Allison Davis

  After a few seconds in my hand the bits I had touched were bruised—after being pressed in my Spanish pocket dictionary for more than a year the whole flower is now almost diaphanous. “It’s like the wedding gown of a prostitute,” a Spaniard once said, and I don’t disagree. Finlay, Victoria. Color (pp. 247-248). Random House Publishing Group.

  Ancient Egyptians used it to dye mummy wrappings and to turn their ceremonial ointments an oily orange. They valued it so much that they put garlands of safflowers entwined with willow leaves in their relatives’ tombs, to comfort them after death. Finlay, Victoria. Color (pp. 193-194). finding that if he fed pigeons on madder their bones would become red in a spread that was consistent with the theory that it was the calcium which was holding the color. Finlay, Victoria. Color (p. 204). If a mouse enters the hive then the bees will kill it. But because its body is too large for little insects to shift, and because they don’t want it to stink up their home, they mummify it in propolis. Finlay, Victoria. Color (pp. 208-209). Throughout the chapter, the themes of death and preservation kept catching my attention. The death of cochineal beetles discussed in the red chapter directly resulted in the presence of red pigment. Unlike cochineal, the materials to produce orange aren't the d...

But one of Turner’s favorite reds may well have been cinnabar— which he used in its manufactured form, vermilion, and which Pliny described as the result of an epic struggle by an elephant and a dragon. These two troublemakers were always fighting, Pliny recounted, and the battle eventually ended with the dragon—evidently a rather snaky one—wrapping its coils around its heavy enemy. But as the elephant fell it crushed the dragon with its weight and they both died. The merging of their blood made cinnabar. Finlay, Victoria. Color (p. 178). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.