The cinnabar red with which the victorious gladiators were painted in Rome came from the Spanish mercury mine of Almadén and there was a watercolor paint made with the urine of cows fed with mango leaves, as Victoria Finlay (United Kingdom, 1964) told EFE ), specialist in color history.
The hair on Napoleon’s corpse contained arsenic that could have come from the wallpaper in his house in St. Helena, which was green, and certain Aboriginal tribes in Australia, in pre-colonial times, made annual journeys of thousands of kilometers to obtain a certain type of paint. Red ocher considered sacred, are other curiosities collected by Finlay, who in an interview with EFE highlighted the spiritual nature of the color:
“On the one hand it is a physical or chemical attribute that our eyes read and our brain interprets as ‘blue’, ‘green’ or ‘red’ but, however, there is a huge element in which ‘color’ is spirit , idea, notion, something intangible and yet describable; colors can affect the mood, they can make us happy; I would also say that certain color combinations are distressing.
Author of “Color”, a study published in Spain by Captain Swing in which she concludes that “the colors we choose have determined the history of our culture itself”, Finlay has indicated that since she was a child she was interested in the origin of colors.
“I realized that before the 1850s, when paints and dyes began to be made with chemicals derived from petroleum – and specifically coal tar – every color I saw on a canvas, cloth, or a stained glass window had an extraordinary origin story.”
And the author has hundreds of data and anecdotes that show that she is not exaggerating: “There was a brown paint, used until the end of the 19th century in Europe, that was made with the ground bodies of Egyptian mummies – and it was called ‘mummy’ or ‘mommy’-“.
Finley’s essay takes the form of a narrative by bringing together scientific findings with biographical experiences: “Once, when I was driving through Lebanon researching purple – because Roman imperial purple was dyed with shellfish enzymes from the cities of Sidon and Tyr – I picked up two Belgian hitchhikers with some huge boxes.
“They told me that they were butterfly collectors and that butterflies have a completely different range of color vision than humans: reds are usually invisible to them, but they can see from yellow to ultraviolet, and that certain flowers that “They look white to us but are, under an ultraviolet detector, covered with marks to which the butterflies respond as signals.”
To the question if there is nothing better than colors to identify political ideas, he responded that, of all the possible symbols, “colors are the ones that are most easily recognized from the greatest distance, by the greatest number of people; they are not “It is surprising that politicians – and big companies – use them strategically to their advantage.”
As for why people keep asking about “favorite color,” he noted that “asking someone what they like most creates a human connection, which is almost always a good thing,” adding:
“There are some people, color forecasters, whose job is to ask people what their favorite color is at the moment and observe what colors – tones and shades are also important – they choose for their clothes and fabrics; to know what the public looking every year in terms of colors can be very valuable knowledge; if you know what the consumer wants and is going to look for, you can sell more things.
Regarding whether there is a different color culture in the East and the West, he recalled: “When I first arrived in Hong Kong there were a lot of people dressed in white passing by with drums. At that time I didn’t know that it was a funeral and “that white was the color of funerals. I have read that in Brittany yellow was the color of mourning.”
“I studied social anthropology and what fascinated me throughout this whole color research process was how different our relationships with colors have been in different cultures and around the world.”
Regarding the discredit of gray, he has pointed out: “I like gray: my living room is painted with a gray rich in pigments… In the Middle Ages, many countries prohibited the poorest from wearing beautiful clothes, and that was defined by the material and color. So people who wore gray used to be poor.”
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