![]() ![]() a celebration of every colour imaginable. Still, she rhapsodises about a photograph of the madder root: "It was orange and blue and red, like kingfishers' wings. Intrigued by tubes of pricey rose-madder paint, still manufactured in Harrow by the firm Winsor & Newton, Finlay tours the factory but is barred from entering one top-secret room. Dutch growers refined it, and made fortunes despite calling the highest grade "krap". Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfishwhich probably meant their scent. Madder is a little bush with a pink root used to produce the warm tomato red in Turkish carpets. In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time. But a wild-goose chase to Bihar in India leads Finlay to conclude that the gent from Calcutta who told her about this process was "taking the piss". One hue was said to be obtained by collecting the urine from a holy cow after it gorged on mango leaves. ![]() For ultramarine, semi-precious lapis lazuli gets powdered into whipped egg yolk like some celestial mayonnaise. ![]() She was formerly arts editor at the South China Morning Post. Those splodges on old palettes turn out to be anything but mundane: they contain real blood, squashed bugs, purple Phoenician seashells, even ground-up Egyptian mummies. Victoria Finlay is the author of Color: A Natural History of the Palette and Jewels: A Secret History. ![]()
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