The metalworking monk, Theophilus, described19 in the twelfth century how glaziers used three furnaces—one for heating, another for cooling, and the third for melting the blown glass into sheets. The color tended to come from the metal oxides (manganese, iron and others) that were naturally found both in the beech wood and in the clay of the jars that the glass was heated in, and the final hue was hard to predict. “If you see any pot happening to turn a tawny colour, use this glass for flesh-colour and taking out as much as you wish, heat the remainder for two hours . . . and you will get a light purple. Heat it again from the third to the sixth hour and it will be a reddish purple and exquisite,” Theophilus wrote, although Vitruvius20 had written in Roman times about how glass-makers made blue glass (and a sky-blue pigment powdered from it) using soda mixed and melted with copper filings.
Nobody quite knows who the glaziers were—they rarely signed their names—although we do know of a Rogerus who was brought from Reims to Luxembourg to work on the Abbey of Saint Hubert d’Ardenne, and there is a record of a man called Valerius who fell from a scaffold while installing stained glass in the Abbey of Sainte-Melanie in Rennes, and bounced up unharmed. But mostly it was just known that they came when they were summoned by the Church, that they sometimes spoke in strange accents, and that when they left, the new cathedral was alive with colored light. Mothers may have warned their children to stay away from the glass camps, because they would have seen the gypsy qualities in these men. But if, as a medieval child, you had crept to the fire where they were transforming sand into gems— blowing this beautiful substance into existence at the end of iron blowpipes—and had listened from the darkness, you might have heard wonderful stories of other worlds. They might have discussed the saints and the proverbs that were in the lead frames they were filling with their colors. But more likely they would have talked about the curious things they had seen, and the strange people they had met.
Today our glass-makers don’t camp out for days on the edge of the forest, and they have efficient ways of protecting their vats from floating ash and over-flying birds. Perhaps it was those tiny imperfections—meaning that the warm sunlight scattered unevenly as it passed from one side of the glass to another—which made me feel on a day after rain in Chartres that something holy was there too. But perhaps those campfire stories were stirred into the slow-melting pot as well, mixed carefully into the blue and red fluxes, shifting the Gothic glass imperceptibly from the realm of craft into that of art.
THE VIRGIN’S ROBE
Chartres gave me another postscript to the story of blue—an unexpected one. On my journeys to Afghanistan I had found out where the color for the Virgin’s veil should have come from, and I thought I had found out why it was so often blue. But I had never thought I would find out what color the veil really might have been. And in Chartres, I found an answer of sorts. The reason this town is such a pilgrimage center is because in around 876 Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne, gave Chartres a special gift. He gave them the veil said to have been worn by Mary, as she stood by the cross and wept.21
Today’s cathedral is the fifth one on the site; the others were burned down or ransacked and each time, the story goes, the people pragmatically said the Virgin must want something better, so they raised the money and rebuilt the structure. The last big fire was in 1194, and only three things were saved: a set of three saints’ windows, a stained-glass picture of the Virgin and Child from 1150, which is now known as “Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière”— Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass—and the famous relic.22
The veil shown in the stained-glass picture of “la Belle Verrière” is a pale color, light enough to allow the sun to flood through and depict the young woman’s purity. But it is unmistakably light blue, and worn over a blue tunic. Those 1150 glass-makers would have had the “real” veil to model their design on, which is curious, because when you see the precious relic in its gold nineteenth-century box—a humble scrap of material to the glory of which this whole cathedral was dedicated—it is not blue at all. More of an off-white: the faded clothing of the melancholy mother of a martyr. Had he seen it or heard of it, and had he wanted to go for veracity rather than value, Michelangelo could as well have painted his mysterious corner figure with lead white, mixed with a little yellow. And yet if he had, I would not have had this story.
9
Indigo
Goluk: “We have nearly abandoned all the ploughs; still we have to cultivate Indigo. We have no chance in a dispute with the Sahibs. They bind us and beat us, it is for us to suffer.”
DINABANDHU MITRA, Nil Darpan, 1860
“The fact is, that every one of these colours is hideous in itself, whereas all the old dyes are in themselves beautiful colors; only extreme perversity could make an ugly colour out of them.”
WILLIAM MORRIS1
My father lived in India for three years in the 1950s, before he met my mother. He used to tell me stories about Bombay mangos, Madras spices, and a puppy called Wendi, who was a great coconut hunter. But what really caught my attention was the club he belonged to in Calcutta which was, he always said, set in an indigo plantation. I daydreamed of the Tollygunge when I was a child. I wasn’t in the least bit interested in the golf course, polo games or colonial bars. But how I thought about the indigo. I imagined tall trees rising to a cathedral canopy, their slim purple trunks as lovely as kabuki actors in kimonos. And I pictured men dressed in Gandhi-white robes and pink turbans strolling through dappled glades to tap a rich blue dye into beaten tin pots.
Once upon a time, or actually several times upon a time, indigo was the most important dye in the world. At one point it helped prop up an empire, and then later it helped destabilize it. Ancient Egyptians used indigo-dyed cloths to wrap their mummies, in Central Asia it was one of the main colors for carpets, and for more than three centuries in Europe and America it was one of the more controversial of dyestuffs, and it would have been familiar to people of many nationalities. So it is rather telling that by my childhood in the 1970s I had no idea what indigo was, only that it sounded nice. And many years later, when it came to setting out on my quest, I still casually went off looking for trees.
“Indigo” is a word like “ultramarine”—it refers to where the color historically comes from, rather than what the substance actually is. So, just as ultramarine is a translation of the Italian for “from beyond the seas,” indigo is derived from the Greek term meaning “from India.” Sometimes the Europeans were fairly slapdash about what they described as coming from India—“Indian” ink, for example, was actually made in China—and they would cheerfully lump anything that came from roughly that direction into the category of Indian things. But in the case of indigo, they were fairly accurate, and so it turned out I had accidentally been right to have started thinking about indigo in India, even if it took me a while to find it there.
Indigo cultivation probably existed in the Indus Valley more than five thousand years ago, where they called it nila, meaning dark blue. It spread north, south, east and west as the best things often do—the British Museum owns a tablet of Babylonian dye recipes from the seventh century B.C. which indicates that indigo was already being used in Mesopotamia 2,700 years ago—and when the Europeans turned up in Goa in the early 1500s, greedy for profits from exotic trade, they found enough Indian indigo to be able to throw it into their holds along with camphor and nutmeg (from what is now Indonesia) and embroidered silks from all over the East. Indigo wasn’t a new substance to Europe—it had been imported in small quantities since classical times for use as a medicine and a paint (Cennino had suggested slipping a bit of Baghdad indigo into clay to make a fake ultramarine for frescos), but now Portuguese, and later British and Dutch, traders were about to market it as a wonderful dye. They were confident their new color would be a winner. Indigo was not only the best blue they knew, but it had the extra cachet of being from an exotic part of the world with an exotic name at a time when the “mysterious Orient??
? was just about to be the rage. But before anyone could make a success of this colorful crop from the Indies, the traders first had to deal with what was almost a monopoly on blue held by the European growers of another plant. A plant called woad, which produces indigo, but much less than comes from the plant that is actually called “indigo.”
Cart full of indigo
A FIGHTER’S WEED
Woad is a funny word—it sounds like “weed,” and in fact the two words have the same origin. The seeds of this mustard plant, Isatis tinctoria, float so easily in the wind and settle in so many different soils that anything unwanted in gardens or fields became known laughingly as a “woad” and later, with a vowel change, as a “weed.” It is so prolific that even today it is banned in some American states—Utah is still overrun by the descendants of seedlings planted by Mormon dyers in the nineteenth century, and California and Washington also try to chase away the blues with strict legislation. The British tend to think of woad as a war paint—a symbol of the fierceness of Ancient Britons before the Romans conquered the country nearly two thousand years ago. Schoolchildren learn that Queen Boadicea wore it as she rode fearlessly on her chariot against the invaders, and that the great warrior King Caractacus daubed his body in woad before every battle.
I visited Caer Caradoc—the hill near Church Stretton in Shropshire where Caractacus is said to have made his last stand—on a November afternoon. I tried to picture the wintry morning in 51 A.D. when a band of warriors may have stood there painting their bodies with blue dye and later lost Britain for the Britons. The wind whipped around both the rocks and my ears as I walked up the steep hill; it sounded like distant war-whoops, and made it easy to imagine an upstart leader—the charismatic son of Cymbeline— encouraging his troops before the battle. This was the second time the Romans had invaded. A century earlier, in 55 B.C., Julius Caesar had arrived with five legions, and had fought his way as far as St. Albans. In his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, Caesar wrote about the peculiar practices of the Britons. The men, he said, lived on milk and meat, dressed in skins, and shared one woman between ten or twelve of them. “All the Britons stain themselves with vitrum,” he continued in a sentence that has been frequently dissected by historians, “which gives a blue color and a wild appearance in battle.”
The question is, was vitrum a reference to woad or was it something quite different like glass—the blue paint the Ancient Egyptians used, perhaps? It is impossible to know, but we can be certain that two thousand years ago woad had arrived in Britain—some seed pods were recently found in a pre-Roman grave at Dragonby in Humberside—and it is a fact that the Britons had something of a reputation for body paint. In his Natural History Pliny (who was right about things almost as often as he was wrong) asserted that the Britons used a plant called “glaustum” to make themselves blue.2 Indeed, he continued, young women used to stain the whole of their bodies with it and then process naked at religious ceremonies, their skin “resembling that of Ethiopians.” But this time, in 51 A.D., no religious ceremonies (nude or otherwise) seemed able to appease the Celtic gods. Over the previous nine years, since they landed in 43 A.D., the Romans had proved to be unstoppable as they moved slowly up the country, and Caractacus had become a guerrilla leader.
There are two ways in which the half-naked Britons in his small army could have stained themselves with woad, and they encapsulate the problems that dyers using woad and other indigo plants have struggled with over the centuries. Because the curious thing about these crops is that despite their reputation they cannot easily be made into dyes. If you take the green leaves of the first-year growth of the woad plant (the second year it contains almost no indigo), crush them, macerate them and leave them to ferment and dry, you can make a blue compost. I once tried painting my body with woad compost suspended in alcohol. But the part that I had daubed on my arms disappeared with the sweat of the first hill I walked up—which suggests the color might have been too temporary for battle—although inexplicably the woad that I had painted onto my feet lasted in uneven blotches for several days, attracting concerned comments about my “bruises.”
However, if Caractacus’s dyers had really wanted to fix the woad as a dye they would have had to go through a complicated and almost mystical chemical process3 with their vats, down in the Iron Age village that you can still just see signs of at the bottom of the hill. They would first have had to remove the oxygen from the vat—by fermenting or “reducing” it—after which the liquid that remained would have been a yellowish color. The magic of indigo is that the blue color only appears after the object being dyed (whether it is a textile or an arm) is taken out of the pot, and meets the air again.
And this second way—smearing blue-green scum (which had been scooped off the top of the pot, and which smelled like rotten pondweed) onto their pale torsos—is perhaps the method the Ancient Britons used to dye themselves a semi-permanent blue. But why would they have done it? Was it just to scare the Romans—or would that ritual painting have had other purposes? One possible reason for warriors to use woad is a highly practical one—it is an extraordinary astringent. Wearing it into battle is rather like rubbing on Savlon before walking through a cactus plantation, and having it available after battle is like preparing a primitive field hospital in advance. The liveliest proof that I have heard of woad’s miraculous healing ability comes from a tattoo expert in Santa Barbara, California. Pat Fish has punctured thousands of Celtic crosses onto human skin since she learned to use tattoo needles in the early 1980s. Actually she’s done most designs except the Devil (“Anyone who would feel comfortable with Satan on their skin I don’t feel comfortable with touching their skin”). But the one thing she will never make again is a tattoo out of woad.
“It was about five years ago,” Fish said when I called her. Her client had a theory that Caractacus and other Celtic warriors had woad tattoos—and he decided to test it out on his own body. Woad was forbidden in California, because it is such a weed, so the man made it into a tincture and mailed it from his home in Canada. “He was scared to take it over the border by car with him, just in case he was caught.” It was rather endearing, she agreed, that a man covered in macho body markings should be afraid of violating a local bylaw. Fish tattooed a Celtic knot on his ankle, using the tincture as a pigment. On day one, it looked good, but two days later the leg started to swell. “On the fourth day things were worse. We went to the doctor, who said, Oh, Pat, what did you do?” she remembered. It was then that she learned that woad was so good for wounds that it had healed the punctures from her needles and allowed the skin to reject its own pigment. “There was this shiny pink tissue all raised on his ankle in the shape of a Celtic knot. I’ve never seen such a perfect scar. But there was no blue in it at all.”
The man’s theory was not altogether unfounded, however—indigo from various plants has been used in tattoos as far afield as Nigeria and Persia, although probably not in tincture form, and some historians have suggested that Caractacus may not have needed to paint himself from a fermenting woad vat because he was already permanently painted. In the 1980s a number of bodies were discovered in the Lindow peat bogs in Cheshire, near Manchester. They caused considerable excitement—one murder suspect even confessed to killing his wife—before scientists identified the bodies as having lived in 300 B.C. Very cautiously—because the bodies were rotten, and the peat contained its own trace minerals—archaeologists confirmed that metals had been found on the skin of at least one body, and speculated that the Celts may have been covered with blue tattoos.4
Tattoos in European culture have often represented stepping outside the boundaries of society, whether to indicate bravery, piety (Armenian Christians used to mark themselves to show they had made an important pilgrimage), impiety (one of the paintings in William Hogarth’s satirical Marriage à la Mode at the National Gallery in London shows a woman with a tattoo etched onto her breast: his eighteenth-century audience would have recognized this as a sign of a co
nvicted criminal), machismo (in Hong Kong, Triad members can be identified by their dragon tattoos) or simply eccentricity. And the pigments they have used have been just as varied as the social signals they have given. The Tahitians used to make their tattoo pigments out of burned coconut husks; native American tribesmen used to put spiders’ webs and burned fern ash into their tattoos; Maoris used to mix soot made from burned caterpillar corpses mixed with fish oil5 for their sacred mokos, while European sailors have tended to use charcoal soot for the “indigo” color (black on pale skin tends to go blue), or even gunpowder— which burns into human skin leaving permanent marks.
The arrival of brighter colors on the tattooist’s palette coincided with Impressionism. As artists queued up to buy new paints for depicting dancers or water lilies, tattooists were experimenting with the same colors for making mermaids and roses. One of the first tattooists in the U.K. to experiment with new colors was a famous artist called George Burchett. The story is that Burchett was one of the first to try Winsor & Newton’s Winsor Blue and Winsor Green paints. When Burchett died in 1953 his company continued to sell pigments bought from L. Cornelissen & Sons artists’ supplies shop in London—according to Lionel Titchener, who is head of the Tattoo Club of Great Britain and also founder of the British Tattoo History Museum in Oxford which, when I visited, was in an untidy state in his back room, owing to artifact overflow. Titchener confirmed that by the late 1950s, U.K. tattooists were beginning to import pigments from the United States—they had all gone through a laboratory test to make sure they were safe. And by the mid 1970s very few tattooists were using artists’ pigments for their colors. “In the early 1970s, Ronald Scutt published his book Skin Deep, the mystery of tattooing,” Titchener told me. “He did some research on the pigments, and sent me a list of Winsor & Newton colors that he considered were safe to use for tattooing.” The colors used today are similar to the Winsor Blue and Green used in the old days “but today they are all laboratory tested, to check for any harmful impurities.”