How bugs turned the world red - Stories in Colour Podcast S1 Ep3 - National Gallery - YouTube

Once there was a colour so valuable that emperors and conquistadors coveted it, and so did kings and cardinals. Artists went wild over it. Pirates ransacked ships for it. Poets from Duns Dickinson sang its praises. Scientists vied with each other to probe its mysteries. Desperate men even risked their lives to obtain it. This highly prized commodity was the secret to the colour of desire. A tiny dried insect that produced the perfect red. Welcome to Stories in Colour, a podcast from the National Gallery searching for histories of how colour has changed the world. Today we're joining the search for the perfect red with a pigment and dye that was so prized it inspired international espionage and built empires. But today you might find it in your I'm Bex Leary from the Digital Department here at the National Gallery and I'm joined by Amy Butler-Greenfield whose article we quoted to open with. Amy is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of dyers and her award-winning history of cochineal, a perfect red, has been published in eight languages. A popular speaker on radio and television programmes, Amy was born in Philadelphia, studied history at Oxford and now lives with her family in Oxfordshire. Welcome to the podcast Amy. Oh it's a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me. A pleasure for us as well. So we're on this hunt for an elusive perfect red. Could you tell us a bit about why red was and is such a desirable colour and also why it's been so difficult for dyers and artists to find a vibrant red hue? Well there's so many wonderful reds in nature if you think about just walking through the world. You have apples and cherries and berries and flowers, there are all these wonderful reds to capture. We have red ourselves, our blood, our lips. For us as human beings we're really wired to find red something that stimulates us. If you put us in a red room, even if you say you hate the colour red, because you're a human, if you're surrounded by that colour, your eyes tend to dilate, your heartbeat goes a little bit faster, it revs our system up. And because we respond to it in that way and because it is tied up with dramatic events, life and birth and violence and sex, it's a colour that's important to us. And so no wonder, because it's in the world, because it has this symbolic meaning, because we're drawn to it, artists want to capture that. The problem is that most of these natural substances, say the peel of an apple, you're not going to get any pigment from that that you can use in a painting. Even something like a cherry, you could squeeze that, but what you'll get is a stain that might be reddish for a bit but will turn to brown. This is what most reds in nature will give us. And so for that reason, it was something that was just only a few substances, many of them hard to get, could give you that really bright red. Amazing. So if there were so few, what were the few that were available to artists to use? Well, there are the ochres, and those are the oldest ones. If you think about cave paintings, many of those have orange-red or brownish-red hues, and those will come from iron-rich ores. Are those the ones that we use to spray around the hands? Exactly, where you will see all around the hand, you'll also see animals sketched with that. So that goes back into deep time, you know, that's tens of thousands of years ago. It takes a lot longer for humans to figure out how to make really bright red, you know, sort of scarlet, a really shocking red. You can do that with two minerals. One we call, it has several names, cinnabar, vermilion, mercury sulfide is what it is. And then the other is red lead. When you superheat lead, it turns red. You have to know the right processes, but those two colors would make a really bright red. They have some problems. One is that they're expensive. The next is that they can turn, they can darken with time or develop a strange sheen and discoloration. The other big one is that they're toxic. You're looking at lead and mercury. But because the red they produced was quite beautiful, it is more on the orange red side of the perspective. When you're looking at that spectrum, the blue reds are harder to get, but it's still, it's beautiful color. And even though it's toxic, they continue to use it. There's a kind of final category, I guess, that we can look at. So we're sort of at the hinge of the 16th century when we're looking for the perfect red, and there's a category of pigments that are being used called red lakes. Could you describe these to us? Because we're not, of course, talking about a body of water when we're talking about red lakes. That's right. That's right. Yes. The word red lake in painting, the lake actually is probably related to the same kind of root word when you get down to the Sanskrit that lakh is. So it isn't a lake that you dive into. What a red lake is, or any kind of lake, what we've been talking about before are mineral pigments, but you can also get a pigment out of a dye. You can't immediately apply a dye to a painting very easily. Dyes are soluble. So if you think about cloth, you put it in a dye bath, so it's liquid. If you were to toss that dye onto a painting, you would just get a liquid mess. So that's not how it's done. What you can do, though, is if you take an alkali base and add it to your dye, and there are a couple of things you can use. The most common one is alum. What will happen is you'll get a precipitate that will go down into the bottom of the dye bath, and it will carry the color with it. It will bind to that color. If you then pour off the liquid, and then there's a whole process. You rinse it, you dry it, you rinse it, you dry it, you filter it. But you'll be left with a chalky substance that carries the color, and that is how you arrive at a pigment, a pigment that has the color that the dye had. And that's your lake. Amazing. And so our red lakes, we've got brazilwood and madder. Those are two of the most common ones. Madder is made from the roots of a plant. Brazilwood from the heart of tropical woods. There's another one called logwood. There's one called orchil that's made from a lichen. There are several different ones that are made from these essentially vegetal substances. And now we'll bring in our audience question. We normally do these at the end of the episode, but for this one, this feels like the perfect time to ask it. So this is a question from one of our YouTube subscribers. He has said, are red pigments really made out of bugs? Well, there are certain red pigments, these red lakes that can be made using bugs, but it's particularly, it's the colors that the bug itself makes. So we're talking about what we think of as insect dyes. One of them is lac or stick lac it's sometimes called, which is collected partly because it makes a varnish shellac that's from lac, but it also makes a bright red color, a sticky one though. It's a little harder to use. It wasn't used as frequently in Europe for that reason. So that's traditional like furniture varnish shellac that you would use for that? Shellac, yes. That's where it would have come from originally is from the lac insect. And then the ones that were used more commonly in Europe were the kermes dyes. And there are three kinds of those. There's something, oak kermes, it grows on a Mediterranean oak. There's one that's in Poland, sometimes called St. John's blood. And then there's another one called Armenian red. And that's where the little bugs, you actually have to pull up the grass, look in the roots and harvest them that way. So they're all quite, they're little bugs and they're, they're hard to collect. And what they're doing is that, that substance they're making is usually a protective one. These insects just sit around and they have predators. And one way to ward off a predator is to taste terrible. And these are very bitter substances, the red. But of course, it's, occasionally they, they are used in food and the bitter taste is important, but that's not the main reason why humans have collected them. They've collected them because of the red color that they make, which is quite beautiful. Because red has been so prized, as you said at the beginning. Yes, it's worth picking all those little bugs, you know, the many, many ones that's because it is, it has extra luster, these insect reds, and they tend to last. And they have kermesic and karminic acid in them in different proportions. And these are both very beautiful dyes, the karminic acid, especially to, again, to humanize. We've got a painting we're going to have a look at from the workshop of Albrecht Durer. It's called Virgin and Child. And we can see some of these at use in it. So yeah, this is a painting in the National Gallery collection. We have the Virgin Mary sat in the center. She's holding and gazing down at her, her baby son, the infant Christ child, who she's breastfeeding while he rests in her lap. And they are sat in a walled garden, surrounded by green vegetation, leaves, flowers, including peonies and an iris. That's why actually this painting is sometimes referred to as Madonna with the iris. And then in the background on the left of the painting, there's a brick archway in the garden wall, which reveals a view of the sea in the distance below a lovely kind of turquoise bright blue sky. Mary herself is depicted with blonde hair, long kind of blonde curly locks, which fall over her shoulder and her dress, which does really dominate the scene, is this really vibrant scarlet red. And it was painted this picture in the start of the 16th century, so around 1500 to 1510. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how these reds come to be? Yes. In this beautiful painting. Yes. Well, before we get to the mechanics, I just want to say that, you know, we often think of the version in blue robes. But you still do sometimes you get these depictions and it's partly because to Europeans, these reds again, really beautiful to be able to wear red from shoulder to toe and the mantle. This is just an interplay of fabulous reds with wonderful, just luminous color in them. To be able to do that in real life, you had to have incredible wealth. And it then became associated with royalty, with princely blood, with eminence. And so part of what you're doing is saying, you know, this is very high status to paint somebody all in red. And so to a viewer at the time, that's part of what they would have been seeing is the sheer magnificence of this. We might just say, oh, it's a great deal of red, because to us, many of these colors can all be made for the same price. But that's not how it looked then. So that's part of how you would have been reading that painting. Now to make those beautiful reds, the painter has to choose from those pigments. And if you look at the scarlet gown, what you have is vermilion and red lead. So again, those kind of toxic substances, but they produce a beautiful color and more toward the entrette. But in order to get all the beautiful folds in that gown, to get the shadows, and to get the sense of the crumpling of the fabric, for that, having what we think of as a glaze, and those are often made with pigment. So that's when the lake pigment has been created. It's a chalky substance. It's ground up and it's mixed up with an oil as a binder. And then it's painted on. And I've heard it described before as a bit like a cherry jam or something, kind of consistency. That's a lovely image, a cherry jam. So usually in very thin layers. And so what you're looking at is the layering under layers of this, and then you apply a glaze over that, and you may wait for it to dry, and then apply another layer of glaze. In some cases, what you see is layering with opaque layers and then a glaze, opaque layers and a glaze. But if you were to cut through this, as if you were cutting through a sandwich, which of course we would never want to do, but occasionally for analysis, there are ways of kind of looking at it sideways. What you see is this beautiful layering, almost as if it were some kind of ice with the different bandings of the colour. And we can see how many layers went into creating these reds. And the upper layer in this, I think was Kermes and the lower layers from madder. So we've got different kinds of red lakes going on in this painting. Exactly. So there's a glaze that has a madder in it. And then on top of that seems to be one that has one of the Kermes dyes in it. Again, those give you slightly different qualities of reds. Madder tends, again, more toward the orange reds. You can get really gorgeous purple reds if you're adding alum to the Kermesic acid. And so you get these wonderful crimsons. And if you look at, while it's an orangish-garlic dress in the shadows and in the folds, we get these deeper colours. And that may be where part of the Kermes is really valuable. And again, there's a whole set of different ones, again, too, in the mantle that goes around. There's a lot going on in this painting, a lot of different, when you look at it, there are many, many different reds. And you have to make those with something and think about how you're combining them. Beautiful. We're going to take a quick break now, because I think we have resoundingly answered our audience question that, yes, red can be and is made by bugs, I guess. After the break, though, we need to get to our perfect red that we were on the hunt for at the start of the episode. So we'll see you shortly after the break. Welcome back from the break. So we've had a look at all different kinds of red pigments, in particular, lots of different red lake pigments. And now we come to our elusive perfect red. And it is another lake pigment produced by insects. Amy, could you introduce us to it? Yes. Well, this is cochineal. It's also pronounced cochineal. If you're from North America, which I am, so I may go back and forth. The word in Spanish is cochineal. And the word in the Americas, one of the words was nochesle, which is probably where the cochineal and cochineal terms come from. And I'm using the Spanish here because it's a pigment that's encountered by Europeans when they go to the New World. And that's because in the New World, it's been being used for a very long time, for centuries. And just as people, human beings in the rest of the world were intrigued by red, they were too. There was a wild form of an insect like those Kermes insects in Europe, wild cochineal. And that was in the Americas. It has a fairly wide range, probably began in South America. We know it was being used as a textile dye from probably fourth, fifth century AD, possibly earlier, but textiles don't always last that long. So that wild form is there. But the one that we're particularly interested, I think, for this discussion is the domesticated form. And the domesticated form most likely arose in what is now Mexico, in the southern Mexican highlands. And it is a bug that, when I say it was domesticated, that means human beings had to take a hand in shaping this. We think of domestication with cows and sheep, very large things. There are fewer large mammals that are suitable for domestication there, but what the people in these highlands became expert in were domesticating insects. And there are a number of examples. Cochineal is one of them, and they produce a form that's much larger than the wild form. It has much more dye, and it's also incredibly temperamental. It has a really small temperature range. And while it's larger than the wild form, it's still quite small. You know, you're talking smaller than a ladybird. I have some that's been dried here. It's about the size, each one, of a peppercorn. I'm going to shake it so you can hear it. And it's mostly, they're like black peppercorns. Some of them have a silver almost plating on them, and that was considered a very valuable form back in its day. But they're all dried. They grow on the nopal cactus, and they're harvested. They're dried often in the sun on mats. And from that, they then can be transported and shipped. At the time that this was developed, it may have started as a local thing, but by the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived, it's been collected by the Aztec lords. And so, you're talking about just many, many tons of cochineal coming up. It's very valuable. It's an integral part of not just the art, but almost identity. There's kind of a red thread that runs through Aztec culture, and it's cochineal colored. Wow. Okay. It's amazing to see these that we have here in the studio and that you just heard, hopefully, on the podcast. They do really look, actually, like peppercorns. I was quite surprised when you first showed me, actually. I think if you held them far away, they would look like that. I was imagining from descriptions that I'd read before that they were smaller and browner, but they're quite dark looking, aren't they? And is it true that the Spanish, when they arrived, they thought that they were grains? They thought that they were cereals rather than bugs? They actually, they would have called it grana. Grana de cochineal is kind of the formal name of it. Grain was a name that was used for these Kermes dyes. So, what they were doing, actually, was saying, this looks like what we have back in Europe, and we know that's extremely valuable. So, it's something that if we can collect it here, and they were going to the marketplaces when Cortes was first coming into Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs, and while he sees it as a form of conquest, they're actually trying to say, you're welcome, you're our guest. So, they actually do a bit of touring. They see the marketplaces. They see these fabulous colors. It's a very clean city as well. They're very impressed because this is a gorgeous place with as big a range of colors. They make a point of saying, as big a range of colors as you can get in our dying capitals. They also note the large quantities of this grana that looks like the very valuable Kermes dyes. And quite quickly, they get word back to Spain that there is grana. There is some kind of form of Kermes that is here, and I think it's going to make us a lot of money. That would be the first thought, wouldn't it? Maybe we should give some context, actually. Yes. You mentioned Cortes. Who was he? What was he doing? Ah, yes. Cortes is leading an expedition from first when Spain came in after Columbus. It's taking islands in the Caribbean. Cortes is leading an expedition into mainland, what we would think of now as Mexico, but into the heart of the Aztec empire. And in part because he makes alliances with the Tlaxcalans, who are one of the groups there, and are actually cochineal growers. And also because the microbes that he's bringing with in the smallpox epidemic takes down so many people, he is able to topple that empire. And the idea of the Spaniards is they'll put themselves in at the top of the pyramid, and they'll take all that tribute that is coming up, including the cochineal. And their understanding of the cultural context to the people of Mexico, this dye is, the nochesle is blood of the nopal cactus. Nopals are important. Blood is important. It's used in so many of the different Mexican, the Codex, the book that they have, each one of those books will generally have reds, and those reds are made from cochineal. It's in paints, it's in cosmetics, it's in pharmaceuticals, tamales that are sold. When they would have been in that marketplace, there would have been many things coloured with that. They might not have picked up on that, but again, it runs through the whole culture. But what the conquistadors are thinking about is what is here that is valuable that we can sell. And what's transportable. What is transportable. As well. What sort of time period are we talking about here? Well, they recognise the value of this, and they're starting to explore. And in fact, I believe that the Spanish emperor at the time, Charles V, recognises very early in the early 1520s, sort of, tell me more about this dye, and how much do you have? And, you know, what sort of, he's thinking about it as a commercial proposition, but the disorder that was in Mexico, simply because of the disease, because of conquest, because of trying to take over this land, it was just in tremendous turmoil. And ultimately, the people producing it, they're going through absolute agony. So you have problems with production there. And then also you have problems with shipping. Because when the Spaniards, the merchants would send supplies over to the conquistadors, the conquistadors would often take apart the ship, because the lumber and iron were so valuable. So instead of shipping things back, they'd just undo the ship. And so this was very frustrating for merchants. And it's not until about the 1540s that everything starts to come together, that they can ship large quantities of this back over to Spain. But once it starts arriving in quantity, very, very quickly, people take notice. And, yeah, you mentioned, obviously, this was devastating for the Indigenous people of what's now called Mexico. How particularly did cochineal and the exploits of the Spanish to acquire it? How did that impact on the people there? Well, I think, you know, there's no way to talk about the conquest and Indigenous people without talking about devastation. And I don't in any way want to say that if you had cochineal, then you were insulated from everything. But part of what is interesting about cochineal is that this domesticated form that is, you know, very picky, very fussy. It doesn't fit very well into Spanish plans for growing things with many other substances, you know, chocolate's a good one, cacao. Their idea is you take it, you put it into regimented plantations, you use forced labour, maybe slave labour to grow it. You grow it in large amounts, and then you ship it back. And so that's the sort of enterprise they're imagining. And it turns out cochineal doesn't do well under that at all. It gets diseases. It takes a lot of expertise to grow it. It's not heavy, heavy labour. It's something that can be done by a family, you know, that young children can recognize the pests, women can help harvest it. And that turns out to be a saving grace for the people, Mixtec, Zapotec farmers who were growing it, because it does best in these small family plots. In many communities, you just had the adults being ripped away to do forced labour. You had just the breakup of families, of community, and then ultimately tradition of culture and language. You can't pass it on if you don't have those links going from generation to generation. It does seem that there's some protective effect, that because the Spaniards were so eager to get a hold of this stuff, they really had to say to the people who knew how to grow it, well, do it your way, then just make sure that we have it. And we know that in general, people don't seem to have been forced to grow it. There were times where the Spaniards tried to say, everybody has to produce this amount, and it never worked very well. But they would grow it with an incentive program. And then they were free to, once they produced a certain amount, to sell the rest at the top dollar if they wanted to. And so that's something that we see that over time, if you look at these areas that were producing cochineal, they, to this day, are some of the most linguistically and culturally diverse areas of Mexico. It does seem to have had, you could keep your family together, you could pass on those traditions and that language. So by domesticating this cochineal, they ultimately help protect their own culture centuries later. We get to a point, I guess, where the Spanish have a monopoly on the trade of cochineal, and it becomes, as you've said, a really valuable export from Mexico. How important was it as an export for the Spanish? If you look at New Spain, which is the part contiguous with Mexico in that area, it's a bit larger than that. Silver is the most important, and after that it's cochineal. Sorry, silver, cochineal, not even gold. Well, because there's less gold. In that area. Yes. One of the things that, I think, maybe the best way to understand, because in different parts of provinces there are different amounts of things that are exported. So I think probably the best way to understand how important it is is to understand it's generally one of the top substances. But it's looking at the laws about them. There are three substances from the Spanish empire that if you try to export them without a license, if you do it without permission, it has the death penalty, and one is gold, one is silver, and the third one is cochineal. So that gives you a sense of how important it was. It was very lightweight stuff but extraordinarily valuable. And because it was so valuable, I imagine very coveted and people would go to very great lengths to find out about it, to discover it, maybe even to steal it? Absolutely. They didn't know quite what it was. There's a big debate. Is it a worm? Is it a berry? Is it a berry that turns into a worm? So it was so secret because it wasn't easy to get into the Spanish empire and information about it was not allowed out about anything that was commercially valuable. So they're not even sure what it is exactly they're looking for. But one of the things that other countries do, partly because they want those goods but also because there's a holy war between Protestant European nations and Catholic Spain, is you can lie in wait for those ships coming across. And in fact, one of the people we know who was on one of those expeditions was Jack Dunne, who we would know now as the pirate and poet John Dunne. He, in 1597, was on one of these expeditions to try and intercept the Spanish fleet, and they actually have terrible weather, a terrible time. John Dunne later writes a poem about how awful this expedition is. But they have one final success, and that is they capture three vessels that are slower than the rest of the fleet because they're just overburdened with cargo, and it turns out they're chock full of cochineal. And they take their ships to London, and I think there's something, you know, in the neighbourhood of 27 tons or so of cochineal. It's enough cochineal to last England for a good long time. So Queen Elizabeth is quite pleased with the results of that pirate expedition. My gosh, I had no idea that John Dunne the poet had anything to do with piracy. That's an amazing story. Wasn't there also a Frenchman who went undercover to find the secrets of cochineal as well? Yes, this is quite a bit later. This is in the 18th century. He's somebody, he's from a family of lawyers. He decides to be a botanist, but then he wants for the glory of France to be the one who finally gets cochineal out of Mexico, what new Spain at the time. And he actually, he's the first person who successfully does this. He has to use all kinds of subterfuge, and he manages to get it out, and even better than that, to make sure that it survives a journey. We can only get it as far as Saint-Domingue, and there he puts it in a botanical garden. But that's when it falls apart, because to try and take care of this stuff, it's actually very difficult, and it doesn't survive. It will only make it out of the Spanish Empire as the Spanish Empire breaks up around 1820. Then it will spread to the rest of the world, but until then, Spain has a monopoly. It's the only one who can bring it into Europe. After it gets to Seville, then it will disperse through Europe, but it will be the Spanish merchants who have control of the supply. And so it arrives into southern Spain, and then gets distributed out to the rest of Europe. Maybe you should just clarify, there's the Mexican cochineal we've been talking about. There is another form that we're not going into today. Could you just tell us briefly what that is, and why we're focusing on Mexican cochineal today? Well, the form that's generally known colloquially as cochineal is Mexican. There are two others. I've mentioned that there are three Kermes dyes. One of them, the St. John's blood, is sometimes known as Polish cochineal, and one of the other Kermes dyes was Armenian red. Those two are closer to the Mexican cochineal than the Kermes is. Kermes has kermesic acid. The other two have carminic acid. The one that's so close to the Mexican cochineal that it can be very hard to detect the difference is Armenian red. But the thing about cochineal is that it is all carminic acid that is providing the intensity of that color. Generally, it's the carminic acid that's the main ingredient there, and there's so much of it. When they domesticated that, they created a bug that really had large amounts of this, so it's about maybe 30 times more dye per bug than the Armenian red, the one that's closest to it. 30 times more, and you don't have to pull up the plant and pick the bug off the root, so it's a much more efficient way to get your dye. Then the other two are more blends with these kermesic acids too, so they're slightly different. Both for color and for ease and for the density and potency of the dye, cochineal is very quickly recognized as a superior dye. How many insects would it take to produce a certain amount of dye stuff because they're so small? Presumably, it's thousands. It is many, many. The estimates range. The usual estimate is somewhere around 70,000 per pound, so if you're thinking maybe 150,000 or so per kilo. That's a lot. Those poor bugs are so many. In the service of beautiful breadcloths and paintings, this feels like a good point for us to take another break. We've traversed over to what was then called the New World to discover Mexican cochineal, and we will travel back after the break to see how this affects artists. We'll see you after the break. Welcome back. We've traveled all the way over to Mexico to see how the indigenous people there were growing cacti and producing these domesticated cochineal bugs to make reds. Now we're going to come back to Europe to look at how and when artists in Europe first get hold of cochineal and use it as a pigment. Tell us the story. Absolutely. Keep in mind that there are tons of this dye stuff coming over. They're not coming over for the artist. They're coming over for the textiles because the high-tech business of Europe at that time is the textile trade, and it's flowing particularly to those centers of the textile trade. So one of the first places it goes to is Italy, which is doing high-end fabrics. You know, your gorgeous velvets and silks and really fine wools, and they're very interested in this, and they check it, find that it is wonderful. But the other people who take notice of this are the artists who are in those places, and one of the centers of this is Venice. Venice is an entrepot between the east and the west. There aren't many colors that are available in both those parts of the world that you cannot get in Venice. They're being traded back and forth. It is really an artist's paradise for color, and in fact, you know, that we think of some of our greatest colorists, well, they come from Venice at this time. Let's look at an example, shall we? I guess, for those lovers of art history and maybe the National Gallery too, the person that might come to mind as an artist who was a great, great colorist in Venice in the mid-16th century was Titian, and we can see, can't we, from two of his paintings exactly sort of when he was starting to use cochineal as a pigment. One of his very earliest works is called The Holy Family with a Shepherd. It shows the adoration of the shepherds, a moment from the biblical story in which the shepherds are visiting the infant Christ after his birth, and the focus in the painting, quite close up, are the three figures sat around the infant Christ. On the left, we've got the Virgin Mary. She's wearing a reddish-pink dress with lots of folds in her fabric, reminding us of the painting we've already looked at actually, beneath a bright blue fabric draped around her shoulders. She's holding up her son, Christ Child, who is resting on a rounded manger, so a sort of wooden trough woven out of sticks, and he's leaning in towards his mother, his head appearing to rest next to hers. And then in the center of the painting, we've got Saint Joseph, where he's betrothed, wearing robes of purple and orange fabric and with curly brown hair and a beard covering the lower half of his face. And his right hand holds the leg of the infant Christ, and in his left hand, he holds a wooden staff, and he's presenting the baby to a young shepherd who kneels in reverence at their feet. And then behind the Virgin Mary, we've got a donkey and an ox, bright blue skies behind, a hint of orange light on the horizon, and very, very small. We can just see a flying angel wearing a pink robe who's announcing Christ's birth to some shepherds. So yeah, this is one of our really early Titians, and how is he using red pigments in this painting? And then we can compare with a later work. Well, what you see with Titian is again, you know, when we looked at earlier with that Virgin and Child, that in order to create those sort of, almost like a living fabric on that painting, you need to be able to show the shadows and the light, the folds, the crumpling, all these twists of the fabric. And you get that in part by using, you know, more opaque paints, and then using these glazes on. And we know that early on, really up through the 1540s, that you see Titian using a number of different, like, glazes, but one of them is kermes, and both kermes and madder are being used to help create that beautiful interplay of light and shadow on the draperies that Mary is wearing in this. And so, yeah, the particular areas, so we've got the red drapery of the Virgin's robes, that's where we're finding the kermes and the madder. That's right. And when you look forward with Titian, what you will find there is that, you know, Titian is a painter with a top reputation, with patrons willing to pay, you know, almost any price. He can afford whatever the best dye's going. And one of the things that we notice is in paintings in the 1550s with Titian, that's where you start to see the cochineal come in. And this is precisely when cochineal in Europe for the dyers is really beginning to flow in, and you're seeing the amount coming in double and then triple, and the price is still going up, because people say this is really something. So, of course, a painter like Titian, who loved color, who was such an expert in color, wants to experiment with this too. And evidently, he found it pleasing, because he does use it in I know you'll describe this painting too, I should let you do that. But there, again, it's cloth that Titian is trying to reflect off in these glazes. Sometimes it's called a carmine glaze, after the carminic acid in cochineal. These are often used to reflect different fabrics. And one of the interesting things, when you stop and look at a painting like this, is to think that the models who were wearing it had to be wearing clothing, usually that had the reds in it. There's only so much you want to see that. And so, sometimes these glazes, like a cochineal, may have been being painted with a glaze using cochineal, but the original fabric may have been dyed with that as well. So, you're using substance to represent it that is actually the same thing as the substance it really is. That's a lovely synergy to talk about. And yeah, think about that you've got that like for like of the cloth that somebody would have been wearing and modeling being painted with the same substance that it was dyed with. So, yeah, the painting we were referencing is Diana Callisto, painted again in the mid-16th century, but a bit later, 1556-9. And it captures the moment when Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt in Roman mythology, forces the nymph Callisto to strip and bathe in front of her. And it's in this moment Diana realises that Callisto, her favourite, is pregnant because Callisto had been seduced by Jupiter, king of the gods. And so, on the right hand side of the painting, we see a group of figures, some of whom actually are naked and some of whom are clothed here, gathered around the naked Diana who points towards Callisto on the left hand side of the painting. And Callisto lies on the ground pinned down by four nymphs. Diana is ordering the nymphs to remove Callisto's clothing, revealing her swollen pregnant belly. So, where can we see cochineal come into this painting? It's in the beautiful draperies of, you know, the nymph, you can see that purplish colour, and that's probably because cochineal's been, the way that you're creating that lake is with alum. Alum's a lovely translucent substance. So, it picks up on the luminosity that cochineal itself has. It's part of its claim to fame, it's not just its potency, but also the way it reflects light. We know that on clothing, that people would remark on the sheen that it had. We think now often about colours just in terms of hue, which when you're looking at a flat screen, that makes sense. But if you're looking at them in real life, you really care about how they reflect the light. And when you create that pigment with the alum, what you're doing is heightening that luminosity, and then you can create that again. So, you see the interplay of light on the fabric, and it feels as if you really are there. It's one of those tricks of the light that painters can use as partly in the nature of the pigments that they choose. Very beautiful, and I like the urge to see these paintings in person. We would, of course, encourage everyone to come and visit the collection. Free to visit, of course. And yeah, see that interplay of light, which digital screens just can't capture. No, they can't. When you see a painting in person, you get more of a sense of the brushstrokes and all that, but also the layering of colour, the painting as a work in time, as something that is layered through time as they're working. It's not just all done at once. It's taking all these minute judgements about colour and form. You mentioned before to me, actually, in the break, that there was another way that artists were getting pigment, not from the raw pigment, but actually from fabric. How did that work? Well, I think a lot of painters tried this trick, and it was a very good one. If you look at, you know, we talked about maybe painting a fabric using sometimes the colour that was in that dye. You could also take the textile. If you took one of these Kermesic dyes, you could take matter-dyed fabric. You might have a cotoneal-dyed silk. If you put it into the, you know, you're trying to create a dye bath, but you're just, you know, you're kind of soaking your fabric in water, and you're thinking, how would you get a pigment out of that? Well, if you add the alkali to it, it will start to dissolve back into that dye bath, and then you can add your alum, and then you get your precipitate. So, you can actually kind of work backward. You can just pull that dye out of the fabric, and you can create a lake from that. So, it will destroy the fabric. Of course. Don't do it to anything you love. But I guess it's a form of very early recycling, or quite a sustainable practice, I guess, to use maybe some old fabric as an artist material. Yes, if you have a moth-eaten bit of cotoneal wool, you know, you could then turn that into something you could paint with. So, yes, upcycling. Upcycling, that's a good way to put it. So, we've seen, yeah, how artists were handling this red pigment so beautifully, almost the perfect red, as we've put it in this episode, in this story, that there were some downsides to it. Absolutely, yes. If there are fewer layers or just a lot of light and the passage of time, it will fade. In fabrics, cotoneal is quite fast, especially with wool, with silk. Quite fast, meaning that it… And by fast, it means that it latches on and it stays there with the aid of what we call a mordant, a substance that lets the literal meaning bite into the fabric. Cotoneal is not so good at binding with cellulosic fibers or plaster, canvas. That's not its strength. And if you look at the binders, again, if it's an intense amount in oil, in many layers, then that color may well stay. And we do have some very old paintings that have quite intense cotoneal glazes still, but we have others where it has really faded. And I think the worst case scenario is really when it's used in watercolor. There, the binder that the red lake, the cotoneal lake is used in, tends to be things like gum arabic, and it fades awfully quickly. So somebody like J. M. W. Turner, he's famous for using many different kinds of red that faded fast, but… He's very famous for him, and so was I. The Cotoneal Lake, the Carminic Lake is another name for it. He would paint those gorgeous sunsets, and they're still gorgeous, but they're not the way they looked when he was painting them. And some people say you could see even a few weeks later it was not the painting he'd painted. So that is a shame. It's a shame that they don't always… Again, depending on how they're put on canvas, quality, you're using all those factors, but there are changes over time. And is that why it's not really a popular artist's pigment today, or is it because of competitor pigments? Well, there's a giant revolution in red that happens in the mid-19th century. There are artificial colours that come along. There are some that are created even earlier than that, but the real change in the market starts to come when the chemist Perkins makes a colour called Mauve out of coal tar. And by about 1880, that Mauve colour isn't going to replace Cotoneal because it's not that intense red, but the successor ones that come later, by 1880, there's a pretty good substitute for a Cotoneal red. And the cloth dies, and that starts to take the market. The Cotoneal market at the time was producing millions of tons of this stuff every year. It just knows knives, just like that, because the other ones are cheaper. They're also easier to apply. With Cotoneal, you need to know something about it, and you also need to be able to look at the insects you're getting. Do they look like they're good quality? Have they gone a bit brown? Do they look like they've had sea salt gone into them? You need some expertise with it. With the artificial dies, there's a packet, there's instructions. It's, you know, it's just a very different kind of thing. And so, it takes over the market. And for artists too, most of it is simply that, you know, artists start preferring some of these other colours too, but you don't have this giant stream of Cotoneal pouring through your, either that you can sort of get your little bit off of. It does last for a bit. It's, you know, a food colouring. Even in the early 20th century, you still see it. But by the time we get to World War II, the domesticated Cotoneal is considered so valueless that it almost disappears from Mexico itself. Really? Oh my gosh. But it is still in use in some ways today. It hasn't, well, maybe it has entirely disappeared in Mexico. No, it hasn't. They found it in time and another revolution happened and that's in the 1960s. Natural foods start coming back. There's always been a worry, even in the 19th century, that these new artificial reds, they're toxic. And some of that is just worry, but some of it, they were absolutely right. You know, they gave people rashes and there was a real worry about how closely related were they to arsenic. And it's in the 1950s that it's discovered some of them are carcinogens and some red dyes are banned. And then other people say, well, maybe they all should be, and I would rather have something all natural. And suddenly there's a market for Cotoneal again. And in fact, now, you know, again, we're back to, you know, very large amounts of it are produced each year. It's produced mostly in Peru now. But the market, it's volatile, but overall it's rising and rising. It's quite an important substance for particularly the natural foods and cosmetic markets. Natural foods, cosmetics. So I might really find it in a strawberry yoghurt or a cake perhaps. Yes, there are all kinds of things that it might be. And I should say, many people then say, so there are bugs in my drink. Well, the form that you would have gotten 300 years ago would have just been grinding up the bugs. And so yes, there would have been bug parts. Now, they can distill that. So you get just the carminic acid. And in fact, people ask me about that in their drinks. And sometimes, you know, there's so many bug parts allowed in your coffee too. And your coffee probably has more than, you know, like your yoghurt that's been dyed with Cotoneal. But it is a worry that comes up for people. And so I imagine, yeah, it's kind of vegetarians perhaps that are causing outcry about it in their food. I think Starbucks actually stopped using it in some of their frappuccinos and cake pops. Yes, people put pictures of Japanese beetles and saying this is what you're eating. And it went all over the web. It's one of those early stories on the web where, you know, things go viral that aren't true. It certainly is true that the colour does originally come from an insect. If you're a vegetarian, you wouldn't want to eat it. There was also a problem with labelling because a very small number of people do have serious allergies to it. And there was a point where, and still is in some countries, where it can just be natural colouring. And here it's E120. That's what you're looking for if you don't want to have it. I suppose we should also say that artists are still using it. Perhaps not so much in Europe now, but it is being used by traditional dyers and weavers in Oaxaca and in Mexico. It is. And there are people who are experimenting with it. You know, I regularly hear from different people who are getting interested in it or wanting to turn an artistic practice, or sometimes they're textile artists based elsewhere, who want to experiment with this. And so I do, I feel, I get more and more of these queries. So I think there's a growing interest, just as there is within the fashion industry, of having ethical faction. So that, you know, it does come up. Elena Osterwalder did some interesting work, Bosco Soti. But yes, the weavers and dyers in Mexico itself, there's a village called Teotitlantepe, that's near Oaxaca City, where there are many different kinds of weaving and dyeing going on there. Some of the dyeing is with chemical dyes, but there are families and groups that are working with a natural cochineal and doing just wonderful work with it. I was actually in the French Alps of all places and went into a little artisan. They were selling wools, yarns. And there was a language barrier with me and the gentleman who ran this shop, but he made and dyed all of these yarns themselves. And he was very proud to say his reds were cochineal. And it was one of the ways I could connect actually with him because the word was the same for him in French, cochineal, he had with his accent. So yeah, some artisans in Europe as well, still using it to dye their yarns. Because it entered the language so late, you know, in the 16th century, the word is very similar from place to place. You know, it's just a borrowing as the new substance would come in. And it did ultimately go all around the world, you know, after it was being exported to China and the Philippines. So there was a tremendous demand for red all over the world. And so it's something that does bind us together, even now, this interest in the way that we respond to red, whatever it is made of. But it is wonderful to think that there are people still working with a substance that does go back and has such a long and tangled and complex history. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, Amy, for our podcast episode of Stories in Colour on, yes, what an amazing story of cochineal and the little bugs that have turned the world red. If you listening want to explore more about the scientific side of colour and how art materials are made, we have a series on the National Gallery's YouTube channel, which you can dive into. And of course, the rest of the podcast as well. And if you've actually got questions about the story of colour and how this amazing technology has interacted with human history, you can email us. We're on podcast at nationalgallery.org.uk. Or you can send us questions via social media, just mention the podcast and we'll try and answer some of those questions for you in our next series of Stories in Colour. Thank you so much for joining us today and listen to this episode. With huge thanks to our guest, Amy Butler-Greenfield. I've been your host, Bex Leary. Our producer was Harry Rosehill. Our researcher was Hannah Rogers. Our scientific advisors were David Peggy and Catherine Higgett. Our technicians were Ian Warren, Tom Gulliver and Timothy Carpenter. Our video producers were Jean Kenyon and Alessandro Sorrenti. Thank you so much for listening and hope to see you next time.