Color plays a ubiquitous and essential role in our daily lives, yet the riveting histories of some of the world’s most commonly used colors go largely unnoticed. From the moment light waves strike our retinae to when the brain assembles them into a conscious image, color guides not only what we see, but how we remember, feel, and believe. Pigments have transformed how humanity connects material and meaning, and inspired devotion and insight — revealing that color is not mere embellishment, but the vehicle through which we construct perception itself.
Ultramarine
Once more coveted than gold, ultramarine was not forged in a studio but in the treacherous cliffs of Northern Afghanistan, where miners pried from the veins of lapis lazuli — a semiprecious gemstone — a blue so celestial in its depth that it seemed almost untouched by natural forces. Once attained, the stone was transported across deserts and mountains and through the courts of Venice and Florence before ultimately reaching the workshops of Renaissance painters. From there, it was crushed and washed in a process so laborious that it could span weeks. What emerged was the purest form of luminous blue, one that transcended craft to become theology.
Soon after its introduction to Western society, artists reserved the hue for painting sacred objects–most notably the robes of the Virgin Mary–and wealthy patrons paid for it in extraordinary sums. It was a symbol of both material and metaphysical luxury, the color that transformed stone into a source of sanctity and devotion into vision.
Cochineal
Found most abundantly in Peru and Mexico, cochineal is a bug, around the size of a grain of rice, that grows in white blooms upon a particular cactus, variously called Opuntia, or “prickly pear.” When dried and crushed, cochineal produces an astonishing, incandescent carmine. The Maya and Aztecs primarily used it in dyes, cosmetics, and paintings, while in Peru, the Inca conveyed war plans through quipu, a complex system of colored, knotted cords carried across the country by messengers on foot.
After Spanish conquistadors discovered the pigment in the markets of Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City), the dye launched Spain toward economic dominance, and a “red craze” descended upon Europe. Masters like Peter Paul Rubens quickly became infatuated with this intoxicatingly saturated pigment, depicting in an early painting the tempestuously crumpled dress of Delilah—the philistine woman who famously coaxed her lover, Samson, into ultimate ruin—in a gushing torrent of crimson. By masterfully fusing cochineal’s origins with her duplicity, Rubens reveals that art’s true meaning is governed not just by the artist’s hand, but by the living matter from which it is formed.
Indian Yellow
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Indian Yellow was featured extensively in Indian miniature paintings and murals before being imported to Europe, where it was favored by artists like J. Turner and Van Gogh during the 17th and 19th centuries. However, for centuries, its origins were the subject of an interesting rumor — the pigment so radiant it bewitched generations of artists was said to come from the urine of cows fed solely on mango leaves near Bihar, India. Though the story sounded fictitious, the truth eventually surfaced in colonial Bengal. Herders did indeed feed their cattle a mango-leaf diet, collecting their vibrantly chromated urine and adding clay to form solid balls of pigment.
The resulting hue was a transparent, fluorescent yellow, and such a success that Turner lavishly bathed his skies in it and Van Gogh poured its warm, translucent radiance into fields and sunflowers. However, in 1910, when the production was halted due to the cruelty of its manufacture, artists turned to chemically produced yellow paints, and the pigment that had entranced much of the world soon became regarded as the elusive gem of a bygone era.
The history of pigments redefines how we think about art itself; these colors reveal that perhaps the greatest illusion in art is that it is an experience governed under human control. Throughout history, pigments that inspired devotion and demanded reverence shaped not only how art appeared, but what it meant. These substances dictated human perception long before the artist intervened, teaching us that, in this sense, we are not the true agents of art but instead its passive subjects, governed by a larger visual entity that is untouched and far more powerful than ourselves. Thus, to distinguish between the artwork and what brought it into being is to understand that art is far from a human creation: it is instead a force that creates us and the world we inhabit.