Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride, 1665-7 (wikimediacommons)

For centuries, painters and textile dyers sought all sorts of ways to create a brilliant red. It’s a really hard color to make, as anyone can tell you who has tried to dye Easter eggs the natural way. (OK, I’ll tell you: for years, we’ve dyed Easter eggs the Martha Stewart way. Usually my kids lose interest after about fifteen minutes, so I’m left in the kitchen with boiling pots and smelly potions, finishing the job. Anyway, what I’ve discovered is that turmeric tints them a beautiful yellow ocher, coffee a lovely brown, and red cabbage plus turmeric makes green. But nothing I’ve tried produces a satisfying pink, let alone red. I’ve used cranberries, pomegranates, everything that happily stains your clothes, but nothing produces that elusive red. And I’m just talking eggs here, not paints or fabrics.)

But back to the historical attempts to derive red. In ancient times, painters and textile dyers found that cinnabar worked pretty well, as did mercuric sulfide—these substances were used to make the reds in ancient Chinese scrolls and in ancient Roman frescoes. The problem was, they were expensive and poisonous, and faded in the light.

Dyers and painters tried leaves, bark, blood, dirt, and cow poop, but nothing quite worked. Madder (from plants) made a pretty good russet and orange-red, as did lac, and kermes (insect-based tints). But when Spain’s conquistadors learned (and subsequently stole) the secret of cochineal red from the Aztecs, artists were finally able to produce those elusive and brilliant shades of flaming scarlet and deep crimson. Cochineal insects, harvested, dried, and ground to a powder, were the Aztecs’ secret. Spain built an empire by strictly controlling access to this highly-valuable, persnickety scale insect.

Leaving aside the difficulties workers faced harvesting the cochineal insects (which you can read about in my forthcoming book), making the red paint from the resulting insect powder was extremely time-consuming and expensive. According to Amy Butler Greenfield’s fascinating book, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, an early art manual advised painters to grind half an ounce of cochineal insect into a fine powder, add tartar lye, water, and alum, and then scrape it into the tincture. The resulting red tint then had to be strained into a clean pot and used quickly.

All red dyes had a tendency to fade over time, but painters who could afford high-quality cochineal tints had more success preventing fading. Rembrandt used a very high-quality cochineal red in this painting, The Jewish Bride, which has lasted over three hundred years–so far.