We were walking up the stairs to watch TV, talking about the Roman Empire. At the coffee shop earlier, I had commented that I knew next to nothing about the Romans — I could cite great Greek philosophers, Greek tragedy, Greek concepts of self and soul, but the Romans? My knowledge was limited to Caesar, to three-word Latin phrases that seemed to contain within them entire moral universes: ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’ and ‘Et Tu, Brute?’ This led to Laiba looking up an article on 50 things to Know about the Roman Empire. She was telling me, then, about what she learned and she told me that the statues that litter the streets of Rome, the white marble sculptures of antiquity that we have become so familiar with, were once painted in vibrant colors. “That makes sense,” I said off-handedly, over my shoulder, “the color fades first.” “That’s beautiful,” she said, repeating the words with her characteristic reverence for language: “The color fades first.” Later that night, gripped with the kind of madness only a good sentence can imbue in a poet, I began my research.
The term I encountered in my preliminary scouring of the web was ‘Fugitive Color’ — types of pigment which faded, darkened, muddied over time. The terminology is amusing — it conjures up images of a particularly mischievous green wandering off into the sunset, an outlaw with a sack thrown over its shoulder. But it is perhaps an accurate turn of phrase — imagine a statue, a painting, embedded in public consciousness, a part of our archival and social lives, with its original color having tip-toed out at some point over the years. In a New Yorker article about the ‘Myth of Whiteness’ in antiquity, the first sentence reads: “Mark Abbe was ambushed by color.” The color is, again, the aggressor — the one who flees, the one who ambushes, exerting itself in the loudness of its absence, in the shock of its presence. The article goes on to tell us that when painted reconstructions of statues from antiquity were displayed in a museum, visitors found them “tasteless.” How hilarious! How telling! How tacky we all are, painting flesh like flesh. It calls to mind the initial critique of Marcel Duchamps ‘Fountain’ — that urinal, that thing as it was, being viewed as unnecessary, egregious. Tasteless.
History (or, pun intended, white history) is retro-actively ennobled in our collective imagination — the Greeks and Romans managed to create lasting structures and philosophies and literatures, and the very fact of our continued remembrance seems to lend those civilisations a patina of elegance, of grace, of a justified position in history rather than an accidental one. Of-course men think about the Roman empire once a day! Just look at the Colosseum! It amuses me to think of that grand remnant, decorated in gold leaf, painted perhaps a bright pink or green or blue. In fact, according to an LA Times article, archaeologists discovered the building was once painted in “riotous colors.” Where now it is a majestic ruin, a testament to the cruelty and collapse of empires, perhaps on the horizon of Ancient Rome, it could have been compared to a bright bloom, a giant stone animal clothed in garish skin. Our understanding of history is always already an anachronism — and the colors fade first.
The ease of access to color, to permanent, chemical color, is a relatively recent development. The red cloaks of kings signified something entirely different than my maroon going-out halter top — red dye was difficult to produce, difficult to get your hands on, and these limitations bred the exclusionary barriers necessary to position the color as a status symbol. It is not, as we may presume, that the color possessed an innate majesty — but rather that a coalition of social and material factors allowed it to ascend to the top rung of the color-wheel hierarchy. But the problem with reds is that they are far more liable to fade than blues, or greens. How many lips in old paintings are drab now, rather than scarlet and kissable? How many cheeks have had their flush stolen? How many young sirens in maroon gowns have been cast as boring villagers, old spinsters — neutrality is the enemy of sex. How much blood, in the art that lines our museums and galleries and old, private halls, runs black?
Red dye was such an elusive and significant commodity on the market at one point, that it became — after gold, silver and tobacco — one of the most valuable exports of the Spanish empire. The world over, dyers and artists and money-hungry men of business and foreign nobles, wondered where and how the Spanish managed to find this brilliant red— how they produced this sheen, this brightness, this vibrancy. The short answer is: they didn’t. The Spanish Conquistadors, upon conquering the Aztec empire, found that there was an ancient, indigenous art of producing red dye from cochineal insects. The females of the species were soft little things (God, aren’t we all), that produced a type of acid that meant — when squished — they’d create the red dye that sent the world into a flurry. This was a fragile economy: the insects were sensitive to changes in weather and temperature, and the entire project of farming them could be undone by a frosty spring, by a summer rain. The Spanish then re-ran the age-old colonial play: exploit the labor, export the goods, profit off suffering and oppression, and use this to thrust yourself into greatness. But because Oaxaca, the center for the production of cochineal dye, was such a treasure trove for the empire, the people, the culture and traditions managed to be preserved. In an article by Fernanda Pesce, she writes that the colonial city of Oaxaca was “essentially built” off the wealth derived from cochineal dye. The absence of color strips history of certain meanings, and it seems the presence of color has its own material effects— a great, red hand steering the wheels of time.
In 2005, Amy Butler Greenfield wrote a book called ‘A Perfect Red’, in which she delves into the intricacies, the intrigues, the political and economic and social reverberation, of this specific dye. She cites an example of a group of British privateers, with — of all fucking people — John Donne as one of the sailors, who captured a Spanish ship and brought it back to England. The Queen and the nobility were elated because, amongst the wealth acquired from the ship, was at least twenty years worth of cochineal dye. Donne would go on from his (extremely successful, it seems) foray into piracy to write the enduring words: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Everything exists in a web of indivisible relation, so of-course, stumbling upon an interest in the history of color, I also happened upon a history of colonialism, a history of travel and beauty and class and other and self. I think we forget, nowadays, the voyages of humanity — we don’t need to think about decades, centuries worth of searching for color and spice when we have next-day delivery. It’s so easy to forget the exploitation at the core of how we obtain or access objects, artifacts, art, disassociated as we are — in an enduring colonial legacy — from the humanity of the labor that produces them.
But the presence, and absence, of color, is not always a social, historical phenomena — sometimes it is a deeply painful, individual one. I am thinking, of course, of Monet. As he aged, Monet developed cataracts — and despite the available technology for medical intervention, he refused an operation. This incident inspired one of my favorite poems of all time, Lisel Mueller’s aptly named, ‘Monet Refuses the Operation.’ She writes: “Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration ……I tell you it has taken me all my life …. to….banish the edges you regret I don’t see.” Oh! How romantic! The body warping as it ages to meet the mind, Monet’s vision of the world as a hazy Impressionist fever dream, the haloes the haloes — a heavenly, angelic light now cast upon the world. How romantic, and how utterly disengaged from reality! Monet actually refused the operation because one of his friends had under-gone it and suffered from horrible side-effects. And one of the symptoms of his cataracts was a loss of color.
“Reds appeared muddy to me,” he complained, “pinks insipid, and the intermediate and lower tones escaped me.” I went to see the Water Lilies in Paris in January of 2023, and it almost hurts to imagine a man who painted with such attentiveness to each shift in shade, such care toward the way the sun struck water, talking this way — muddy reds! Insipid Pinks! Surely not the eyes that guided those hands, not the body that held that brush! But all empires fall, and all bodies fail, and neither history nor mortality seem concerned with the fairness of it all. All things decay. But, sorry to Monet, sorry to the Impressionists, sorry to the painters of those scenes of quiet magic, the color fades first. There’s a period of Monet’s work that isn’t as popular as ‘Water Lilies’ or his various pond-scapes — when his cataracts drove him away from his blues and purples and pinks, his flowing and transcendent hues, into a mess of red and brown and orange. The colors of his paintings, like the colors of his world, lost their frenetic energy, the softness of their spectrum. Monet eventually couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand the degradation of his art, the infringement by time and life and age upon genius and he got the operation. He subsequently destroyed many of the paintings he created in his ‘lost’ cataracts era, and he hated them all deeply.
“The world is flux,” Mueller writes, “and light becomes what it touches.” It is so movingly true, such an intimate portrayal of the human condition — we are not lonely creatures on a rock in space! We are members of a vast ecosystem that has exhibited an impressive commitment to life! No man, remember, is an island. But the light does not become what it touches, of-course. The light bends around and weaves into shape, and the light becomes color. And the loss of color, however slight, is a plunge into a kind of darkness. This entire examination has reminded me of a song I love, by Death Cab for Cutie, where the singer softly croons: “If you feel discouraged when there’s a lack of color here, please don’t worry lover, it’s really bursting at the seams.” The absence of color, its fading and its warping, tells us a story about ourselves — a story that bursts at the seams of everything, unclothing our understanding of time and humanity. Yesterday is permanently lost to us, it has left its imprints but snatched away its particulars, we will never see those reds again.
Fugitive colors! Runaways! The search for meaning is constantly exceeded by meaning. The search for history is always limited by the fact that it must be studied as history. Do you think the Romans ever considered that the future would strip them of their brightness? That time would erode their legacy into blank slabs of marble? I hope not. I hope they went about their days, to the market, to the baths, to the gladiator rings, and thought about lunch, and the girl they kissed last night, and how to make their mother stop nagging. It all goes, doesn’t it? What good does it do to think about tomorrow, when today is so urgent, so flooded with vermillion and navy and magenta and ultra-marine? I rediscovered the poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell today (he was, alongside John Donne, a Metaphysical poet.) In the poem, he tries to urge his lover into sleeping with him by offering reminders of “Time’s winged chariot, hurrying near.” “The grave’s a fine and private place,” he tells her, “But none, I think, do there embrace.” Those scarlet lips, drab and unkissable. The flush gone from her cheeks. I don’t think often about the Roman Empire, and I hope they thought of me even less. What does it matter, the erosion of everything, when there are days to live, when there are sleazy poets to bed? We don’t need whole essays meditating on this — every evening we watch it happen. Every evening, the light falls away — again, and again, and oh god, again, the color fades first.
SOURCES:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture.
https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2013-jan-18-la-fg-wn-rome-colosseum-color-20130118-story.
Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red : Empire Espionage and the Quest for the Color of Desire (Available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-Red-Empire-Espionage-Colour/dp/0385605153.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408507/.
https://hekint.org/2017/01/24/monet-and-his-cataracts/.
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