Paints, dyes, and fabrics come in many different colors. But where do those colors come from?
Sometimes they come from... [Record scratch]
Bugs? This is cochineal, a tiny insect native to Mexico, Central and South America.
Thousands of years ago, people in the region figured out how
to use them to bring bright, vibrant color to works of art.
They did this by grinding the insect into a material called pigment.
Pigments are substances that are used to impart color to an object.
There are pigments all around us—in paints, inks, fabrics and even food dyes.
These days, many of these colors are made using factory chemicals. But cochineal is different;
it's what is known as a "natural pigment." -Natural organic pigments come from the
living world. So a plant, or an insect. The history of art is full of examples.
Like indigo, a plant which is reduced into the pigment used to color denim blue jeans.
Or the purple iris flower, which was used to make green paint.
Cochineal makes a vibrant red pigment. So vibrant that we still use it today
in food dyes for pink and red beverages. Really brings new meaning to the phrase "bug juice!"
Ancient cultures were very skilled at developing technologies.
But how did artists figure this out without all of the tools and research we have today?
It starts with the five senses. It's touch that tells you if something is hard or soft; it's taste
that tells you if it's sweet, so good to eat, or bitter. Possibly medicinal or poisonous. And it's
sight that tells you if it's rich in color. We can't know exactly when cochineal was
first used, but through trial and error, ancient people learned that these insects could produce
this color. They also learned that it could be used to dye yarns and fabrics by mixing it with
powder from a mineral called alum. This helps cochineal's color permanently fuse to fabric.
When mixed with thick gluey substances, it can be painted on surfaces like walls and sculptures.
This pigment was so valuable that both the bug and the nopal cactus that cochineal live on
were cultivated to the north in Mexico, and south in the Andean desert of Peru,
where these textiles were made. At The Met, we study pigments to
learn all sorts of details about art. Based on what we know about the natural materials,
we can study pigments to learn where objects were made and when. We use tools, like x-rays,
infrared light, and lasers, to analyze which pigments are used in a work of art.
We can also track the history of trade between cultures; eventually, Spanish colonists recognized
cochineal as a precious good when they arrived in the Americas. They sold it throughout Europe,
where it became a royal color and symbol of the church. It continued to travel as far as Japan,
where it was used in inks for nineteenth-century woodblock prints.
Art often reflects what we see in the natural world: plants, minerals, insects.
Sometimes there's more of the natural world in the art than we realize.