in the 1980s, a chemist called Otto Elsner noticed something else extraordinary. He observed how dyeing done on a sunny day came out blue—but on a cloudy day it was purple. This seemed to provide part of the answer the Jews had been looking for. Elsner had established that it was indeed possible to get blue from purple by involving a photo-chemical reaction—and his discovery had the additional theological neatness of embracing something holy that was, like the world itself, born of light. But Elsner had used modern chemicals in his experiments, and he and his colleagues were still faced with a more elusive problem: how did the ancients make that pigment into dye? Alkali solutions would do the job efficiently, which was good; but they would also dissolve wool, which was bad. There was evidently a critical step in the manufacturing process missing, but who could have guessed that the mystery would be solved by a gentile with a jam jar and some pickled snacks?

The Israeli researchers contacted John Edmonds after they learned of his experiments with woad, and wanted to know if he had done anything on purple. Edmonds said he would like to try, and a few weeks later a package arrived for him in the post. It contained a small vial of pigment from
Murex trunculus
, and some wool. He was excited by the opportunity to test his theory that if Tyrian purple contains indigo then perhaps, like woad and indigo, it needs to have the oxygen removed from the vat before it can become a dye. And what more convenient ingredient for achieving this than the rotting meat of the mollusk (which would cause the bacteria to putrefy and use up the oxygen)? The Israeli researchers had not sent Edmonds the murex meat in their parcel, “so I went out to the supermarket and bought some pickled cockles—which are similar—and when I got home I washed out the vinegar.”

He heated the pigment and shellfish in a bain-marie, keeping it at an alkali level of pH9. He then left the solution to steep for ten days at 50 degrees Centigrade, during which time it changed from purple to green (and Edmonds’s wife decided she
really
didn’t like this dyeing business because of the smell). The first time he dipped a cloth into the liquor it turned purple. But later he found that if the dissolved greenish liquor was exposed to light, any cloth he put into it turned green and then—in the air—turned blue. He had, he thought, found the recipe for the Jewish holy blue made from a purple vat. The missing ingredient, in addition to sunlight, had been a biological reducing agent—the bacteria in the rotting bodies of the murex shellfish. Today, however, non-purists might choose to use sodium dithionide, better known as Color Run Remover. It does a similar job and is a lot less pungent.

All this happened in November 1996. Professor Zvi Koren, head of Chemical Technologies at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel, and his colleagues have subsequently come to similar conclusions about the way the Jews dyed their
tsitsit
. At a conference on archaeological dyes in Amsterdam in November 2001, Professor Koren showed a slide of people collecting
Murex trunculus
on the rocky coast of Israel. “Here
we
are,” he said, pointing to some excited-looking scientists. “And here are the snails,” he added, pointing to small gray blobs on the rocks. And then finally he pointed to a bearded man sitting on the rocks enjoying the sunshine. “And here is the rabbi, looking over to make sure we don’t eat the murex. Because it is definitely not kosher.”

Like the best jokes, Koren’s was based on truth. In a strange way,
tekhelet
in Jewish tradition might be said to be about playing with the edges of what is allowed. It is literally on the fringe of a garment, and it is metaphorically on the very fringe of what is permitted to Jews. Tyrian purple—or in this case Tyrian blue—is one of the least kosher of colors. Shellfish are as anathema to Jewish menus as pork, so it is curious that one of the most sacred Jewish garments should be made from them.
³⁰

At the same conference, John Edmonds and artist Inge Boesken-Kanold were demonstrating a purple and blue dye vat. The demonstration was taking place in another part of the building— to get there I needed to walk down three floors, walk along the street for 20 meters, go through another door, and then walk up three floors. But I didn’t need directions: I could smell the vat from the moment I reached street level. Even from there I found myself gasping; and by the time I had climbed up to the room itself the stink was almost unbearable. This, I realized, was why Tyre had banished its dyers to a remote corner of town. But as Edmonds and Boesken-Kanold hung their little sample cloths up to dry, I could see why the good people of Tyre had put up with their olfactory suffering. Because there, like little miracles of the dye pot, were examples not only of a vivid purple, as bright as anything Perkin created, but of a sky blue from the same source. There in that smelly room was the legendary Tyrian purple—the symbol of power and greed and luxury that I had chased around the world to find. And next to it was its bluer twin, which had the same constituent elements but with a little sunlight mixed in with them as well, to remind the Jews not to forget the more mystical side of the universe.

Perkin’s extraordinary discovery of modern dyes that day in 1856 had—years later—resulted in rediscoveries of how to make two of the oldest, and most revered, colors in the world. As with so many stories in my historical paintbox, it turns out that the old secrets were not lost after all. They were just waiting for someone to discover them again.

EPILOGUE

The End of the Rainbow

H ow many shades can a walnut be? What is the color of a healthy liver? How can you describe the ideal organic strawberry to a buyer on the other side of the world? What shade do you want your car to be? Or your hair? Or the sapphire in your engagement ring? How can you measure the color of pies? Writing and researching this book have shown me how hard it is to describe color—to explain the gleam of insect blood or the natural luminescence of a piece of precious Chinese green-ware or the ruby-like resonance of a glass of saffron tea. So I decided to end by meeting someone who had made it his business to do just that: work out how to describe the exact shade of a color to somebody halfway across the world.

Lawrence Herbert is sometimes called the Color King. “Or even the Color Magician,” he volunteered, when I met him at the Pantone color palace in a sprawling piece of industrial greenbelt just off the New Jersey Turnpike. Herbert’s mission in life—ever since he took a temporary job at a small and ailing printing company (which produced color charts) in 1956 and bought it out within six years— has been to create an internationally accepted standard of colors. “My dream was that someone should be able to call a supplier in California from their home in Acapulco and say I’d like to buy rose pink paint, or whatever. And that when it arrived it was exactly right.”

In the natural world—where the color of an ochre might depend on the exact place where it was mined, or where an “indigo” dye could be dozens of different shades, depending on the dipping time, the alkalinity and even the sunniness of the day—making colors has traditionally been an imprecise although often highly symbolic activity. But at Pantone, which has grown to be the biggest color-specification company in the world, color is all about precision. Herbert and his colleagues started by dividing the world into fifteen basic colors, including black and white, making up about a thousand shades. He later introduced even more elaborate systems, including colors with evocative names like wood violet, moss tone, sulphur spring and doe. Pantone sells the basic “catalogue” in fan-like books—and if you have one and your contact has one, then you can both know exactly what shade you are talking about. It started off as a service for printers, but the expanded system has proved to have a myriad of uses.