Furthermore, it appears that red has also unwittingly influenced the art market: paintings featuring the colour red are likely to increase their economic value. However, the painters of the time, convinced more than ever that the structure of a painting does not lie in the balance between its forms but the relationship between its colours, made good use of this new bright and incredibly stable red, resulting in an explosion of expression.Įven today, after millennia of history, red has not lost its evocative power, indeed if one thinks of the large-sized canvases of the Color-Field group, of Rothko’s and Barnett Newman’s work, it seems that nothing else is able to cause the same mesmeric transcendental and dramatic effect.
Ironically enough, after a long-standing quest for the perfect shade of red to represent nature as faithfully as possible, in 1910 Cadmium red became available as a product – the major innovation in the history of red pigments – at a time that colour had already been freed from naturalism with the advent of early abstraction. Even if you have never heard of these pigments before and their names sound arcane and exotic, their use was so deep-rooted in the culture that our current language preserves their traces the English word “purple” is derived from the Latin term for Tyrian red, purpura, and “kermes” is the linguistic root of “crimson”. Among these, the expensive Tyrian red (or imperial dye) derived from the secretion of a family of sea snails which was used to dye luxurious ceremonial robes and made the fortune of the Phoenicians or Kermes, produced from the dried bodies of insects in the genus Kermes – hence the name – and used by artists to create shiny and translucent glazes, layered atop other less intense nuances. Whereas both cinnabar and minium had a bright orange undertone, nature generously provided men with deeper shades of red, tending to purple and blue, in the form of animal-based dyes. This explains why today we still speak of “miniature” to indicate something tiny. The latter, also called red lead, was already known during the Roman Empire and was widely used during the Middle Age, in particular to decorate manuscripts with elaborated capital letters and detailed small illustrations. When the Chinese technique to produce cinnabar artificially became widespread in medieval Europe, the result was even more surprising and vermilion (this is the name of the synthetic version) replaced both its natural counterpart as well as other pigments such as minium. Unlike ochre, which is more opaque and dusty looking, cinnabar appears bright and intense and its vividness can still be admired on the walls of some of the most luxurious villas in Pompeii. For many centuries, the king of red pigments was cinnabar, a mercury mineral used for its colour since the 16 th century BC. Conversely to what the importance of this colour would suggest, not many red pigments exist, with only a few, mostly ancient and of natural origin, that literally made art history.
0 kommentar(er)
