Hollywood taught us: the greek-roman world was all white marble.
The middle ages were muddy brown.
Colors were invented in the renaissance, then the XXth century was back to black and white.
A THREAD ABOUT COLORS IN THE ACTUAL ANCIENT WORLD

GUYS I WENT INTO LIKE A MONTH LONG RESEARCH RABBIT HOLE FOR THIS THREAD AND NOW I SEE DEBATES ABOUT HUES IN MY DREAMS.
(OKAY IT WAS SO LONG I SPLIT IT IN TWO)
CW: wow, for once I don't have to put some horrific CW. Except, uh, poison. SO MUCH poison.

First, away with a misconception: the roman and greek world WASN'T dazzling white.
Yeah, they liked marble, and roman togas were traditionally white. But all those white temples, and some of those white statues you see, were *brightly painted*

(incidentally, I couldn't find the meme's origin, if anyone can point me at it I'll be happy to credit)

We don't know as much about roman clothing, but have a look at these egyptian-roman portraits: most people are depicted with brightly colored clothes!
(Idk why so many people think anything fun or nice was invented about 1960)

People were willing do go a LONG way to have colors for their clothes, houses and everyday objects.
And like any fancy thing, colors became a handy way to remind the riffraff that you were rich, powerful, or holy, or all of the above.
pic: guess which one is the emperor?

So let's start, color by color!
I'll focus mostly on ancient roman and medieval\\renaissance Italy.
And since I'm physicist I'll go in spectral order, as it should be.
For this thread, I'll do red, "orange" and yellow.
pic: a quick guide to the electromagnetic spectrum

A small premise about romans: they were really, REALLY into wall paintings.
Even common (you could say "middle class") people, bars, and public baths had every wall painted.
So, brighters, fancy colors were VERY important.

A more general note: remember that how many color there are, and which are called which, varied *a lot* across time and cultures.
It's far from a universal belief that the sky is blue.

Anyway, let's start with RED.
Basically the one color everyone always agreed exists and matters.
I guess being the color of blood helps with that.
A reddish color has the distinction of being one the very oldest pigments used by humans: red was cool before anything was cool.

Ochre and red can be obtained from clay - most of Earth's crust is iron oxide, and iron oxide tends to be red.
So red paint is literally as old as dust.
Iron-rich clays can make a pretty good red, too.

Roman wall paintings used A LOT of red, but most of it was just a particularly nice hue of clay, from the mineral hematite.
But as the world got fancier, people wanted their red REDDER.
pic: "yes, nice, but... that red looks a bit too much like A PEASANT'S RED"

Turned out it's not easy - It's STILL not easy - to make a red pigment that is bright and doesn't fade!
But one guy said, "look, I found this stone! It's slightly redder than clay, incredibly costly, and toxic too!".
Everyone: "OMG I WANT IT".

Thus cinnabar red, from a mercury oxyde, became the most valuable red in the ancient world.
In pompeii, it was used only in very small amounts, usually mixed with hematite.

(roman artists pretty much took literally the "peasants color" vs "fancy color". The fancy - "florid", they said - pigments were supposed to be provided by the client, NOT by the artist, because they were so costly! Cinnabar red was one of the florid colors)

Its rarity in Pompeii might be just because Pompeii houses weren't *that* fancy.
It was a wealthy provincial town, but far from a great metropolis like, say, Alexandria or Antioch.
Incidentally, chinese were fond of cinnabar red too - look at this Qin laquer!

In Pompeii, a red organic pigment was also used. It *might* be from the resin of the dracaena plant.
Sources, both modern and ancient, are confusing as fuck because romans called BOTH cinnabar, and some modern scholars ended up confusing them too.

In the middle ages, this resin-derived pigment became known as dragon's blood.
According to medieval enciclopedias, it was "the result of dragon blood mixing with elephant blood when they died in mortal combat."
Wow, that's a SERIOUS marketing scam for selling powdered resin.

AAAND, we're done with red. Let's get to ORANGE.
Orange has no place being a color.
Really. It's a hoax. Stop propagating it.
(I'd elaborate on this but I don't want to give orange undeserved visibility)

So, to the next REAL color: yellow.
Both in art and literature, it was often conflated with\\replaced by gold.
However, ochre-ish yellow was a popular background for wall paintings in Pompeii.
I think because it was, well, literally dirt cheap: it could be derived by clay.

Here a good example of yellow background, from a recent excavation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/exceptionally-well-preserved-snack-bar-unearthed-in-pompeii

A good, *bright* yellow pigment, however, wasn't a thing for a very long time.
You know all those beautiful yellows in Van Gogh's paintings? Those were the result of the explosion of colors available with modern chemistry!

(as an aside, development of chemical synthetic colors was a HUGE factor in the growth of impressionism!
Tech and art are always more closely related that many realize)

Seeing how well it worked with red, someone said:
"hey! I have a slightly brighter yellow which is super rare, and also toxic!"
but people said: "TOXIC, you say? why waste it as a color? We'll use it as MEDICINE!".

So, the arsenide sulhpure known as orpimentum never gained widespread use as a pigment. However, it was mined and traded as medicine and MAKEUP.
Because, well, use enough arsenide for skin care and you'll definitely never grow old.

In addition, Romans liked sapphron a lot because it was fancy and smelled nice. They used it for makeup, parfume, and dyes.
At some point, legally only augurs (diviners) could wear it, but there's little indicaton those laws were taken seriously, at least outside Rome itself.

Eastern Romans, however, couldn't stand using a peasant yellow.
You are rich? Then why use a color that costs as much as gold, when you can straight-up use gold.
And so the byzantine golden mosaics became a thing.
Pics: mosaics in Ravenna. GO SEE THEM THEY'RE STUNNING.

Note that while it is actual gold in the tiles, it wasn't THAT expansive compared to some of the other pigments here, because gold can be used in veeeeeery thin sheets, so it was used in tiny amounts compared to, say, cinnabar red or ultramarine blue.

(Romans used gold in the same way before the Empire split, too, like in this beautiful portrait from roman Egypt. But they just weren't into bling as much as the byzantines)

Aaaaand that's it for yellow. Since there's quite a bit of spectrum yet to cover, for today I'll end it here.

Bonus fact: you think that now, with so many pigments commonplace, there's not much drama around colors?
OH, YOU'RE SO WRONG.
Just read this story about an artist who BOUGHT A COLOR FOR HIMSELF, and another one who made a color for ANYONE EXCEPT HIM. https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/30/anish-kapoor-uses-stuart-semple-worlds-pinkest-pink-despite-ban/

You liked this? I post about even less relevant historical trivia! You can find my old threads here: https://linktr.ee/Malvagio 

Second part here: https://twitter.com/MalvagioMarco/status/1359237478432067585