Colour

Medieval alchemists kept the recipe for this brilliant red a guarded secret

The story of vermilion, a brilliant red with a mysterious past

Vermilion might just be the colour of magic. A full red,

usually slightly on the cool side, it is so saturated that it seems to pulsate. And, because bright hues, and reds in particular, have been in demand since prehistory, it is shrouded in mystery and romance.

Also known as cinnabar and, if you’re a chemist, mercury sulphide, vermilion is a naturally occurring chemical compound, but it is relatively rare. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote that it had ‘sacred associations’ and was smeared on the faces of statues of Jupiter on holy days. In the early decades of the 1st century AD, around 2,000 pounds of Spanish cinnabar was sent, under guard, to Rome each year.

Luckily for early colour lovers, a method for manufacturing synthetic vermilion was discovered as early as the 4th century BC in China, where it was used to make lacquers and was associated with the vermilion bird, a beautiful mythical creature similar to a phoenix that represented summer and the element fire. It took many centuries for the method to become common knowledge in Europe, however, because the alchemists who made it guarded the formula so jealously. Nevertheless, by the 12th century, the secret was out. Around 1122, a Benedictine monk named Theophilus wrote a treatise that described the process like a witch’s spell. Precise amounts of sulphur and mercury were weighed out and mixed, then put into a carefully sealed jar and buried in hot coals. ‘ You will hear a crashing noise inside,’ he wrote, ‘as the mercury unites with the blazing sulphur’.

For those who could get their hands on vermilion, it became a crucial, even revered, pigment, despite an occasional tendency to blacken in humid air. It was the red beloved by medieval illuminators, and can be seen in all its strident glory in Masaccio’s Saints Jerome and John the Baptist (1428–29) at the National Gallery. Its powerful, look-at-me character has also made it a favourite for 3D structures and objects, too. It was the pigment frequently used to colour lipstick-red Chinese lacquerware from the 3rd century BC (this is the reason for yet another alias of vermilion’s: Chinese red). The ancient Fushimi Inari Taisha temple in Kyoto is famous for its pathways studded with thickets of vermilion-painted torii, or gates. More recently, Anish Kapoor has used the colour in his wax-based works, such as the personal My Red Homeland (2003). It was also the colour Sir Anthony Caro chose for his iconic abstract sculpture Early One Morning (1962). This piece represented a radical departure for the artist and the colour was crucial. It made the sculpture ‘ look straightforward’, Caro said, totally unlike the bronzes and marbles so beloved by traditionalists. It was a bold statement, and vermilion was the ideal colour with which to make it.

A full red, usually slightly on the cool side, vermilion is shrouded in mystery and romance