Speaker 1: Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2: This week on Unearthed, we talked about Anatolia's oldest known
Speaker 2: indigo dyed textile, and that reminded me that once we
Speaker 2: did an entire episode about the history of the color blue,
Speaker 2: which of course talked about indigo as a die. This
Speaker 2: one is a live show that we did at the
Speaker 2: National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C. In September
Speaker 2: of twenty nineteen, and this episode came out on October sixteenth.
Speaker 1: Twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
Speaker 2: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to a podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we are sharing our
Speaker 2: live show from the National Gallery of Art Washington, which
Speaker 2: we did in September as part of their MGA Nights programming.
Speaker 2: And we actually did this show twice over the course
Speaker 2: of the evening so that more people who attended that event,
Speaker 2: which is very popular, could get in and see it.
Speaker 2: And so today we are sharing the first of those two.
Speaker 2: We're not going to share the second one because it
Speaker 2: would effectively be the exact same show.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson.
Speaker 2: And I'm Holly Frye. Blue is my favorite color, and
Speaker 2: that makes me not special. Blue is the most popular
Speaker 2: color and a lot of the world. For example, there
Speaker 2: was a survey that was conducted in twenty fifteen that
Speaker 2: polled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China,
Speaker 2: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, and in all
Speaker 2: of those places, blue was the most popular color by
Speaker 2: a significant margin. So I am not alone in the
Speaker 2: world in my love of blue. It can also feel
Speaker 2: like we're really surrounded by blue all the time, because
Speaker 2: we have the blue sky and the reflection of the
Speaker 2: sky in the water, and then things like blue jens,
Speaker 2: and then all the blue stuff that people buy because
Speaker 2: it's everyone's favorite color. And yet a lot of ancient
Speaker 2: languages did not have a word for blue at all.
Speaker 2: Some languages still don't. For a lot of human history,
Speaker 2: the process of making blue dyes and paints has been
Speaker 2: pretty prohibitively expensive and complicated if people knew how to
Speaker 2: do it at all. So blue used to be really rare.
Speaker 2: And today we're going to talk about blues progression from
Speaker 2: something that there wasn't even a name for because it
Speaker 2: was so rare to something that seems really ubiquitous. And
Speaker 2: like Tracy just said, there were a lot of ancient
Speaker 2: languages that just had no word for blue whatsoever. And
Speaker 2: this is something that folks started figuring out thanks to
Speaker 2: William Ewart Gladstone, who spent four terms as Prime Minister
Speaker 2: of the United Kingdom between eighteen sixty eight and eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, but he had also studied classics at Oxford,
Speaker 2: and ten years before he became Prime minister, he published
Speaker 2: a six hundred plus page book that was called Study
Speaker 2: on Homer and the Homeric Age, and it had a
Speaker 2: whole section in it titled Homer's Perceptions and.
Speaker 1: Use of Color.
Speaker 2: I really like that one of the jobs that you
Speaker 2: can have had before being Prime minister as classicist.
Speaker 1: That seems cool.
Speaker 2: I feel like if we had more of that and
Speaker 2: less of other things, you'd be in great shape. So
Speaker 2: in this section of the book, Gladstone outlined what he
Speaker 2: interpreted as signs of immaturity. That was one of his
Speaker 2: words for it, in Homer's ability to differentiate color. And
Speaker 2: here is what he said. One the paucity of his colors, two,
Speaker 2: the use of the same word to denote not only
Speaker 2: different hues or tints of the same color, but colors which,
Speaker 2: according to us, are essentially different. Three the description of
Speaker 2: the same object under epithets of color fundamentally disagreeing with
Speaker 2: one another, for the vast predominance of the most crude
Speaker 2: and elemental forms of color black and white over every other,
Speaker 2: and the decided tendency to treat other colors is simply
Speaker 2: intermediates between those two extremes.
Speaker 1: Five.
Speaker 2: The slight use of color and Homer as compared with
Speaker 2: other elements of beauty for the purposes of poetic effect,
Speaker 2: and its absence in certain cases we might confidently expect it.
Speaker 2: So in other words, Homer's use of color descriptors seemed
Speaker 2: kind of contradictory and frankly just haphazard. Homer's works mostly
Speaker 2: referred to things as black or white, and sometimes referred
Speaker 2: to the same object using different color descriptors at different times,
Speaker 2: or he would describe things with strange colors, like he
Speaker 2: described both blood and a rainbow with a word that
Speaker 2: translates essentially as violet, or calling the sea wine dark,
Speaker 2: which I know maybe he got criticized for, but it
Speaker 2: sounds very poetic to me, Homer's writing also seems to
Speaker 2: have had no word that specifically meant blue. And side note,
Speaker 2: there is actually a lot of debate as well about
Speaker 2: whether all of the writing that is attributed to Homer
Speaker 2: now was really the wor one person, or if there
Speaker 2: are multiple people involved that all kind of fell into
Speaker 2: this umbrella.
Speaker 1: But that is a whole different.
Speaker 2: Story and way outside the scope of what we're talking
Speaker 2: about tonight.
Speaker 1: But just keep that in mind as we talk about
Speaker 1: Homer's work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, regardless of whether Homer was one person or
Speaker 2: many people. This whole conversation led to some discussion about
Speaker 2: whether people in the Homeric age were color blind or
Speaker 2: otherwise we're perceiving color color differently than cited people in
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century when Gladstone was writing, and we'll get
Speaker 2: back to that idea. This also led to further study
Speaker 2: about how ancient writers were describing and naming colors, and
Speaker 2: it quickly became clear that other ancient writings also had
Speaker 2: odd uses of color, including not having a word for
Speaker 2: the color blue. Researchers studied these language patterns for decades,
Speaker 2: and then in nineteen sixty nine, Brent Berlin and Paul
Speaker 2: Key published basic color Terms, their universality and evolution, and
Speaker 2: basic color terms are essentially single words that can be
Speaker 2: applied to a wide range of objects and are understood
Speaker 2: by most native speakers of a given language. So in English,
Speaker 2: for example, there are all kinds of words describing different
Speaker 2: shades and hues, but there are actually only eleven basic
Speaker 2: color terms, and those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink,
Speaker 2: and thank goodness, purple. One of the important things about
Speaker 2: basic color terms is that there's an agreed on shade
Speaker 2: that they are describing. So even though violet was one
Speaker 2: of the words that Homer was using, the fact that
Speaker 2: it was sort of being applied to seemingly random objects
Speaker 2: would mean that that wasn't really functioning as a basic
Speaker 2: color word or a basic color term. All the languages
Speaker 2: that Berlin in k studied had a minimum of two
Speaker 2: basic color terms black and white, sometimes described as light
Speaker 2: and dark, and here is something that I think it's
Speaker 2: really cool. And languages that had three basic color terms,
Speaker 2: the third one was red, and languages with four the
Speaker 2: fourth one was either yellow or green, and then the
Speaker 2: other of those was the fifth one. In languages that
Speaker 2: had five it's only when a language had six basic
Speaker 2: color terms that it had a color term for blue,
Speaker 2: and then from there the pattern didn't hold up much
Speaker 2: Farther There was brown as the seventh color, and then
Speaker 2: colors beyond that just followed in no particular order. And
Speaker 2: this nineteen sixty nine work had studied a relatively small
Speaker 2: group of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and
Speaker 2: most of them lived in industrial areas, and this naturally
Speaker 2: led to a lot of discussion and questions about whether
Speaker 2: these results could really be considered universal. So in the
Speaker 2: late nineteen seventies, Berlin and k started working on their
Speaker 2: World Color Survey, which asked more than twenty five hundred
Speaker 2: native speakers of unwritten languages around the world to identify
Speaker 2: various colors. Berlin and k published a monograph on this
Speaker 2: in July of two thousand and nine, and they reported
Speaker 2: that more than eighty percent of the world's languages followed
Speaker 2: this pattern of black and white and then and then
Speaker 2: yellow or green, and then the other one of those,
Speaker 2: and then blue. And these ancient languages without a word
Speaker 2: for blue seems to follow these same patterns. A lot
Speaker 2: of them have the black, white, and red and that's
Speaker 2: it sounds like my wedding, not at all like Game
Speaker 2: of Thrones, and way before that. There has been a
Speaker 2: lot of research since then into why this pattern actually
Speaker 2: exists and how to interpret all of this information. And
Speaker 2: there's also been research into whether that pattern is evidence
Speaker 2: that ancient people saw fewer colors, like William Ewert Gladstone suggested,
Speaker 2: as well as whether people living today whose languages have
Speaker 2: fewer color terms are actually perceiving fewer colors or if
Speaker 2: they're perceiving them differently. So a lot of that research
Speaker 2: is really contradictory and inconclusive. There are lots of questions
Speaker 2: that we don't have one hundred percent agreed upon answers
Speaker 2: to yet, like are their physiological differences in the eyes
Speaker 2: or brains of people who speak languages that include different
Speaker 2: numbers of basic color terms. There's some research that suggests yes,
Speaker 2: and other research that suggests to know if there are
Speaker 2: physiological differences, are those differences a result of the language
Speaker 2: differences or is it the other way around? How much
Speaker 2: of this is physiological, how much is socially constructed? Are
Speaker 2: colors as sighted people perceive them universal or are they relative?
Speaker 2: And it might seem a little bit weird that there
Speaker 2: are so many unanswered questions about colors, because it's really
Speaker 2: easy to imagine that colors are unchanging physical traits.
Speaker 1: I know what purple looks like. It's purple. But it's true.
Speaker 2: There's an element of physics to all of this. Isaac
Speaker 2: Newton started working with the visible spectrum of light in
Speaker 2: the sixteen sixties, and he used a prism to refract
Speaker 2: sunlight into a spectrum that he described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
Speaker 2: and violet. But before this, societies around the world had
Speaker 2: their own ideas about what light was made of and
Speaker 2: where colors came from, and even Newton's work, which became
Speaker 2: the foundation of how we all talk about color and light,
Speaker 2: was influenced by his own preconceived ideas. For example, the
Speaker 2: reason that there is an indigo in his list is
Speaker 2: because he just thought there needed to be seven colors. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's seven days of the week, seven notes at a musical scale.
Speaker 2: Seven's like an auspicious number. Clearly there have to be
Speaker 2: seven colors. So, in other words, colors just aren't static,
Speaker 2: unchanging traits that exist all by themselves. Our understanding of
Speaker 2: colors is socially constructed, and the way people describe the
Speaker 2: colors around them can vary dramatically based on language and culture.
Speaker 2: Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings, and those meetings
Speaker 2: change and evolve over time in response to all kinds
Speaker 2: of factors, including what pigments are available, how expensive those
Speaker 2: pigments are, whether there were laws about how they could
Speaker 2: be used, and what's in fashion at the moment. So
Speaker 2: when we look back into colors in the past, this
Speaker 2: can of course get really complicated. An ancient culture may
Speaker 2: have had no word for blue, and if they did,
Speaker 2: it might have been used for a different range of
Speaker 2: shades that an English speaker living today might imagine. And
Speaker 2: even if we have examples of that culture's physical objects
Speaker 2: like jewelry or textiles or works of art, their colors
Speaker 2: can change over time thanks to things like fading and
Speaker 2: oxidation and just dirt getting on them. And exactly how
Speaker 2: they fade and shift can really vary depending on what
Speaker 2: an object is made of, what pigment was used to
Speaker 2: color it, the binders that were used with those pigments,
Speaker 2: how it was handled since then, and what pollutants have
Speaker 2: been in the air, and on and on. There's so
Speaker 2: many factors.
Speaker 1: On top of all of.
Speaker 2: That, when we look at a work of art, especially
Speaker 2: a work of art that was made long ago in
Speaker 2: the past, we are almost certainly seeing it under totally
Speaker 2: different lighting conditions than the artists who than the artists
Speaker 2: who created had when they were making it. And one
Speaker 2: of the hypotheses for why so many ancient languages did
Speaker 2: not have a word for blue is that they just
Speaker 2: didn't need one. Most ancient cultures did not have a
Speaker 2: way to make blue pigment. And while there is blue
Speaker 2: in nature, of course, thanks to things like flowers and
Speaker 2: berries and butterflies and birds and the sky, it's not
Speaker 2: nearly as common as other colors are. And we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about how people worked out a way to
Speaker 2: make their own blue. After we first pause for what
Speaker 2: will be a little sponsor break, we're.
Speaker 1: Going to talk a bit about pains and pigments.
Speaker 2: If you look at some paleolithic rock art and cave art,
Speaker 2: you will notice a pretty similar use of color no
Speaker 2: matter where in the world you're looking, because the palette
Speaker 2: tends to be really earthy. There's lots of brown and
Speaker 2: yellow and red and black, and there are naturally occurring
Speaker 2: pigments that produce these colors and are pretty abundant in
Speaker 2: a lot of the world, like ochre, which is made
Speaker 2: from iron oxide and various earthy materials. Different cultures have
Speaker 2: had their own ceremonial and some methods of preparing and
Speaker 2: using these pigments, but basically you can really just grind
Speaker 2: up some rocks and put water in there and paint
Speaker 2: with it. Do you ever have a teacher like an
Speaker 2: our teacher, Have you do that? I think so probably
Speaker 2: not a lot. Uh, you can't really do that with
Speaker 2: blue though. It turns out there are not many blue minerals,
Speaker 2: and the ones that do exist typically cannot just be
Speaker 2: crushed and mixed with water like you could do with ochre.
Speaker 2: Mashing up blueberries or blue flowers might seem like a
Speaker 2: great idea, and you could try to use that.
Speaker 1: And paint with it, but it's actually.
Speaker 2: Usually going to turn out kind of brownish or gray,
Speaker 2: and often it's also going to fade really quickly, so
Speaker 2: you're going to lose that blue color you were chasing.
Speaker 2: And ancient peoples could carve objects out of blue stones
Speaker 2: or minerals or shells, or make decorative objects with feathers,
Speaker 2: but that was about it. Even substances like lapis lazulie,
Speaker 2: which were eventually made into pigments, were first used just
Speaker 2: primarily to make carvings and inlays, rather than actually trying
Speaker 2: to use them as dyes or paints. So that changed
Speaker 2: with the development of the first synthetic pigment, which happened
Speaker 2: by a about thirty one hundred BCE that came to
Speaker 2: be known as Egyptian blue, and according to Roman writer Vitruvius,
Speaker 2: it was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is
Speaker 2: a naturally occurring sodium carbonate compound. Modern experiments have pinpointed
Speaker 2: the likely ingredients as silica, copper, and calcium. Usually the
Speaker 2: silica probably came from sand and the calcium came from limestone,
Speaker 2: although it was also possible for sand to include calcite
Speaker 2: or flex of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to
Speaker 2: be mixed with a small amount of alkali and then
Speaker 2: be heated to between eight hundred and fifteen one thousand
Speaker 2: degrees celsius. And when we were running through this script
Speaker 2: earlier today, I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot?
Speaker 2: And I was in my hotel room as we were
Speaker 2: getting ready confirming it with like five different sources.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was that hot, which just seems like it
Speaker 1: would all be on fire to me. But that's why
Speaker 1: I'm not a scientist.
Speaker 2: We don't really know who worked out recipe or what
Speaker 2: their process was for figuring it out.
Speaker 1: We don't know if it was an accidental.
Speaker 2: Discovery or if it was the result of a more
Speaker 2: methodical process to try to get to this final result.
Speaker 2: It may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly
Speaker 2: in Mesopotamia. Yeah, it could have been anywhere on a
Speaker 2: spectrum between like the kids through some sand in the kiln.
Speaker 1: To I'm going to figure this out, like no idea.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of room.
Speaker 2: Egyptian blue was used in Egyptian art from its discovery
Speaker 2: until the end of the Roman Era, and there is
Speaker 2: still a lot of artwork that exists today that was
Speaker 2: made with it. The blue coloring isn't necessarily visible on
Speaker 2: all of it, though. In two thousand and nine, it
Speaker 2: was discovered that Egyptian blue has a near infrared luminescence
Speaker 2: that can help researchers find traces of it that aren't
Speaker 2: visible to the naked eye anymore. So. About that same time,
Speaker 2: conservation scientists used that discovery to confirm that there are
Speaker 2: traces of Egyptian blue on the Parthenon marbles, and we
Speaker 2: have artwork where we can see this pigment that is
Speaker 2: at least three thousand years old, and the pigment itself
Speaker 2: has held up. The binders that have been used with
Speaker 2: it have not always fared as well, though, For example,
Speaker 2: pieces that used a lot of gum arabic as a
Speaker 2: binder have tended to blacken or turn green over time.
Speaker 2: The Egyptian term for Egyptian blue translates to artificial lapis lazilie,
Speaker 2: and the next pigment we're going to talk about is ultramarine,
Speaker 2: which was made out.
Speaker 1: Of lapis lazolie.
Speaker 2: Lapis lazilie is a metamorphic rock that's found primarily in
Speaker 2: one place in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that's the premier
Speaker 2: mountains in Central Asia. People in what's now Afghanistan were
Speaker 2: mining lapis as early as seven thousand BCE, and by
Speaker 2: thirty five hundred BCE was being carried thousands of miles
Speaker 2: along trade routes through Asia and Europe and Africa. And
Speaker 2: as we said earlier, the first uses of lapis lazolie
Speaker 2: were mostly to make carved objects in inlays. Although lapis
Speaker 2: could be crushed into powder and used as a pigment,
Speaker 2: that pigment was not very pure because lapis is made
Speaker 2: up of a mixture of different minerals, and these minerals,
Speaker 2: depending on what their concentrations were, would all affect the
Speaker 2: final color. So if there were impurities present and again
Speaker 2: those concentrations, different preparations could look completely different from one another,
Speaker 2: and then they would also look completely different. Over time,
Speaker 2: people still tried it, though there is evidence of lapis
Speaker 2: being used as a paint in the Karnak Temple complex
Speaker 2: in Egypt. By about the sixth century, though, people had
Speaker 2: worked out how to purify lapis lasalie into a pure
Speaker 2: blue pigment now known as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue,
Speaker 2: we do have the recipe for this. One artist and
Speaker 2: writer Tanino Chanini, who lived between about thirteen seventy and
Speaker 2: fourteen forty, wrote the process down in a lot of detail.
Speaker 2: And you may have heard that ultramarine was worth more
Speaker 2: than gold and Chininocinini's method really illustrates why it wasn't
Speaker 2: just because lapis lasilie was only being mind in one
Speaker 2: area of Afghanistan at the time. The process was also
Speaker 2: long and really complicated, and it yield a very small
Speaker 2: amount of usable pigment. So here's how he described it
Speaker 2: in his book of art. Quote, First, take some lap
Speaker 2: as lazily, and if you would know how to distinguish
Speaker 2: the best stones, take those which contain most of the
Speaker 2: blue color. So it is for it is mixed with
Speaker 2: what is like ashes. That which contains least of this
Speaker 2: ash pigment is best. But be careful that you do
Speaker 2: not mistake it for azuo deela magna, which is beautiful
Speaker 2: to the eye as enamel. Azurodela magna is as you rite,
Speaker 2: which is copper carbonate carbonate material. It was being used
Speaker 2: to make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance,
Speaker 2: although it was hard to mine and it was also
Speaker 2: tricky to work with, but it was cheaper than ultramarine,
Speaker 2: although it was not as stable or vibrant as a pigment.
Speaker 2: So going back to the recipe, once you've got your
Speaker 2: lap as lassily, you pound it in a bronze mortar
Speaker 2: covered so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You
Speaker 2: grind it and you strain it, and you sift it,
Speaker 2: and you pound it. Quote again as much as is required.
Speaker 2: But bear in mind that though the more you grind,
Speaker 2: the more finely powdered the A zero will be, yet
Speaker 2: it will not be so beautiful and rich and deep
Speaker 2: in color. And all of this pounding and grinding and
Speaker 2: straining and sifting was difficult because lapis lasoli is physically
Speaker 2: hard to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning.
Speaker 2: He went on to write, Quote, when the powder is prepared,
Speaker 2: procure from the druggist six ounces of resin of the pine,
Speaker 2: three ounces of mastic, and three ounces of new wax
Speaker 2: to each pound of lapis lasili. Put all these ingredients
Speaker 2: into a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take
Speaker 2: a piece of white linen and strain these things into
Speaker 2: a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder
Speaker 2: of lapis laslie. Mix it all well together into a paste,
Speaker 2: and that you may be able to handle the paste.
Speaker 2: Take linseed oil, and keep your hands always well anointed
Speaker 2: with this oil. This pae must be kept at least
Speaker 2: three days and three nights, kneeding it a little every day.
Speaker 2: And remember that you may keep it for fifteen days
Speaker 2: or a month, or as long as you please. I
Speaker 2: like how it's like three days, but like forever's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's totally fine. Also, it's not lap as lasli yet,
Speaker 2: or it's not ultramarine yet. You still need to extract
Speaker 2: the pigment from the pace that you just made and
Speaker 2: left from between three days and forever. You do this
Speaker 2: by putting the pace in a glazed basin, quote with
Speaker 2: a porringer ful of lie moderately warm, and then you
Speaker 2: work that with two rounded wooden sticks. So he describes
Speaker 2: this quote. With these two sticks, one in each hand,
Speaker 2: turn and squeeze and knead the paste thoroughly, exactly in
Speaker 2: the manner that you would need bread. Now I need
Speaker 2: to take a minute. I've never used sticks to need bread.
Speaker 1: I picture you so much, just poking at It's like.
Speaker 2: In a bread machine. It's a paddle like that. Uh okay,
Speaker 2: so sticks as you and knee bread. When you see
Speaker 2: that the lye is thoroughly blue, pour it, uh, pour
Speaker 2: it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of
Speaker 2: fresh lie, pour it over the paste, and work it
Speaker 2: with the sticks as before. When this lie is very blue,
Speaker 2: pour it into another glazed basin and continue to do
Speaker 2: so for several days until the paste no longer tinges
Speaker 2: the lye. Then throw it away, for it is good
Speaker 2: for nothing. Hey, guess what, You still don't have ultramarine yet.
Speaker 2: The substance in each of these basins will be a
Speaker 2: different shade of blue depending on when in the process
Speaker 2: you filled it, and you need to combine them together
Speaker 2: based on how many shades of ultramarine you are trying
Speaker 2: to make. You have to be careful when you're doing this.
Speaker 2: The basins that were filled first are the best quality,
Speaker 2: and quote the last two extracts are worse than ashes.
Speaker 2: May your eyes therefore be experienced so as not to
Speaker 2: spoil the good as you're by mixing it with the bad,
Speaker 2: and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry.
Speaker 2: So from there, Tanini offers some advice about what to
Speaker 2: do if none of your ultramarine has the beautiful deep
Speaker 2: color that you're expecting, and essentially that's mixing it with
Speaker 2: a little bit of crimson dye and allowing that all
Speaker 2: to dry again. Then once you have your finished ultramarine,
Speaker 2: we get to the part of this that is the
Speaker 2: unexpected sexism moment of the show quote, put it into
Speaker 2: a skinner purse, and rejoice in it, for it is
Speaker 2: good and perfect. And bear in mind that it is
Speaker 2: a rare gift to know how to make it well.
Speaker 2: And you must know that it is rather the art
Speaker 2: of maidens than of men to make it, because they
Speaker 2: remain continually in the house and are more patient and
Speaker 2: their hands more delicate. But beware of old women. I'm
Speaker 2: just out here ruining your Acca marine. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: think he'd be cool with me making a Socco marine
Speaker 2: or ultramarine either. Ultramarine is beautiful and expensive and rare,
Speaker 2: so during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was
Speaker 2: mostly used by the most skilled, respected artists and artisans.
Speaker 2: Some artists would try to make it stretch by saving
Speaker 2: their ultramarine for their last final touches on whatever work
Speaker 2: they were making, and others used ultramarine only on subjects
Speaker 2: that seemed worthy of it. And this is when blue
Speaker 2: started to take on a symbolic meaning, such as the
Speaker 2: color of the Virgin Mary's clothing. And you can also
Speaker 2: see an example of this here in the National Gallery
Speaker 2: of Art in Raphael's the album Madonna, which was created
Speaker 2: in about fifteen ten. That is on view in gallery
Speaker 2: twenty of the main floor of the West Building, that
Speaker 2: is the other building from where we are tonight. That
Speaker 2: is a very good reason for you to come back
Speaker 2: to this amazing place. Yeah, don't try to go over
Speaker 2: there right now. That building is closed.
Speaker 1: Get in all the trouble.
Speaker 2: Some artists, though dated, neither of these things, to try
Speaker 2: to conserve it or make it stretch. An example is
Speaker 2: Johannis Permir who just spent enormous amounts of money on
Speaker 2: ultramarine and used an extent simply everywhere. The vermiers are
Speaker 2: in Gallery fifty A of the West Building also still
Speaker 2: the other building spectacular.
Speaker 1: They are beautu I get the vapors over seat. You
Speaker 1: can see them on the internet.
Speaker 2: Also, thanks to its colossal expense and rarity, people were
Speaker 2: really eager for some kind of substitute for ultramarine. It
Speaker 2: needed to be equally good quality, but also cheaper and
Speaker 2: easier to get. In eighteen twenty four, the French Society
Speaker 2: for the Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize of
Speaker 2: six thousand francs to whoever figured out an industrial process
Speaker 2: to make synthetic ultramarine and it also had to cost
Speaker 2: less than three hundred francs a kilogram, and there were
Speaker 2: two competing claims on this prize, which was ultimately awarded
Speaker 2: to Jean Baptiste Guimet in eighteen twenty eight. And that
Speaker 2: is made from cowlin, sodium carbonate, bitumen and sulfur, prepared
Speaker 2: and heated in a furnace or kiln. So once there
Speaker 2: was this widely available, much less expensive blue pigment, the
Speaker 2: color blue became way more common in artwork and for
Speaker 2: more mundane topics a lot of the time. By the
Speaker 2: start of the Impressionist movement, most painters were working in
Speaker 2: synthetic ultramarine rather than made from lapis lazuli, And then
Speaker 2: we get all those beautiful monaise that are all full
Speaker 2: of blue everywhere. To be clear, ultramarine was not the
Speaker 2: only blue pigment that was in use at this point.
Speaker 2: Cobalt blue was introduced in eighteen oh two and cerulean
Speaker 2: blue in the eighteen sixties. Prussian blue had been developed
Speaker 2: back at the start of the seventeen hundreds, quite by accident.
Speaker 2: There is some fuzziness as to the details about this,
Speaker 2: but the conventional story is that an alchemist named Johann
Speaker 2: Kanrad Dipple was working with potash and animal blood, and
Speaker 2: Johann Jakub Diesbach was a dye maker who used podash
Speaker 2: as part of making a red dye, and Deezbach ran
Speaker 2: out and he either bought or borrowed some from Dipple,
Speaker 2: and it was the podash that had been adulterated with
Speaker 2: animal blood. And because of this, instead of making the
Speaker 2: red dye that he was expecting, Diesbach wound up.
Speaker 1: The vivid blue.
Speaker 2: I like to imagine that he was like, he won't
Speaker 2: notice if I just take some of it.
Speaker 1: We'll give it. Why is this blue now?
Speaker 2: Tipple used his knowledge of chemistry to work out how
Speaker 2: to replicate these box results, and then another man, Johann
Speaker 2: Leonard Frisch, also claims to have invented this in a
Speaker 2: letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in seventeen fifteen. Although these
Speaker 2: men tried to keep their recipe a secret so they
Speaker 2: could cash in on the incredibly lucrative blue pigment trade,
Speaker 2: John Woodward published a method of making it in seventeen
Speaker 2: twenty four, so anybody could make as much as they wanted,
Speaker 2: and the development of Prussian blue also sometimes called Berlin Blue,
Speaker 2: affected the use of blue in artwork much the way
Speaker 2: that synthetic ultramarine did. For example, it led to a
Speaker 2: whole style of woodblock prints in Japan called ai zurie.
Speaker 2: Those were printed mostly or entirely in blue, and these
Speaker 2: prints made use of Prussian blue as well as indigo
Speaker 2: and other blue pigments. And a particularly famous example is
Speaker 2: Katushiko's Hoku sais thirty six views of Mount Fuji that
Speaker 2: includes the Great Wave of Kanagawa, and the first prints
Speaker 2: of this series we're all in blue, and blue is
Speaker 2: really prominent in the rest of them that are not
Speaker 2: those first ones that are one hundred percent blue. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I love that whole series. And hey, we just mentioned indigo,
Speaker 2: which means that's a good segue into talking about the
Speaker 2: mysteries of blue dyes, which are going to do after
Speaker 2: another quick break. In a lot of the world, the
Speaker 2: oldest surviving examples of dyed textiles are dyed red, but
Speaker 2: blue dye has been around for a pretty long time
Speaker 2: as well. One example is to kell It, which is repent,
Speaker 2: which is mentioned repeatedly in Jewish scripture and was in
Speaker 2: use at least thirty five hundred years ago. Knowledge of
Speaker 2: how to make it was lost some time after the
Speaker 2: Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today its
Speaker 2: sources believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
Speaker 2: Other blue dyes are even older. In twenty sixteen, researchers
Speaker 2: announced that they had dated a piece of cotton textile
Speaker 2: found in Juaca, Peru, and found that it was sixty
Speaker 2: two hundred years old. It had been dyed with indigo,
Speaker 2: making it the oldest known use of indigo dye and
Speaker 2: one of the oldest surviving cotton textiles. And there were
Speaker 2: other blue dyes in the Americas as well. For example,
Speaker 2: there is evidence that the Navajo Nation had a natively
Speaker 2: produced blue plant dye, which was eventually replaced with indigo
Speaker 2: that was introduced from further south in what is now Mexico.
Speaker 1: So today indigo.
Speaker 2: Is more often associated with what's now India, but the
Speaker 2: plant genus Indigofera includes hundreds of flowering plants that live
Speaker 2: in tropical and subtropical areas all around the world, and
Speaker 2: a lot of them can and have been used to
Speaker 2: make purple and blue dyes. Indigo has been used to
Speaker 2: make paints as well. For example, Maya blue was used
Speaker 2: as a paint in pre colonial meso America, and that
Speaker 2: was made from indigo and a clay called paligor skite
Speaker 2: and at least one other ingredient who's or at least
Speaker 2: one other ingredient whose identity is.
Speaker 1: Still a little bit debated.
Speaker 2: And as another example of usage, Peter Paul Rubens used
Speaker 2: both ultramarine and indigo in the Fall of Phaeton, which
Speaker 2: is here at the National Gallery of Art in the
Speaker 2: West Building's Gallery forty five. Melanie Gifford, who is a
Speaker 2: research conservator here, described his process in painting this to
Speaker 2: us in an email. She said Rubens used indigo paint
Speaker 2: indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting
Speaker 2: in Italy in sixteen oh four, and then when he
Speaker 2: revised the painting in Antwerp a few years later, he
Speaker 2: switched to the brighter ultramarine. So when it comes to
Speaker 2: making dye, the historical details of how the plants were
Speaker 2: processed and how the dye was used could really vary
Speaker 2: based on where the indigo was being grown. Often the
Speaker 2: steps had a cultural or religious significance, and regardless of
Speaker 2: the specifics, it tended to be a pretty involved process.
Speaker 2: That required a whole lot of plant material to make
Speaker 2: a very small amount of dye. And as an example,
Speaker 2: here is how indigo was processed in Suriname, as described
Speaker 2: by John Gabriel Studman quote. When all the verdure is
Speaker 2: cut off, the whole crop is tied in bunches and
Speaker 2: put into a very large tub with water covered over
Speaker 2: with very heavy logs of wood by way of pressers.
Speaker 2: Thus kept, it begins to ferment. In less than eighteen hours.
Speaker 2: The water seems to boil and becomes of a violet
Speaker 2: or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring
Speaker 2: matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is
Speaker 2: drawn off into another tub, which is something less. When
Speaker 2: the remaining trash is carefully picked up and thrown away,
Speaker 2: and the very noxious smell of this refuse, it is
Speaker 2: that occasions the peculiar unhealthiness which is always incident to
Speaker 2: this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash
Speaker 2: is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose, not just
Speaker 2: poky sticks, untill by a skillful maceration, all the grain
Speaker 2: separates from the water, the first sinking like mud to
Speaker 2: the bottom, while the ladder separates while the ladder appears
Speaker 2: clear and transparent on the surface, this water being carefully
Speaker 2: removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor is
Speaker 2: drawn off into a third tub to let what indigo
Speaker 2: it may contain also settle in the bottom, after which
Speaker 2: the last drops of water here being also removed, the
Speaker 2: sediment or indigo is put into proper vessels to dry, where,
Speaker 2: being divested of its last remaining moisture and formed into small,
Speaker 2: round and oblong square pieces, it has become a beautiful
Speaker 2: dark blue and fit for exportation. It's a lot of
Speaker 2: work all these I'm like, do we need the blue?
Speaker 2: Though I know I would be, I'd be like any
Speaker 2: other color. I'm out, I can't. Fortunately, it's a day
Speaker 2: we have chemistry, and chemists do these things rather than
Speaker 2: having I mean, you can still mash a lot of
Speaker 2: plants and get indigo dye. People do that, some of
Speaker 2: them for fun. As a cool side note, when you
Speaker 2: dye something with true indigo made from indigo plants, it
Speaker 2: is green when it comes out of the vat, and
Speaker 2: then it turns blue while it's exposed to the air.
Speaker 1: Magic chemistry. It looks really cool.
Speaker 2: Indigo was being cultivated in the Indian subcontinent by two
Speaker 2: thousand BCE, and indigo became an important part of the
Speaker 2: spice trade. During processing, the plant's leaves were pulverized into
Speaker 2: a paste and the extracted dye was shaped into blocks
Speaker 2: and dried. And these resulting blocks were so stone like
Speaker 2: that when they arrived in Europe people actually assumed that
Speaker 2: they were some kind of stone similar to lapis. Indigo
Speaker 2: wasn't that common in Europe until after an Indian navigator
Speaker 2: led Vasco da Gama to a sea route to the
Speaker 2: Indian subcontinent in fourteen ninety eight, and before that point,
Speaker 2: wade was more commonly used as a blue dye in Europe.
Speaker 2: This was also known as pastel. That can make reading
Speaker 2: old die manuals a little confusing for people who aren't
Speaker 2: familiar with that term being used in that way rather
Speaker 2: than for crayons made out of powdery pigment.
Speaker 1: Or white colors. Woad is also a.
Speaker 2: Flowering plant that requires an involved process to be made
Speaker 2: into a dye.
Speaker 1: Ethel M.
Speaker 2: Merritt's, a book on vegetable dyes, which was published in
Speaker 2: nineteen nineteen, described it this way.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The leaves, when cut are reduced to a paste kept
Speaker 2: in heaps for about fifteen days to ferment and formed
Speaker 2: into balls which are dried in the sun. These balls
Speaker 2: are subjected to a further fermentation of nine weeks before
Speaker 2: being used by the dyer. Seems less complicated, but also
Speaker 2: nine weeks of further fermentation.
Speaker 1: Well, it could be forever, so it could be forever.
Speaker 2: When theo When indigo became more accessible in Europe after
Speaker 2: fourteen ninety eight, it really upended the dye industry. This
Speaker 2: was at a time when various crafts and trades are
Speaker 2: being regulated through the guild system, and a lot of
Speaker 2: europe dyer's guilds had very strong opinions about this sudden
Speaker 2: availability of indigo dye. Although processing the indigo plants into
Speaker 2: a dye was very difficult and time I'm consuming, it
Speaker 2: was getting to Europe ready to use rather than people
Speaker 2: in Europe having to be the ones to make it
Speaker 2: ready to use. The resulting dye was also a lot
Speaker 2: easier to work with than woad and it made a
Speaker 2: better quality blue overall. As indigo dye became more available,
Speaker 2: guilds and governments in Europe had to negotiate a sudden shift.
Speaker 1: In supply and demand.
Speaker 2: Blue had already been increasing in popularity as people had
Speaker 2: gotten better at processing woad into a good quality dye.
Speaker 2: But then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted
Speaker 2: blue cloth for everything from clothing to coats of arms.
Speaker 2: And it got to the point that, in places where
Speaker 2: dyeing and weaving had been completely different trades governed by
Speaker 2: totally different guilds, weavers started to be allowed to dye
Speaker 2: their own cloth, but only if they were dying at blue. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: indigo was being banned in various parts of Europe as
Speaker 2: dyers tried to protect their trade, and regions whose economies
Speaker 2: depended on growing and processing wod tried to protect their
Speaker 2: life livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second published an
Speaker 2: edict against indigo in fifteen seventy seven, in which he
Speaker 2: called it cheating, corrosive, devouring and diabolical. Seems pretty harsh.
Speaker 2: Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in
Speaker 2: fifteen ninety eight, and in Saxony in sixteen fifty, and
Speaker 2: then Rome prohibited the use of indigo throughout Italy in
Speaker 2: sixteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: I kind of agree with Rudolph A second, I just
Speaker 1: indigo's not for me. I don't.
Speaker 2: No shade to anybody that loves indigo. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2: It's fine, it shouldn't be illegal. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: Queen Elizabeth the First banned the cultivation of wode in
Speaker 2: England in fifteen eighty five. Although people disparagingly say that
Speaker 2: this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad,
Speaker 2: what this was really about was being motivated by fears
Speaker 2: that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated
Speaker 2: and lucrative wode. So these laws didn't stop this spread
Speaker 2: of indigo into Europe or the rise of blue as
Speaker 2: a popular color in textiles and art, both because of
Speaker 2: the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of
Speaker 2: those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before
Speaker 2: the fourteenth century, about seventy five percent of the dying
Speaker 2: manuals in Europe had been about the color red, and
Speaker 2: then blue became more and more common in these manuals
Speaker 2: from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries with the increased
Speaker 2: availability of indigo and other blue pigments, and eventually blue
Speaker 2: overtook red and apprentice dyers when they did their masterpiece
Speaker 2: to show that they were ready to practice their craft
Speaker 2: on their own had to do their masterpiece in blue
Speaker 2: dye rather than red. The consequences of this skyrocketing popularity
Speaker 2: of indigo blue in Europe were far reaching. Indigo was
Speaker 2: one of the primary exports of what is now India,
Speaker 2: so as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies
Speaker 2: became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry, and this affected
Speaker 2: everything from human rights to the movement for India's independence
Speaker 2: from Britain, as farmers who were forced to grow indigo
Speaker 2: demanded to be allowed to grow food crops instead, and
Speaker 2: then on the total other side of the planet, indigo
Speaker 2: became a major crop in parts of the Americas, where
Speaker 2: it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers.
Speaker 2: The description that we read earlier on how indigo was
Speaker 2: being processed in Surinam actually came from a book that
Speaker 2: was titled Quote Narrative of five Years Expedition against the
Speaker 2: Revolted Negroes of Surinam, and that recounted Steedman's experiences in
Speaker 2: Surinam from seventeen seventy two to seventeen seventy seven, and
Speaker 2: much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced by sugarcane,
Speaker 2: and it became a major cash crop in South Carolina,
Speaker 2: where it was introduced by Eliza Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied
Speaker 2: on the knowledge and skill of enslaved labors to refine
Speaker 2: how the indigo there was being cultivated and processed, and
Speaker 2: synthetic indigo was developed in the late nineteenth century, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't until the early twentieth century that it really
Speaker 2: just became super practical to make. Today's synthetic indigo is
Speaker 2: almost entirely has almost entirely replaced indigo that is made
Speaker 2: from plant sources. And there are just so many other
Speaker 2: notable uses of blue that we could talk about in
Speaker 2: this show. Today we haven't at all touched on blue
Speaker 2: glass or blue ceramics. There's the cobalt that was used
Speaker 2: to make that was used to make blue glass and glazes,
Speaker 2: or the blue and white porcelain that was so popular
Speaker 2: in China during the Yuan and Being dynasties, or the
Speaker 2: many attempts to try to replicate that look that were
Speaker 2: made in Europe and North America. There is blue jasperware
Speaker 2: that was developed by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken
Speaker 2: a different focus, we could have had a totally different
Speaker 2: look at the color blue today rather than having the
Speaker 2: focus beyond paints and dies and that's the.
Speaker 1: Mysteries of the color blue.
Speaker 2: So thank you to the National Gallery of Art Washington
Speaker 2: for invite us to be here tonight. Yeah, it's been
Speaker 2: such a delight and we get to do it all
Speaker 2: again in a minute. Yeah, so we especially one of
Speaker 2: the thanks Sherry Williams, who is the manager of community programming,
Speaker 2: and Christina Brown who's a publicist, and then Melanie Gifford
Speaker 2: and Chelsea Ususa who were the people that we talked
Speaker 2: to in advance of tonight. And then we also want
Speaker 2: to thank the folks that we have been working with tonight.
Speaker 2: So Kathleen walking around with us a lot, Yeah, taking
Speaker 2: care of us. Robert who's here in the front, took
Speaker 2: great care of us leading up to this, and then
Speaker 2: I think Olivia's back in the back doing sound making
Speaker 2: me not sound like a cackling hen ah. So thanks
Speaker 2: so much everyone for coming. Yeah, thanks so much for
Speaker 2: joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send
Speaker 2: us a note our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app, podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 2: favorite shows.
Speaker 1: M