The Ancient Art of Color

What painstaking processes created pigments that lasted millennia?

Pliny the Elder wasn’t all that impressed. He acknowledged the significance and symbolism of the stuff:

It is for this colour that the fasces and axes of Rome make way in the crowd; it is this that asserts the majesty of childhood; it is this that distinguishes the senator from the man of equestrian rank; by persons arrayed in this colour are prayers addressed to propitiate the gods; on every garment it sheds a lustre, and in the triumphal vestment it is to be seen mingled with gold.

But he ultimately didn’t get the “frantic passion for purple” in ancient Rome, especially given its disgusting origins:

Why it is that such a high value has been set upon the produce of this shell-fish, seeing that while in the dye the smell of it is offensive, and the color itself is harsh, of a greenish hue, and strongly resembling that of the sea when in a tempestuous state?

Pliny was talking about Tyrian purple, the color that instantly signified to any Roman that its wearer was an important person. Purple became shorthand for significance; Marcus Aurelius advised his readers to avoid arrogance by telling them to beware of being “dyed in purple.” The Romans had laws governing who could wear it: only high magistrates, members of the royal family (who were “born to the purple”), and generals enjoying a triumph were allowed to wear the color.

Purple was symbolic because it was so expensive. The dye came from several types of sea snails, most notably the murex, a native of the eastern Mediterranean (near Tyre, a Phoenician trading hub), which today has the scientific name Bolinus brandaris.

Illustration of a murex snail, late 1600s (public domain)

The path from snail to dye was not a pretty one. Pliny tells us that

In the spring season they unite in large bodies, and by rubbing against each other, produce a viscous spittle, from which a kind of wax is formed…. This secretion consists of a tiny drop contained in a white vein, from which the precious liquid for dyeing is distilled… It is a great point to take the fish alive; for when it dies, it spits out this juice. From the larger ones it is extracted after taking off the shell; but the small fish are crushed alive, together with the shells, upon which they eject this secretion.

After the snails were crushed, their goo was cooked for a week until it became a usable dye. The process was disgusting — the smell was so pungent that the workshops were far from the center of town — and wasteful. One gram of dye required the death of up to 10,000 snails. The resulting purple dye was so expensive that even the wealthiest Romans tended only to dye the fringes of their garments.

Tyrian purple was so important that ancient people invented a myth to explain its origins. The Phoenician god Melqart (or in some tellings, Hercules) discovered the stuff after he took his dog for a walk on the beach. The dog snacked on some snails, came back with a purple snout, and an industry was born.

Rubens’ painting of Hercules, his dog, and a snail (public domain)

There aren’t a lot of examples of Tyrian purple that remain from ancient times. Since it was rare to begin with and was used to dye fragile textiles, we don’t quite know what it looked like. This mosaic of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his retinue tries to capture it:

Ввласенко, CC 3.0

Tyrian purple was so intertwined with the legacy of Rome’s greatness that Charlemagne — who, 300 years after the fall of western Rome, tried to reclaim the title of Roman Emperor — commissioned his burial shroud in Tyrian purple imported from Byzantium:

Public domain

Neither of these examples likely captures the richness of the original color. In the medieval period, the Byzantines generally kept the color to themselves, restricting its use to the clothing of royals and bishops or occasionally using it to stain the parchment of holy books. The purple industry took its toll on the snail population — archaeologists have found garbage dumps full of shells, and the shells get smaller in the upper layers, indicating that dyemakers were killing more and more juveniles to make their dye.

How many snails gave their lives for this single page from a Bible?

Public domain

After the Ottomans took Constantinople, the use of Tyrian purple died out. Popes and cardinals changed their vestments from purple to red, and the color disappeared from use. The secrets of its production weren’t rediscovered until the 21st century, and it may disappear again — the snails that carry the dye are losing their habitats.

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The story of Tyrian purple demonstrates that color in the ancient world was an extravagance. You probably don’t think much about where the colors in your life come from (I certainly don’t). You select a red shirt or a blue pair of pants without much sense of how they got that way. But in the ancient and medieval world, vivid color was often achieved through painstaking effort and monumental expense. To liven up your home or body with a splash of color took some doing.

Another color that became famous long before the Phoenicians started to crush and cook snails was “Egyptian blue,” which is at least 5,000 years old. The color is made from two of Egypt’s most abundant resources — sand and natron, a salty mixture found in dried lake beds — mixed with copper and calcium carbonate and heated to very high temperatures. Nobody knows its exact origins, but the color became one of the hallmarks of Egyptian art. The color, especially when part of a pottery glaze, is still stunning after thousands of years.

While many ancient colors are faded or gone entirely, washed away by centuries of weathering, Egyptian blue still packs a punch. This sphinx of Amenhotep III is almost 3,500 years old:

The Met

This board game (also from the time of Amenhotep III) seems ready to play:

Public domain

And this hippo is coming up on its 4,000th birthday:

The Met

The pigment is even vivid outside of human visual abilities. Egyptian blue luminesces in the infrared spectrum, which means that these objects are still giving off light after thousands of years, even though you and I can’t perceive it.

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The Egyptians weren’t the only ancient civilization to have a signature shade of blue. The Mayans also devised a blue pigment that has stood the test of time. They created it by grinding up the leaves of an indigo plant and mixing them with a particular type of clay.

Maya blue was used everywhere — and I mean everywhere. Since the color was associated with the rain god Chaak, even human-sacrifice victims were painted blue before being laid on an altar and having their hearts cut out during times of drought.

More often, though, it shows up in the stunning art of the Mayan people. Since the pigment is remarkably durable — even modern solvents can’t remove it — it has outlasted the other colors on many Mayan objects.

It’s a softer, more sky-blue pigment than the Egyptian version, as you can see on this 1,200 year old whistle:

The Met

And this costumed figurine:

The Met

The color continued to be used for a while after Spanish colonists conquered the Yucatan. It shows up in the Florentine Codex, created in the mid-1500s:

Wikimedia Commons

And the work of artists like Baltasar de Echave Ibia, who used the blue pigment liberally in his art:

Public domain

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Our final shade ties together one of the world’s great ancient dynasties and cutting-edge modern science. Chinese artists developed their own pigments, creating the colors that we today call Han purple and Han blue, though they were created before the Han Dynasty took power. Both were made in a way similar to Egyptian blue — artists melted sand, barium, and copper together at high temperatures. In fact, because the processes are so similar, some historians have speculated that they are evidence of the earliest known cross-cultural communication between China and the West.

There’s not a lot of these pigments left on ancient works of art, at least as far as I could find. The famous Qin Dynasty terracotta warriors have traces of this blue pigment on them, though it’s mostly weathered away now.

Shankar S (CC 2.0)

But this mural of people playing a board game gives a sense of the rich color that used to decorate many Han-era artifacts:

Public domain

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Han purple is its use in modern physics. I won’t pretend to understand the science here, but something about the mineral structure of the pigment causes weird things to happen when it’s at very low temperatures and exposed to magnetic waves. I’ll let science writer Esther Inglis-Arkell try to explain it to you:

Something unusual happens as the temperature drops and as a magnetic field is applied, although the temperature has to drop pretty far, going down to between one and three degrees Kelvin, and the magnetic field has to be about 800,000 times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. The results are worth it — the electrons seem to merge, taking on one spin, and acting as one electron.

That sounds like an ordinary superconductor, you say. Then you’re as foolish as a Phoenician in sub-par purple! Han purple still has a trick up its sleeve. Drop the temperature some more and something happens to the magnetic wave traveling through the substance. At higher temperatures, it propagates like a regular wave, traveling in three dimensions. Get under one degree Kelvin, and it no longer has a vertical component. It propagates in two dimensions only.

While the Chinese artisans who produced these pigments likely had no idea that they were creating a substance that “revealed puzzling critical phenomena at the quantum phase transition (QPT) caused by an applied magnetic field,” the strange substance they cooked up is still a curiosity for modern science.

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These ancient pigments can still stun us across the centuries. I’ve certainly had the experience of moving through a museum, drowsily looking at the faded gray and white art, and then being shaken awake by a vivid flash of Egyptian blue. These pigments must have done something similar for the ancient artists who used them — otherwise, why would they have sunk such immense amounts of time and money into producing them?

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