by Jon Lackman | 30 April 2010 | Uncategorized
The Winter 2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin is given over to a wonderful, amply illustrated article by Elena Phipps, “Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color.” As Met director Thomas Campbell notes in his foreword, “Cultures the world over and throughout history have valued the color red,” and much of the world’s red has been cochineal red. “Cochineal, produced from the dried and pulverized bodies of a cactus-eating scale insect … quickly supplanted all other red dye-stuffs,” when Europeans “discovered” it in the 1520s in the Americas, where “Mexican and Andean weavers had for centuries been using it to create ritual and ceremonial textiles.” (Amy Butler Greenfield published a book on the substance in 2005, A Perfect Red.) Phipps based her article on years-long close study of Metropolitan Museum objects that use cochineal as well as her reading of the relevant literature. As she notes, her article “encompasses not just art and history but also geography, economics and science.” She notes for example that “the shipments from Lima to Spain in 1587 included 5,677 arrobas (about 144,000 pounds, or 72 tons) of cochineal,” forming an important part of the financing for the Spanish empire. Artists from Rembrandt to Van Gogh have made use of it, and of course it can be found today in everything from lipstick to salami.
