Bloody, glorious history of red

In 1519, amid the more conventional blood-stained booty he was looting from the Aztecs, Hernan Cortes shipped a new dyestuff to Spain. According to Amy Butler Greenfield’s delightful, rollicking history of cochineal, it produced “the brightest, strongest red the old world had ever seen.” The conquistadors called it “grana cochinilla”: the pulverized bodies of a female cactus-eating insect, Dactylopius coccus, native to tropical and subtropical America.

Seventy thousand of these insects make 1 pound of cochineal. Today, we are as likely as not to find a tiny bottle of it at the back of the kitchen cupboard ready for us to add a red hue to cakes or icing -- or, in dire emergency, to use for a lipstick substitute, as in Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” when newly married Sybil Chase runs short. (Though if the insecure 23-year-old had known she was smearing crushed tropical insects on her lips, she might have been less happy.) So widespread is its use as a food industry colorant that in Europe it has its own additive E number, E120.

As Greenfield tells it, and she tells it with verve in “A Perfect Red,” this domesticity is only the latest stage in the turbulent and often violent history of (what she passionately believes is) the greatest of natural dyes. In terms of dyeing materials red, there is “before cochineal” and “after”: before, an unpredictable and transient color; after, certain and eternal.

The turning point for red arrived with the brutal colonization of Mexico. The journey from stately Spanish galleon to today’s kitchen cupboard involved piracy on the high seas, the reshaping of Europe, comically inept state-sponsored commercial espionage, the great voyages of discovery of the Enlightenment, the competition for empire and what we might call botanical imperialism. Phony intelligence on cochineal’s nature and whereabouts has a comforting place too in the account of how other European governments attempted to break Spain’s monopoly.

Up to the late 19th century, red meant cochineal, whether for materials or artists’ palettes. Then, a nemesis arrived in the shape of fast-developing industrial chemistry, coloring the world with synthetic aniline dyes as well as supplying generals with poison gas.

That might be enough for one book. However, coming from a family of dyers, Greenfield is involved, and involves us, in both the ancient crafts of dyeing and the cultural significance of color through the ages, particularly red. It certainly plays a part in coloring the language. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable offers six columns of “red” idioms. Moreover, throughout history red has signified elite status. Roman generals parading in triumph had their faces painted red to associate them with the gods. Recently, scenes from the funeral of Pope John Paul II filled television screens worldwide with the brilliant red robes worn by cardinals, the princes of the Roman Catholic Church.

So, as well as traversing a gallery containing native people and their oppressors, secretive dyers, kings, pirates, spies and chemists, Greenfield takes us -- anecdotally at least -- into luxury and its social role. Beginning with early modern sumptuary laws that linked permissible display to status, we move on through class and the commercialization of fashion to wind up with the 21st century power play of color codes. Red signals Jezebel on the movie screen, but media advisors also tell women it is the color of confidence for the television interview.

Incidentally, “man” is the primary meaning of the Hebrew “adam”; red is “adom.” It’s rather odd to find in Greenfield’s book Seurat listed between Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner; the Madras physician general Dr. James Anderson was a more adventurous importer of foreign plants and Sir William Perkin remained far more significant in chemistry after retiring from business than either are allowed here. And her statement that “in classical Rome” powerful men were “called coccinati: the ones who wear red” is bold on the back of only one reported use of “coccinatus” as a noun in Latin literature.

Linking her themes is no easy task, and it can’t be said that Greenfield has managed it with ease. And with that in mind, we might query what narrative “A Perfect Red” intends us to follow. Foregrounding the dyestuff makes for a fun read, well-supported by extensive research, but it also entails a loss of historical meaning. Is this a story of colonization -- destruction, exploitation, liberation? (As described here, how cochineal farming helped to preserve the culture of Mexico’s native population, reduced by conquistador violence and disease from 29 million to 1 million is fascinating.) Or is all that only part of a wider narrative of global discovery and scientific enlightenment? Or is there a still wider theme where cochineal plays its part in the rise of the modern worldview? That’s left to the reader to ponder. *