Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: The Color Blue About this episode This 2019 episode covers the color blue, the most popular color in many parts of the world. But many ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue, and some languages still don’t.
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2:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. This week on Unearthed, we talked about Anatolia's oldest-known indigo-dyed textile, and that reminded me that once we did an entire episode about the history of the color blue, which of course, talked about indigo as a dye.
2:30 Holly Frey? This one is a live show that we did at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in September of 2019. And this episode came out on October 16, 2019. Enjoy.
2:44 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:58 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Today, we are sharing our live show from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which we did in September as part of their NGA Nights programming.
3:08 Holly Frey? And we actually did this show twice over the course of the evening, so that more people who attended that event, which is very popular, could get in and see it. And so today, we are sharing the first of those two.
3:18 Tracy V. Wilson? We're not going to share the second one, because it would effectively be the exact same show.
3:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:30 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
3:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Blue is my favorite color, and that makes me not special.
3:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Blue is the most popular color in a lot of the world. For example, there was a survey that was conducted in 2015 that polled people in Britain, Germany, the United States, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. And in all of those places, blue was the most popular color by a significant margin. So I am not alone in the world in my love of blue. It can also feel like we're really surrounded by blue all the time, because we have the blue sky and the reflection of the sky in the water, and then things like blue jeans, and then all the blue stuff that people buy, because it's everyone's favorite color. And yet, a lot of ancient languages did not have a word for blue at all.
4:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Some languages still don't. For a lot of human history, the process of making blue dyes and paints has been pretty prohibitively expensive and complicated if people knew how to do it at all. So, blue used to be really rare. And today, we're going to talk about blue's progression from something that there wasn't even a name for, because it was so rare, to something that seems really ubiquitous. And like Tracy just said, there were a lot of ancient languages that just had no word for blue whatsoever. And this is something that folks started figuring out, thanks to William Ewer Gladstone, who spent four terms as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1868 and 1894. But he had also studied classics at Oxford.
5:04 Tracy V. Wilson? And 10 years before he became Prime Minister, he published a 600-plus-page book that was called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. And it had a whole section in it titled, "Homer's Perceptions and Use of Color." I really like that one of the jobs that you can have had before being Prime Minister is classicist. That seems cool. I feel like if we had more of that and less of other things, you'd be in great shape.
5:31 Tracy V. Wilson? So, in this section of the book, Gladstone outlined what he interpreted as signs of immaturity, that was one of his words for it, and Homer's ability to differentiate color. And here is what he said. "One, the paucity of his colors. Two, the use of the same words to denote not only different hues or tints of the same color, but colors which, according to us, are essentially different. Three, the description of the same object under epithets of color fundamentally disagreeing with one another. Four, the vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms of color, black and white, over every other, and the decided tendency to treat other colors as simply intermediates between those two extremes.
6:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Five, the slight use of color in Homer as compared with other elements of beauty for the purposes of poetic effect, and its absence in certain cases, we might confidently expect it."
6:26 Holly Frey? So in other words, Homer's use of color descriptors seemed kind of contradictory, and frankly, just haphazard. Homer's works mostly referred to things as black or white, and sometimes referred to the same object using different color descriptors at different times. Or he would describe things with strange colors, like he described both blood and a rainbow with a word that translates essentially as violet, or calling the sea wine dark, which I know maybe he got criticized for, but it sounds very poetic to me. Homer's writing also seems to have had no word that specifically meant blue. And side note, there is actually a lot of debate as well about whether all of the writing that is attributed to Homer
7:09 Holly Frey? now was really the work of one person, or if there are multiple people involved that all kind of fell into this umbrella. But that is a whole different story and way outside the scope of what we're talking about tonight. But just keep that in mind as we talk about Homer's work.
7:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, regardless of whether Homer was one person or many people, this whole conversation led to some discussion about whether people in the Homeric Age were colorblind, or otherwise were perceiving color differently than sighted people in the 19th century when Gladstone was writing. And we'll get back to that idea. This also led to further study about how ancient writers were describing and naming colors. And it quickly became clear that other ancient writings also had odd uses of color, including not having a word for the color blue.
7:57 Holly Frey? Researchers studied these language patterns for decades. And then in 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Key published Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. And basic color terms are essentially single words that can be applied to a wide range of objects and are understood by most native speakers of a given language. So in English, for example, there are all kinds of words describing different shades and hues, but there are actually only 11 basic color terms. And those are red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink, and thank goodness, purple.
8:32 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the important things about basic color terms is that like there's an agreed on shade that they are describing. So even though violet was one of the words that Homer was using, like the fact that it was sort of being applied to seemingly random objects would mean that that wasn't really functioning as a basic color word or a basic color term. All the languages that Berlin and Kay studied had a minimum of two basic color terms, black and white, sometimes described as light and dark. And here is something that I think is really cool. In languages that had three basic color terms, the third one was red. In languages with four, the fourth one was either yellow or green. And then the other of those was the fifth one in languages that had five.
9:14 Tracy V. Wilson? It's only when a language had six basic color terms that it had a color term for blue. And then from there, the pattern didn't hold up much farther. There was brown as the seventh color. And then colors beyond that just followed in no particular order.
9:30 Holly Frey? And this 1969 work had studied a relatively small group of bilingual people, all of whom spoke English, and most of them lived in industrial areas. And this naturally led to a lot of discussion and questions about whether these results could really be considered universal. So in the late 1970s, Berlin and Kay started working on their World Color Survey, which asked more than 2,500 native speakers of unwritten languages around the world to identify various colors.
9:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Berlin and Kay published a monograph on this in July of 2009. And they reported that more than 80% of the world's languages followed this pattern of black and white, and then red, and then yellow or green, and then the other one of those, and then blue. And these ancient languages without a word for blue seemed to follow these same patterns. A lot of them have the black, white, and red, and that's it.
10:24 Holly Frey? Sounds like my wedding. Not at all like Game of Thrones and way before that. There has been a lot of research since then into why this pattern actually exists and how to interpret all of this information. And there's also been research into whether that pattern is evidence that ancient people saw fewer colors, like William Ewart Gladstone suggested, as well as whether people living today, whose languages have fewer color terms, are actually perceiving fewer colors, or if they're perceiving them differently.
10:53 Tracy V. Wilson? So a lot of that research is really contradictory and inconclusive. There are lots of questions that we don't have 100% agreed upon answers to yet, like, are there physiological differences in the eyes or brains of people who speak languages that include different numbers of basic color terms? There's some research that suggests yes, and other research that suggests no. If there are physiological differences, are those differences a result of the language differences, or is it the other way around? How much of this is physiological? How much is socially constructed? Are colors, as cited, people perceive them, universal? Or are they relative?
11:34 Holly Frey? And it might seem a little bit weird, that there are so many unanswered questions about colors, because it's really easy to imagine that colors are unchanging physical traits. I know a purple looks like it's purple. But it's true, there's an element of physics to all of this. Isaac Newton started working with the visible spectrum of light in the 1660s, and he used a prism to refract sunlight into a spectrum that he described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But before this, societies around the world had their own ideas about what light was made of and where colors came from. And even Newton's work, which became the foundation of how we all talk about color and light, was influenced by his own preconceived ideas.
12:18 Holly Frey? For example, the reason that there is an indigo in his list is because he just thought there needed to be seven colors.
12:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, there's seven days of the week, seven notes in a musical scale, seven's like an auspicious number. Clearly, there have to be seven colors. So in other words, colors just aren't static, unchanging traits that exist all by themselves. Our understanding of colors is socially constructed, and the way people describe the colors around them can vary dramatically based on language and culture. Societies give colors their own symbolic meanings, and those meanings change and evolve over time in response to all kinds of factors, including what pigments are available, how expensive those pigments are, whether there were laws about how they could be used, and what's in fashion at the moment.
13:05 Holly Frey? So when we look back into colors in the past, this can, of course, get really complicated. An ancient culture may have had no word for blue, and if they did, it might have been used for a different range of shades than an English speaker living today might imagine. And even if we have examples of that culture's physical objects, like jewelry, or textiles, or works of art, their colors can change over time, thanks to things like fading and oxidation, and just dirt getting on them. And exactly how they fade and shift can really vary, depending on what an object is made of, what pigment was used to color it, the binders that were used with those pigments, how it was handled since then, and what pollutants have been in the air, and on and on. There are so many factors.
13:49 Tracy V. Wilson? On top of all of that, when we look at a work of art, especially a work of art that was made long ago in the past, we are almost certainly seeing it under totally different lighting conditions than the artist who created had when they were making it.
14:03 Holly Frey? And one of the hypotheses for why so many ancient languages did not have a word for blue is that they just didn't need one. Most ancient cultures did not have a way to make blue pigment. And while there is blue in nature, of course, thanks to things like flowers, and berries, and butterflies, and birds, and the sky, it's not nearly as common as other colors are. And we're going to talk about how people worked out a way to make their own blue after we first pause for what will be a little sponsor break.
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17:12 Tracy V. Wilson? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
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18:20 Tracy V. Wilson? We're going to talk a bit about paints and pigments. If you look at some Paleolithic rock art and cave art, you will notice a pretty similar use of color, no matter where in the world you're looking, because the palette tends to be really earthy. There's lots of brown and yellow and red and black. And there are naturally occurring pigments that produce these colors and are pretty abundant in a lot of the world, like ochre, which is made from iron oxide and various earthy materials. Different cultures have had their own ceremonial and symbolic methods of preparing and using these pigments. But basically, you can really just grind up some rocks and put water in there and paint with it.
18:58 Holly Frey? Did you ever have a teacher, like an art teacher, have you do that?
19:00 Tracy V. Wilson? I think so, probably.
19:01 Holly Frey? We did that a lot. You can't really do that with blue, though, it turns out. There are not many blue minerals, and the ones that do exist typically cannot just be crushed and mixed with water, like you could do with ochre. Mashing up blueberries or blue flowers might seem like a great idea, and you could try to use that and paint with it, but it's actually usually going to turn out kind of brownish or gray, and often it's also going to fade really quickly. So you're going to lose that blue color you were chasing. And ancient peoples could carve objects out of blue stones, or minerals, or shells, or make decorative objects with feathers, but that was about it. Even substances like lapis lazuli, which were eventually made into pigments, were first used just primarily to make carvings and inlays, rather than actually trying to use them as dyes or paints.
19:46 Tracy V. Wilson? So that changed with the development of the first synthetic pigment, which happened by about 3100 BCE. That came to be known as Egyptian blue. And according to Roman writer Vitruvius, it was made from sand, copper, and natron, which is a naturally occurring sodium carbonate compound. Modern experiments have pinpointed the likely ingredients as silica, copper, and calcium. Usually the silica probably came from sand, and the calcium came from limestone, although it was also possible for sand to include calcite or flecks of limestone itself. So these ingredients had to be mixed with a small amount of alkali, and then be heated to between 850 and 1,000 degrees Celsius.
20:28 Tracy V. Wilson? And when we were running through this script earlier today, I went, is that right? That seems incredibly hot. And I was in my hotel room, as we were getting ready, confirming it with like five different sources, yes, it was that hot.
20:43 Holly Frey? Which just seems like it would all be on fire to me, but that's why I'm not a scientist. We don't really know who worked out this recipe, or what their process was for figuring it out. We don't know if it was an accidental discovery, or if it was the result of a more methodical process to try to get to this, this final result. It may have been developed even outside of Egypt, possibly in Mesopotamia.
21:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it's, it could have been anywhere on a spectrum between like, the kids threw some sand in the kiln, to, I'm going to figure this out, like.
21:14 Holly Frey? No idea.
21:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Lot of room. Egyptian blue was used in Egyptian art from its discovery until the end of the Roman era, and there is still a lot of artwork that exists today that was made with it. The blue coloring isn't necessarily visible on all of it, though. In 2009, it was discovered that Egyptian blue has a near-infrared luminescence that can help researchers find traces of it that aren't visible to the naked eye anymore. So about that same time, conservation scientists used that discovery to confirm that there are traces of Egyptian blue on the Parthenon marbles.
21:50 Holly Frey? And we have artwork where we can see this pigment that is at least 3,000 years old, and the pigment itself has held up. The binders that have been used with it have not always fared as well, though. For example, pieces that used a lot of gum arabic as a binder have tended to blacken or turn green over time.
22:08 Tracy V. Wilson? The Egyptian term for Egyptian blue translates to "artificial lapis lazuli", and the next pigment we're going to talk about is ultramarine, which was made out of lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli is a metamorphic rock that's found primarily in one place in the eastern hemisphere, and that's the premier mountains in Central Asia. People in what's now Afghanistan were mining lapis as early as 7,000 BCE, and by 3,500 BCE, it was being carried thousands of miles along trade routes through Asia and Europe and Africa.
22:41 Holly Frey? And as we said earlier, the first uses of lapis lazuli were mostly to make carved objects and inlays. Although lapis could be crushed into powder and used as a pigment, that pigment was not very pure, because lapis is made up of a mixture of different minerals, and these minerals, depending on what their concentrations were, would all affect the final color. So if there were impurities present, and again, those concentrations, different lapis preparations could look completely different from one another. And then, they would also look completely different over time. People still tried it, though. There is evidence of lapis being used as a paint in the Karnak Temple complex in Egypt.
23:20 Tracy V. Wilson? By about the 6th century, though, people had worked out how to purify lapis lazuli into a pure blue pigment now known as ultramarine. Unlike with Egyptian blue, we do have the recipe for this one. Artist and writer Chinino Chinini, who lived between about 1370 and 1440, wrote the process down in a lot of detail.
23:41 Holly Frey? And you may have heard that ultramarine was worth more than gold, and Chinino Chinini's method really illustrates why. It wasn't just because lapis lazuli was only being mined in one area of Afghanistan at the time. The process was also long and really complicated, and it yielded a very small amount of usable pigment.
24:00 Tracy V. Wilson? So here's how he described it in his book of art. Quote, "First, take some lapis lazuli. And if you would know how to distinguish the best stones, take those which contain most of the blue color. So it is, for it is mixed with what is like ashes. That which contains least of this ash pigment is best. But be careful that you do not mistake it for azuro della magna, which is beautiful to the eye as enamel."
24:25 Holly Frey? Azuro della magna is azurite, which is copper carbonate material that was being used to make blue pigments during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, although it was hard to mine and it was also tricky to work with. But it was cheaper than ultramarine, although it was not as stable or vibrant as a pigment.
24:42 Tracy V. Wilson? So going back to the recipe, once you've got your lapis lazuli, you pound it in a bronze mortar, covered so that the dust doesn't just fly out. You grind it, and you strain it, and you sift it, and you pound it, quote, "again as much as is required." But bear in mind that though, that though the more you grind, the more finely powdered the azuro will be, yet it will not be so beautiful and rich and deep in color.
25:06 Holly Frey? And all of this pounding and grinding and straining and sifting was difficult because lapis lazuli is physically hard to pulverize. And this was also just the beginning. He went on to write, quote, "When the powder is prepared, procure from the druggist six ounces of resin of the pine, three ounces of mastic, and three ounces of new wax to each pound of lapis lazuli. Put all these ingredients into..." To a new pipkin and melt them together. Then take a piece of white linen and strain these things into a glazed basin. Then take a pound of the powder of lapis lazuli. Mix it all well together into a paste and that you may be able to handle the paste. Take linseed oil and keep your hands always well anointed with this oil.
25:49 Holly Frey? This paste must be kept at least three days and three nights, kneading it a little every day. And remember that you may keep it for 15 days or a month or as long as you please.
26:01 Tracy V. Wilson? I like how it's like three days, but like forever is cool. Yeah. It's totally fine. Also, it's not lapis lazuli yet, or it's not ultramarine yet. You still need to extract the pigment from the paste that you just made and left from between three days and forever. You do this by putting the paste in a glazed basin, quote, "with a poringerful of lye moderately warm." And then you work that with two rounded wooden sticks. So he describes this, quote, "With these two sticks, one in each hand, turn and squeeze and knead the paste thoroughly exactly in the manner that you would knead bread." Now, I need to take a minute.
26:42 Tracy V. Wilson? I've never used sticks to knead bread.
26:46 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm picturing someone just poking at it.
26:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Like even in a bread machine, it's a paddle. Like that.
26:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay, so sticks, as you would knead bread. When you see that the lye is thoroughly blue, pour it, pour it into a glazed basin. Take the same quantity of fresh lye, pour it over the paste and work it with the sticks as before. When this lye is very blue, pour it into another glazed basin and continue to do so for several days until the paste no longer tinges the lye. Then throw it away, for it is good for nothing.
27:23 Holly Frey? Hey, guess what? You still don't have ultramarine yet. The substance in each of these basins will be a different shade of blue, depending on when in the process you filled it. And you need to combine them together based on how many shades of ultramarine you are trying to make. You have to be careful when you're doing this. The basins that were filled first are the best quality. And, quote, "The last two extracts are worse than ashes. May your eyes therefore be experienced, so as not to spoil the good azure by mixing it with the bad, and each day remove the lie that the azure may dry."
27:56 Tracy V. Wilson? So from there, Tanini offers some advice about what to do if none of your ultramarine has the beautiful, deep color that you're expecting. And essentially, that's mixing it with a little bit of crimson dye and allowing that all to dry again. Then, once you have your finished ultramarine, we get to the part of this that is the unexpected sexism moment of the show. Quote, "Put it into a Skinner purse and rejoice in it, for it is good and perfect. And bear in mind that it is a rare gift to know how to make it well. And you must know that it is rather the art of maidens than of men to make it, because they remain continually in the house and are more patient and their hands more delicate. But beware of old women."
28:40 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm just out here ruining your aquamarine.
28:44 Holly Frey? Yeah, I don't, I don't think he'd be cool with me making his aquamarine. Or ultramarine, rather. Ultramarine is beautiful and expensive and rare. So during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was mostly used by the most skilled, respected artists and artisans. Some artists would try to make it stretch by saving their ultramarine for their last final touches on whatever work they were making. And others used ultramarine only on subjects that seemed worthy of it. And this is when blue started to take on a symbolic meaning, such as the color of the Virgin Mary's clothing. And you can also see an example of this here in the National Gallery of Art in Raphael's The Album Madonna, which was created in about 1510. That is on view in Gallery 20 of the main floor of the West Building.
29:29 Holly Frey? That is the other building from where we are tonight. That is a very good reason for you to come back to this amazing place.
29:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, don't try to go over there right now. That building is closed.
29:37 Holly Frey? You'll get in all the trouble. Some artists, though, dated neither of these things to try to conserve it or make it stretch. An example is Johannes Vermeer, who just spent enormous amounts of money on ultramarine and used it extensively everywhere. The Vermeers are in Gallery 50A of the West Building, also still the other building.
29:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Spectacular. They are beautiful.
30:00 Holly Frey? I get the vapors over Saint Vermeer. You can see them on the internet also.
30:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
30:04 Holly Frey? Thanks to its colossal expense and rarity, people were really eager for some kind of substitute for ultramarine. It needed to be equally good quality, but also cheaper and easier to get. In 1824, the French Society for the Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize of 6,000 francs to whoever figured out an industrial process to make synthetic ultramarine. And it also had to cost less than 300 francs a kilogram. And there were two competing claims on this prize, which was ultimately awarded to Jean-Baptiste Guimet in 1828, and that is made from cow urine, sodium carbonate, bitumen, and sulfur prepared and heated in a furnace or kiln.
30:45 Tracy V. Wilson? So, once there was this widely available, much less expensive, blue pigment, the color blue became way more common in artwork and for more mundane topics a lot of the time. By the start of the Impressionist movement, most painters were working in synthetic ultramarine rather than made from lapis lazuli. And then we get all those beautiful Monets that are all full of blue everywhere.
31:06 Holly Frey? To be clear, ultramarine was not the only blue pigment that was in use at this point. Cobalt blue was introduced in 1802 and cerulean blue in the 1860s. Prussian blue had been developed back at the start of the 1700s, quite by accident. There is some fuzziness as to the details about this, but the conventional story is that an alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel was working with podash and animal blood. And Johann Jakob Diesbach was a dye maker who used podash as part of making a red dye. And Diesbach ran out and he either bought or borrowed some from Dippel. And it was the podash that had been adulterated with animal blood. And because of this, instead of making the red dye that he was expecting, Diesbach wound up with a vivid blue.
31:51 Tracy V. Wilson? I like to imagine that he was like, "He won't notice if I just take some of it." Oh, give it. Why is this blue now? Tippel used his knowledge of chemistry to work out how to replicate these box results. And then another man, Johann Leonard Frisch, also claims to have invented this in a letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Liebnetz in 1715. Although these men tried to keep their recipe a secret so they could cash in on the incredibly lucrative blue pigment trade, John Woodward published a method of making it in 1724 so anybody could make as much as they wanted.
32:24 Holly Frey? And the development of Prussian blue, also sometimes called Berlin blue, affected the use of blue in artwork, much the way that synthetic ultramarine did. For example, it led to a whole style of woodblock prints in Japan called aiizurie. Those were printed mostly or entirely in blue. And these prints made use of Prussian blue as well as indigo and other blue pigments. And a particularly famous example is Katuzhiko Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji. That includes the great wave of Konagawa. And the first prints of this series were all in blue. And blue is really prominent in the rest of them that are not those first ones that are 100% blue.
33:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I love that whole series. And hey, we just mentioned indigo, which means that's a good segue into talking about the mysteries of blue dyes, which we're going to do after another quick break.
33:48 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
34:30 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:51 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
35:36 Holly Frey? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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36:51 Tracy V. Wilson? In a lot of the world, the oldest surviving examples of dyed textiles are dyed red. But blue dye has been around for a pretty long time as well. One example is tachylit, which is mentioned repeatedly in Jewish scripture and was in use at least 3,500 years ago. Knowledge of how to make it was lost sometime after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and today its source is believed to be a secretion made by marine snails.
37:20 Holly Frey? Other blue dyes are even older. In 2016, researchers announced that they had dated a piece of cotton textile found in Huaca, Peru, and found that it was 6,200 years old. It had been dyed with indigo, making it the oldest known use of indigo dye and one of the oldest surviving cotton textiles. And there were other blue dyes in the Americas as well. For example, there is evidence that the Navajo Nation had a natively-produced blue plant dye, which was eventually replaced with indigo that was introduced from further south in what is now Mexico.
37:52 Tracy V. Wilson? So today, indigo is more often associated with what's now India, but the plant genus Indigofera includes hundreds of flowering plants that live in tropical and subtropical areas all around the world. And a lot of them can and have been used to make purple and blue dyes. Indigo has been used to make paints as well. For example, Maya Blue was used as a paint in pre-colonial Mesoamerica, and that was made from indigo and a clay called paligor scite, and at least one other ingredient whose, or at least one other ingredient whose identity is still a little bit debated.
38:26 Holly Frey? And as another example of usage, Peter Paul Rubens used both ultramarine and indigo in the fall of Fayetteon, which is here at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building's Gallery 45. Melanie Gifford, who is a research conservator here, described his process in painting this to us in an email. She said Rubens used indigo paint, indigo to paint the sky while working on the painting in Italy in 1604. And then when he revised the painting in Antwerp a few years later, he switched to the brighter ultramarine.
38:57 Tracy V. Wilson? So when it comes to making dye, the historical details of how the plants were processed and how the dye was used could really vary based on where the indigo was being grown. Often, the steps had a cultural or religious significance. And regardless of the specifics, it tended to be a pretty involved process that required a whole lot of plant material to make a very small amount of dye.
39:20 Holly Frey? And as an example, here is how indigo was processed in Suriname, as described by John Gabriel Stedman. Quote, "When all the verdure is cut off, the whole crop is tied in bunches and put into a very large tub with water, covered over with very heavy logs of wood by way of pressers. Thus kept, it begins to ferment. In less than 18 hours, the water seems to boil and becomes of a violet or garter blue color, extracting all the grain or coloring matter from the plant. In this situation, the liquor is drawn off into another tub, which is something less, when the remaining trash is carefully picked up and thrown away. And the very noxious smell of this refuse, it is that occasions
40:00 Holly Frey? the peculiar unhealthiness, which is always incident to this business. Being now in the second tub, the mash is agitated by paddles adapted for the purpose." Not just pokey sticks. Till by a skillful maceration, all the grain separates from the water. The first sinking like mud to the bottom while the latter separates, while the latter appears clear and transparent on the surface. This water being carefully removed till near the colored mass. The remaining liquor is drawn oft into a third tub to let what indigo it may contain also settle in the bottom. After which the last drops of water here being also removed, the sediment or indigo is put into proper vessels to dry,
40:43 Holly Frey? where being divested of its last remaining moisture and formed into small, round and oblong square pieces. It has become a beautiful, dark blue and fit for exportation. It's a lot of work.
40:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, all these, I'm like, do we, do we need the blue though?
40:59 Holly Frey? I know, I would be, so I'd be like, any other color, I'm out, I can't.
41:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Fortunately, today we have chemistry and chemists do these things. Rather than having, I mean, you can still mash a lot of plants and get indigo dye. People do that, some of them for fun.
41:15 Tracy V. Wilson? As a cool side note, when you dye something with true indigo, made from indigo plants, it is green when it comes out of the vat and then it turns blue while it's exposed to the air.
41:24 Holly Frey? Magic chemistry.
41:26 Tracy V. Wilson? It looks really cool.
41:27 Holly Frey? Indigo was being cultivated in the Indian subcontinent by 2000 BCE and indico became an important part of the spice trade. During processing, the plant's leaves were pulverized into a paste and the extracted dye was shaped into blocks and dried. And these resulting blocks were so stone-like that when they arrived in Europe, people actually assumed that they were some kind of stone similar to lapis.
41:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Indigo wasn't that common in Europe until after an Indian navigator led Vasco da Gama to a sea route to the Indian subcontinent in 1498. And before that point, woad was more commonly used as a blue dye in Europe. This was also known as pastel. That can make reading old dye manuals a little confusing for people who aren't familiar with that term being used in that way, rather than for crayons made out of powdery pigment or light colors.
42:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Woad is also a flowering plant that requires an involved process to be made into a dye. Ethel M. Meritz, a book on vegetable dyes which was published in 1919, described it this way. Quote, "The leaves, when cut, are reduced to a paste, kept in heaps for about 15 days to ferment, and formed into balls which are dried in the sun. These balls are subjected to a further fermentation of nine weeks before you being used by the dyer."
42:46 Holly Frey? Seems less complicated, but also nine weeks of further fermentation. Well, it could be forever.
42:52 Tracy V. Wilson? It could be forever. When the indigo, when indigo became more accessible in Europe after 1498, it really upended the dye industry. This was at a time when various crafts and trades are being regulated through the guild system in a lot of Europe. Dyers guilds had very strong opinions about this sudden availability of indigo dye. Although processing the indigo plants into a dye was very difficult and time consuming, it was getting to Europe ready to use, rather than people in Europe having to be the ones to make it ready to use. The resulting dye was also a lot easier to work with than woad, and it made a better quality blue overall.
43:32 Holly Frey? As indigo dye became more available, guilds and governments in Europe had to negotiate a sudden shift in supply and demand. Blue had already been increasing in popularity as people had gotten better at processing woad into a good quality dye. But then with this influx of indigo, more people wanted blue cloth for everything, from clothing to coats of arms. And it got to the point that in places where dyeing and weaving had been completely different trades governed by totally different guilds, weavers started to be allowed to dye their own cloth, but only if they were dyeing it blue.
44:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Meanwhile, indigo was being banned in various parts of Europe as dyers tried to protect their trade, and regions whose economies depended on growing and processing woad tried to protect their livelihoods. Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II published an edict against indigo in 1577 in which he called it cheating, corrosive, devouring, and diabolical. Seems pretty harsh.
44:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Indigo was prohibited in parts of France and Germany in 1598 and in Saxony in 1650, and then Rome prohibited the use of indigo throughout Italy in 1652.
44:45 Holly Frey? I kind of agree with Rudolph II. I just, indigo's not for me.
44:51 Holly Frey? No shade to anybody that loves indigo. I'm just kidding. It's fine. It shouldn't be illegal. On the other hand, Queen Elizabeth I banned the cultivation of woad in England in 1585. Although people disparagingly say that this was an issue because she thought it smelled bad, what this was really about was being motivated by fears that food crops were being displaced by this newly cultivated and lucrative woad.
45:15 Tracy V. Wilson? So these laws didn't stop the spread of indigo into Europe, or the rise of blue as a popular color in textiles and art, both because of the availability of indigo and because of the introductions of those blue pigments that we had talked about earlier. Before the 14th century, about 75% of the dyeing manuals in Europe had been about the color red, and then blue became more and more common in these manuals from the 15th through the 18th centuries with the increased availability of indigo and other blue pigments. And eventually, blue overtook red. And apprentice dyers, when they did their masterpiece to show that they were ready to practice their craft on their own, had to do their masterpiece in blue dye rather than red.
46:00 Holly Frey? The consequences of this skyrocketing popularity of indigo blue in Europe were far reaching. Indigo was one of the primary exports of what is now India. So as Britain colonized the Indian subcontinent, British colonial policies became tightly intertwined with the indigo industry. And this affected everything from human rights to the movement for India's independence from Britain, as farmers who were forced to grow indigo demanded to be allowed to grow food crops instead.
46:27 Tracy V. Wilson? And then on the total other side of the planet, indigo became a major crop in parts of the Americas, where it was being grown and harvested and processed by enslaved laborers. The description that we read earlier on how indigo was being processed in Suriname actually Came from a book that was titled, quote, "Narrative of Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam." And that recounted Stedman's experiences in Surinam from 1772 to 1777. And much of the Caribbean indigo was later replaced by sugarcane, and it became a major cash crop in South Carolina, where it was introduced by Eliza Lucas Pinkney. Pinkney relied on the knowledge and, and skill of enslaved laborers to refine how the
47:12 Tracy V. Wilson? indigo there was being cultivated and processed.
47:14 Holly Frey? And synthetic indigo was developed in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that it really just became super practical to make. Today's synthetic indigo is almost entirely, has almost entirely replaced indigo that is made from plant sources.
47:28 Tracy V. Wilson? And there are just so many other notable uses of blue that we could talk about in this show today. We haven't at all touched on blue glass or blue ceramics. There's the cobalt that was used to make, uh, that was used to make blue glass and glazes, or the blue and white porcelain that was so popular in China during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, or the many attempts to try to replicate that look that were made in Europe and North America. There is blue Jasperware that was developed by Josiah Wedgwood. If we had taken a different focus, we could have had a totally different look at the color blue today, rather
48:06 Tracy V. Wilson? than having the focus be on paints and dyes. And that's the mysteries of the color blue. So, thank you to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, for inviting us to be here tonight.
48:20 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's been such a delight, and we get to do it all again in a minute.
48:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, so we especially wanted to thank Sherri Williams, who is the manager of community programming, and Christina Brown, who's publicist, and then Melanie Gifford and Chelsea Souza, who were the people that we talked to in advance of tonight. And then we also wanted to thank the folks that we have been working with tonight. So Kathleen walked around with us a lot.
48:43 Holly Frey? Yeah, taking care of us. Robert, who's here in the front, took great care of us leading up to this.
48:47 Tracy V. Wilson? And then I think Olivia's back in the back doing sound.
48:50 Holly Frey? Making me not sound like a cackling hen.
48:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Ha! So, thanks so much, everyone, for coming.
48:57 Holly Frey? Yeah.
49:06 Holly Frey? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
49:28 Holly Frey? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
50:05 Speaker 05 Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
50:33 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
51:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.
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