The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLV:3 (Winter, 2015), 337–366.

Barbara C. Anderson Evidence of Cochineal’s Use in Painting The organic red dye known as cochineal has played a number of key roles in his- tory, most important as a superb colorant for animal-based textiles, especially silks and woolens, with a great range of hues and shades from purple to coral. Coveted for more than two millennia, its reach ultimately extended over the globe, providing handsome revenues wherever it was traded. This article concentrates on its use in painting before the nineteenth century.1

COCHINEAL’S DERIVATION The dye is extracted from the insect dactylopius coccus, the host for which is the nopal or opuntia cactus, originally indigenous only to South and Central America and Mexico. Long cultivated in Pre-Columbian Mexico, where it was used as a dye for rabbit fur and feathers, and as a lake pigment in mural, manuscript, and textile painting, it was also a major colorant in ancient Andean textiles, although no evidence is available to indicate that the insect had a domesticated presence in South America. Shortly after Hernando Cortés and his soldiers moved into Tenochtitlan, Bernal Díaz del Castillo recorded it among the dazzling array of goods available in the vast market, and many of the early European chroniclers of the New World’s offerings were aware of its allure. In illustrated documents of the early contact period, such as Codex Mendoza,thedye’s depiction as a primary source of tribute demonstrates its value.2 The exact species of dactylopius coccus was initially a mystery, fostering a debate about whether it was a worm or an insect. Only with the invention of the microscope in the late seventeenth century

Barbara C. Anderson retired in 2012 as the director of the Museum Resources Division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Previously she was head of exhibitions and consulting curator for Spanish and Latin American art at the Getty Research Institute. She is currently working on The Red that Colored the World, an exhibition opening in 2015 at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00722 1 Ana Roquero, Tintes y tintoreros de América: Catálogo de materias primas y registro etnográfico de México, Centro América, Andes Centrales y Selva Amazónica (Madrid, 2002); Elena Phipps, Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (New Haven, 2010). 2 Robin A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and the Opuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, V (1977), 1–8.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 338 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON were Europeans finally able to establish its true identity and to begin devising ways to wrest its control for their own gain. In fact, the cochineal bug was one of the first subjects of microscopic investiga- tion. Even today the identification of the substance in a work of art can be elusive since its organic nature precludes routine methods of analysis, including the most powerful microscopy (more on current techniques below).3

THE RISE OF COCHINEAL IN EUROPE When the emperor Charles V became aware of cochineal, he immediately appreciated its im- portance as a revenue source. It first saw export from Mexico to Spain during the 1540s and then to the rest of Europe and Asia, becoming the second-most profitable trade item from the New World after silver. Five main conditions in Europe favored the in- creasingly enthusiastic reception of cochineal: (1) a long-established, thriving textile industry based on silk and wool, to which cochineal took most readily, in northern and southern Europe from the Mid- dle Ages onward; (2) the loss of the murex shell source of purple dye, which popes and kings favored, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, leading to Pope Pius II’s decree in 1464 that made red the color of cardinals; (3) the discovery of an alum quarry in Tolfa, Italy, just after the primary source of the mordant critical for organic red dyes in the Ottoman Empire became un- available; (4) cochineal’s exceptional saturation and colorfastness, and its cultivation in Mexico, which enabled higher production levels than the labor-intensive manual hunting and gathering required for kermes and Polish cochineal, its rivals; (5) the devel- opment of lighter-weight fabrics in northern Europe during the fourteenth century to substitute for the heavier English wool that had become scarce.4 Color became increasingly desirable, and, by the sixteenth cen- tury, increasingly available via the “transoceanic shipping that

3 Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York, 2006), 143–156. 4 For the history of cochineal’s cultivation and commercial exploitation from various per- spectives, see Raymond Lee, “American Cochineal in European Commerce,” Journal of Modern History, XXIII (1951), 205–224; Donkin, “Spanish Red”;CarlosMarichal,“Mexican Cochineal and the European Demand for American Dyes,” in Steven Topik, idem, and Zephyr Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, 2006). Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571: The Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1978), 240.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 339 brought tropical dyestuffs to northern ports via the Atlantic coast, bypassing the Levantine bottleneck and undermining Italian mono- polies in the luxury trade.” Cochineal was the most highly prized of these dyestuffs. The trade networks for cochineal, which supplanted all other red insect dyes within a few decades of its arrival in Europe, are well known. Its main routes were first from New Spain to Seville and later, after 1520, to Cadiz. By the 1540s, it had reached France, Flanders, England, Livorno, Genoa, Florence, and Venice. From Venice it went to the Levant, Persia, Syria (especially Isfahan, Aleppo, and Damascus), Cairo, and India, as well as to Constantinople and the ports on the Black Sea and the Caspian region. By the 1570s, it had gone from New Spain to East Asia via Acapulco and the Philippines.5

COCHINEAL’S USE AND MEANING IN PAINTING Although primarily valued as a textile dye, cochineal was also embraced by painters for its translucency, especially as a lake pigment; lakes produced luminous effects in mural, easel, and manuscript paintings wher- ever they were created, beginning in the ancient Americas. In Mesoamerica, according to Magaloni-Kerpel, the artists of Monte Alban Tomb 204 of Monte Alban Period I (c. 200 B.C.) and Tombs 104 and 105 from the Classic Period (600–750 A.D.), as well as of Tomb 5, Cerro de la Campaña, Suchilquitongo (c. 750 A.D.), used a combination of three organic reds; cochineal predominated, along with small amounts of hematite in the earlier periods, and hematite and cinnabar at Suchilquitongo, to make what has been called “Zapotec Red” for the backgrounds of scenes of funerary rituals.6 At the well-preserved Suchilquitongo, “it is still possible to perceive that the red organic background has a very particular optical quality: it remains transparent, because it is a dye, but reflects the light, so as to produce the sensation of a living screen. When illuminated with candlelight (the manner in which the tombs would have originally been seen) this red acquires an immaterial quality. The human figures emerge from the red screen and acquire a concrete presence, creating an optical illusion, because their bodies

5 Jane Schneider, “Peacocks and Penguins: The Political Economy of European Cloth and Colors,” American Ethnologist, V (1978), 413–437, 434. 6 Diana Magaloni-Kerpel, “The Hidden Aesthetic of Red in the Painted Tombs of Oaxaca,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, LVII/ VIII (2010), 55–74.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 340 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON were painted with dark hematite, a saturated earth pigment that contrasts sharply with the transparency of the background.”7 In European painting, the substance called both carmine and cochineal (or cochinilla, cochinelle, and cucciniglia with their various spellings) in the early modern period was used to create special effects, its primary applications being the glaze over other lakes and vermilion. Artists and writers—such as Roger de Piles, in Les premiers elements de la peinture pratique (1684)—recommended this technique for the most beautiful and economical results, in the process ensuring that an upper layer of cochineal lake left the most expensive materials in the hands of the master, rather than his assistants, who commonly painted in the cheaper lower and middle layers.8 Veronese’s Four Allegories in the National Gallery, London, executed in the 1570s, exemplify the possibilities of cochineal: “A generous use of and reliance on red lake pigments is also a charac- teristic of Venetian painting; in the ‘Allegories’ the deep purple- red glazes have been identified as based on the dyestuff extracted from cochineal…. Although no other red lake type was detected, Veronese has constructed a considerable colour range in the reds by superimposing red glazes over pink or red underlayers consist- ing of white, red lake and vermilion in varying combinations and proportions, occasionally adding red lead to widen the colour range further.”9 In Antony Van Dyck’s Balbi Children of 1625–1627 (Figure 1), Roy comments that the artist’s “method of painting for the chil- dren’s clothes and particularly for the large hanging curtain involves a more extensive glazing technique than is seen in his earlier work and, in fact, is not much used later. This presumably reflects an interest in Venetian methods of drapery painting for which glazes, particularly red lakes…play such an important part. The back- ground curtain to the right is a most elaborate piece of drapery painting and involves undercolours consisting of orange-toned

7 Ibid., 69. 8 Margriet van Eikema Hommes, “Painters’ Methods to Prevent Colour Changes Described in Sixteenth to Early Eighteenth Century Sources on Oil Painting Techniques,” in Erma Hermens, Annemiek Ouwerkerk, and Nicola Costaras (eds.), Looking Through Paintings: The Study of Painting Techniques and Materials in Support of Art Historical Research (Leiden, 1998), 91–132, 107. 9 Nicolas Penny, Ashok Roy, and Marika Spring, “Veronese’s Paintings in the National Gallery, Techniques and Materials: Part II,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XVII (1996), 32–55, 39.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 341 Fig. 1 Anthony Van Dyck, The Balbi Children, Flemish, Painted in Genoa, c. 1625–1627. Oil on Canvas (219 151 cm). Bought, 1985 (6502). National Gallery, London

SOURCE ©National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.

pure vermilion mixed with white and red earth, and then further modeled in two contrasting paints, one based on deep blue indigo and the other on a rich crimson red lake, likely to have been pre- pared from cochineal. The final shimmering effect of the shot colours was achieved by glazing and scumbling with further red lake, red lake mixed with indigo, and pure indigo.”10

10 Roy, “The National Gallery’s Van Dycks: Technique and Development,” ibid., XX (1999), 50–83, 63. In an email response of February 20, 2013, to an inquiry of mine about the seeming inconclusiveness concerning cochineal, Jo Kirby responded, “It has never been possible

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 342 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Cochineal glaze was also applied over the dark areas of the green curtains in the portrait, a method also commonly employed by the Venetian painters that Van Dyck revered. Rembrandt glazed with cochineal over vermilion in the brilliant red dress of The Jewish Bride, and in the shadows of a black garment worn by the subject in Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Taylor observes that red “tints in the depths meant that they advanced to the eye…and so could hold their own against the brighter highlights. Thus, the unity of painting chiaroscuro was preserved by a distortion of nature.”11 The geographical origin of the cochineal used in this period has been a source of confusion ever since Europe’s first experience of it. Francisco Pacheco and other Europeans writing about paint- ing in the seventeenth century insisted that Florentine cochineal was superior to that from the Indies. Despite later scholarly endorse- ment of this view, however, painters probably did not know that Italian cochineal was actually Mexican cochineal. According to Matthew, by the early seventeenth century, red lakes seem to have been identified more often by a place name than by the original plant or insect source of the dye substance; red lake “of Florence,” “of Venice,” and “of Antwerp” are the most common of such usages. The implication is that the pigment was being processed in some, if not all, of the large manufacturing cities where it was being used in great quantities as a dye.12 Bruquetas has shown that Spain had no major tradition of pigment production, except for the locally extracted vermilion and ochre. Thus, despite Pacheco’s pronouncement, cochineal from Florence actually came from the Indies (as the Americas were called), later to be processed in Italy. The Medici family imported

to perform HPLC analysis to confirm the initial identification of the lake in the Balbi Children via microspectrophotometry in the visible region; no sample is available for this purpose. However, the pigment has the characteristics observed by the same technique in Charity [another Van Dyck tested in the National Gallery], which is known to contain cochineal dyestuff, and on this basis, cochineal is the most likely candidate.” 11 Roy, “The National Gallery’sVanDycks”;KarinGroen,“Investigation of the Use of the Binding Medium by Rembrandt: Chemical Analysis and Rheology,” available at http://alexandria. tue.nl/repository/freearticles/617823.pdf, 220. Paul Taylor, “The Glow in Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Paintings,” in Hermens, Ouwerkerk, and Costaras (eds.), Looking, 159–178, 173. 12 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (Madrid, 2009; orig. pub. 1649), 454; Louisa Matthew, “Pigment Trade in Europe,” in Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (eds.), Colour Between Two Worlds (Florence, 2011), 301–316, 293.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 343 cochineal from the Indies to Florence and elsewhere in Italy as soon as it became available for purchase in Spain. The common belief is that sixteenth-century tapestries of the Sala dei Duecento in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio were dyed with Mexican cochineal. Juan Pantoja de la Cruz’s inventory of 1608 included twice as much carmin de indias as carmine from Florence. Moreover, a contract for an altarpiece dated 1632 by Vicente Carducho, a Florentine work- ing in Spain, specifies only carmin de indias, even though Carducho wrote of his preference for Florentine carmine just a year later in his Diálogos de la Pintura. An analysis performed by the National Gallery London on Velázquez’s Immaculate Conception and St. John on Patmos, both from his Seville period c. 1618/19, shows that the pupil and son-in-law of his fellow Sevillian Pacheco included, knowingly or unknowingly, Mexican cochineal in his palette, thirty years before the publication of Pacheco’sbook.13 Historical Documentation and Instruction Historical documenta- tion and instruction about the best employment of cochineal in painting survive from the sixteenth century onward. For instance, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex of 1576/77 described the cultivation, preparation, and use of cochineal in Mexico by weavers and painters (see Figure 2), and in the seventeenth cen- tury,CarduchoandPachecoreportedonitsvarioususesinSpanish painting. Carducho explained the laying-in stage, in which outlines were transferred to the canvas: “Taking outlines is when an oiled paper is placed over a painting and the parts of the painting seen through the transparent paper are drawn on the paper with pencil: this may be done also by outlining the parts of the painting with carmine, and placing the paper on top; pressing with the hand, the paper takes the carmine and thus the design is transferred.”14 Pacheco added, “asaboy,Iusedamixtureofwhiteand carmine, or white and black in oil, to paint a history or figure on

13 Rocío Bruquetas, “Sources for the Study of Pigments Used by Goya and Other 18th- Century Spanish Painters,” in Sigrid Eyb Green, Joyce H. Townsend, and Mark Clarke (eds.), The Artist’s Process: Technology and Interpretation: Proceedings from the Fourth Symposium of the Art Technological Research Working Group (London, 2012), 138–146, 145; Lea Markey, “‘Istoria della terra chiamata la nuova spagna’: The History and Reception of Sahagún’s Codex at the Medici Court,” in Wolf and Connors (eds.), Colours, 199–220, 214; Bruquetas, Técnicas y materiales de la pintura española en los siglos de oro (Madrid, 2002), 216, 133; Zahira Veliz, Artists’ Techniques in Golden Age Spain (New York, 1986), 26; Larry Keith, “Velázquez’s Painting Technique,” in Dawson W. Carr and Xavier Bray, Velázquez (London, 2006), 70–79, 7. 14 Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 28.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 344 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Fig. 2 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex (Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España), Mexico, 1576–1577, Book 11, Fol. 368. Woodcut

SOURCE Biblioteca Mediceo Laurenziana Mediceo Palatino, 218–220, Florence

a small canvas, in this way it was easier to blend and adjust, remove and rework.” Throughout his treatise, Pacheco mentions cochineal whenever he discusses the proper colors for illuminations, frescoes, oil paintings, and polychrome sculptures; for the depiction of drap- eries, rosy flesh; and for mixing with other pigments to make rich hues such as purple. Bruquetas found references to cochineal in treatises and numerous documents related to painting and poly- chrome sculpture during Spain’s Golden Age but not always con- nected to specific works. Zurbarán, for example, is known to have used it extensively, but only three of his paintings have under- gone scientific examination to date: Two paintings in the Monastery of Guadalupe and one of the Roman Emperor Domitian on horse- back ascribed to his workshop were recently found to contain cochineal.15 Although cochineal has often been characterized as more fugi- tive than other reds used in European painting, its allure as a color tended to outweigh that disadvantage. Joshua Reynolds—according

15 Pacheco, Arte, 434 (English translation in Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 35); Bruquetas, Técnicas, 133. Zurbarán’s painting is in a private collection in Spain.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 345 to Northcote, his follower and biographer—clung to it for flesh tones, even though Northcote attempted to convince him “to abandon those fleeting colors, lake and carmine, which it was his practice to use in the flesh, and to adopt vermilion in their stead as infinitely more durable, although not, perhaps so exactly true to nature as the former. In reply, Reynolds looked at his hand and said, ‘I can see no vermilion in flesh.’”16 Modern Detection But although a corpus of tested paintings is growing slowly, comparatively little is known about cochineal in individual objects. Written descriptions are rare, preserved mainly in a few inventories and contracts (some of which will be mentioned below). Absolute verification of cochineal in undocumented objects is currently possible only through analysis of paint samples taken by the few experienced scientists with access to, and familiarity with, expensive and sophisticated equipment, especially high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), which has been tracing organic pig- ments since the 1980s. Many works of art have no inconspicuous areas from which to take samples, and not all reds in an individual work can necessarily be identified. Since reds that appear similar to the naked eye may often reveal their differences only with scientific examination, generalizations about the use of a substance are difficult to draw. Hence, the body of paintings to which cochineal can be definitively tied is likely to remain small until new, noninvasive and less-specialized methods are developed. The scientific staff led by Marco Leona at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are at the forefront of HPLC analysis and noninvasive techniques. Kirby, Roy, Larry Keith, and others in the National Gallery in London have compiled the greatest number of cochineal identifica- tions in European paintings from the sixteenth through the nine- teenth centuries. Other, more narrowly focused studies of this type will be discussed below.17 A relatively small number of painted objects have been subjected to chemical tests; others have been examined with spectroscopy,

16 James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., etc., Late President of the Royal Academy, Comprising Original Anecdotes of Many Distinguished Persons, His Contemporaries, and a Brief Analysis of his Discourses (London, 1818), I, 183. 17 Phipps, Cochineal Red. For the cochineal identifications, see National Gallery Technical Bulletin XVII (1996), XX (1999), XXVI (2005), and XXVIII (2007). European and South American institutions are in the process of testing items in their collections, but results have not been published.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 346 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON which can give good, if not conclusive, evidence when results are compared with the molecular structure of a reference sample of cochineal. Representing the pre- and post-contact eras in the Americas, for example, the presence of cochineal is strongly indi- cated in three wall paintings, eight manuscripts, several qeros, four easel paintings, and two lacquerware furniture pieces. The manuscript of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, thought to have been composed in the Valley of Nochistlan (“the place of cochineal” in Nahuatl), Oaxaca— a major center of cochineal production in Pre-Colombian and colonial Mexico—underwent various types of spectroscopic analysis in 2008. The emission spectra were consistent with insect dye, which, in the Americas almost certainly means cochineal, but none of the red areas examined was indicated in the report, probably because all reds were thought to be cochineal. The same type of examination also appeared to indicate that the roughly contempora- neous Codex Cospi was painted with cochineal. The Codex Becker no. 1, another Oaxacan manuscript, is also said to contain cochineal but without further elaboration concerning its method of identifica- tion or its sample sites in the manuscript.18 Manuscripts from the viceregal period have received more fre- quent discussion in conferences or publications than have other painted objects. Magaloni-Kerpel, a leading figure in the study of Pre-columbian and colonial Mexican painting, wrote not only about the reds in tomb paintings at Monte Alban and Suchilquitongo, as described above, but also contributed to its study in two chapters in Colours between Two Worlds, which largely concerns Sahagún’s Florentine Codex of c.1576/77. In it, she reports, among other uses of cochineal in painting, that harlots and witches tinted their lips with cochineal. Straulino found cochineal and other reds in the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan no. 2 from the mid-sixteenth century, though she did not indicate their locations. Stanley recently reported evidence of cochineal found through microscopic and spectroscopic examina- tion in a mid-sixteenth-century deerskin map from Central Mexico

18 Costanza Miliani, “Materials and Techniques of the Pre-Columbian Mixtec Manuscript, The Codex Zouche-Nuttall,” Access, Research and Technology for the Conservation of the European Cultural Heritage, MOLAB User Report (2008), available at http://www.eu-artech.org/files/ Users_report_final_NUTTAL.pdf; Miliani, Davide Domenici, et al, “Colouring Materials of pre-Columbian Codices: Non-Invasive In Situ Spectroscopic Analysis of the Codex Cospi,” Journal of Archaeological Science, XXXIX (2012), 672–679; Leonor Nayar, “Codices precolombinos,” Documentos de Trabajo (Buenos Aires, 2009), II, 1–49, 23.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 347 now housed at Princeton University. Newman and Derrick iden- tified cochineal in pale pink areas—specifically the horizontal lines separating land-parcel sections, a conch shell, and cornstalks—of the Beinecke Map at Yale University (dated to the 1560s) using HPLC, and Magaloni provided artistic and historical analysis. Emission spectra of samples taken from the Codex Huejotzingo (the Library of Congress) and maps of Ameca, Atlatlauca, and Cholula that ac- company their respective Relaciones geográficas, dated 1581 (the Nettie Benson Library of the University of Texas), also show properties consistent with cochineal.19 Although most of the pigment analysis has focused on early contact-period manuscripts, a few other categories in colonial paint- ing have also received attention. Cochineal is currently a special focus of a project devoted to the study of the pigments decorat- ing colonial Andean qeros undertaken by scientists at the National Museum of the American Indian; the Metropolitan Museum; the Cotsen Institute for Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles; the American Museum of Natural History; and the Museum of New Mexico.20 Cochineal has been identified in a number of South American paintings: Pedro Fernández de Noriega’s Vision of the Flask (1671) from his series on the life of St. Francis in the convento dedicated to him in Lima; Juan Zapata’s Death of Saint John of God (c. 1685) from Cuzco, now in the Museo de Arte de Lima; an anonymous

19 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Hidden Aesthetic of Red”; idem, “Painters of the New World: The Pro- cess of Making the Florentine Codex,” in Wolf and Connors (eds.), Colours,47–78; Marina Straulino, “A New View: The Conservation and Digital Restoration of the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2,” in David Carrasco and Scott Sessions (eds.), Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through theMapadeCuauhtinchanNo.2(Albuquerque, 2007), 49–80, 60; Ted Stanley, “Case Study: Ex- amination and Analysis of a Mesoamerican Deekskin Map,” oral presentation, American Institute of Conservation 40th Annual Conference, Albuquerque, 2012; Newman and Derrick, “Analytical Report of the Pigments and Binding Materials Used on the Beinecke Map,” in Mary E. Miller and Barbara Mundy (eds.), Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City (New Haven, 2012), 91–100, 99; Magaloni-Kerpel, “The Traces of the Creative Process: Pictorial Materials and Tech- niques in the Beinecke Map,” in Miller and Mundy (eds.), Painting a Map, 75–90. Sylvia Rodgers Albro and Thomas C. Albro, II, “The Examination and Conservation Treatment of the Library of Congress Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, XXIX (1990), 97–115, 113, n. 13; Mary Elizabeth Haude, “Identification and Classification of Colorants Used during Mexico’s Early Colonial Period,” American Institute for Conservation: The Book and Paper Group Annual, XVI (1997), 1–20, 7–8. 20 Emily Kaplan et al., “The Qero Project: Conservation and Science Collaboration over Time,” American Institute of Conservation Research and Technical Studies, I (2012), 1–24, available at http://www.conservation-us.org/_data/n_0001/resources/live/RATS-003-2012.pdf.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 348 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Cuzco painter’s Saint Ignatius as Doctor of the Church in the Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano “Isaac Fernández Blanco”;Tomás Cabrera’s late eighteenth-century Virgin of the Carmelites from San Pedro, Jujuy; and several eighteenth-century examples by Marco Zapata and others. All of these paintings show cochineal in the draperies of the subjects.21 CochinealinpaintingproducedintheBritishcoloniesand the federal-era United States does not seem to have been subjected to systematic investigation, but there are certainly interesting paths to follow. The red inks in the elaborately decorated Pennsylvania German Fraktur documents are said to have been made from co- chineal (Figure 3), which we know was available from such local paint sellers as Samuel Wetherill in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Wetherill’s papers include a manuscript recipe book in which co- chineal is a primary ingredient in the manufacture of red. By this time and in this region, cochineal would have come the long way back to the New World, starting its journey in Mexico or Guatemala, traveling to England and across the Atlantic again to the Eastern seaboard of the new United States.22 Work to identify the presence, exact location, use, and meaning of cochineal in paintings continues. Additional New World objects have recently undergone HPLC analysis in the studios of Newman at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; of Leona at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; and of Mackenzie in the New Mexico Depart- ment of Cultural Affairs, as part of a larger project organized at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Leona identified it in the billowing red draperies of the archangel in Sebastián López de Arteaga’s St. Michael and the Bull, dated c. 1650, in the Denver Art Museum (Figure 4). Newman found cochineal in an eighteenth- century lacquered chest from Michoacán, now in the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, and Leona identified it in a lacquered eighteenth-century costurero, or sewing box, from Michoacán now

21 Francisco Staastny and Noemi Rosario Chirino, “Perfil tecnológico de las escuelas de pintura limeña y cuzqueña,” Iconos: Revista peruana de conservación, arte y arqueología,IV (2000–2002), 19–29, 22, 28; Alicia Seldes et al., “Green, Yellow, and Red Pigments in South American Paintings, 1610–1780,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, XLI (2012), 225–242; Gabriela Siracusano, El Poder de los colores: de lo material a lo simbóloco en las prácticas culturales andinas, sigos XVI–XVIII (Buenos Aires, 2005), 94–95. 22 Wetherill papers 1762–1899, CD 3479. P5H8, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. My thanks to Julie Miller in the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress for introducing me to this manuscript.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 349 Fig. 3 Johan Adam Eyer, Marriage Blessing, Pennsylvania, 1784. Tempera on Paper

SOURCE Free Library, Rare Book Department, Fraktur 00636, Philadelphia.

in the Museum of International Folk Art. Mackenzie detected it in the red cape of a late eighteenth-century hide painting depicting Santiago, in the style of the New Mexican santero Molleno, as well as in other colonial objects in that collection. As for European paintings and polychrome objects, cochineal has been found in sculpture and furniture, oil paintings, manuscript illuminations, maps, and drawings. In a manuscript at the University of Texas entitled “Tatres de la Real Cancilleria de la Gobernación del principat de Catalunya,” dated between 1338 and 1578, co- chineal is in text inks and a decorated initial from the sixteenth- century portion. It was similarly employed for text and decoration in Andalusian maps and drawings related to lawsuits in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, housed in the Real Audiencia y Chancillería

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 350 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Fig. 4 Sebastián López de Arteaga, St. Michael and the Bull, Mexico, c. 1650. Oil on Canvas

SOURCE Gift of Frank Barrows Freyer II for the Frank Barrows Freyer Collection by Exchange and Gift of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 1994.27. Photo Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

de Granada. One of several versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1555–1560), now in the Getty Museum, has been found to contain the dye in drapery areas (Figure 5), as does Tintoretto’s Deposition of Christ (c. 1590) in the National Gallery of Scotland (Figure 6).23

23 Holly Robertson, “Conservation Portfolio, project number 2004-18, Number B 338, available at http://ischool.utexas.edu/~hollyr/portfolio/spain/arcguvak-bindings/2004-18. html (2004); Rosario Blanc et al., “Sampling and Identification of Dyes in Historical Maps and Drawings by Liquid Chromatography with Diode-Ray Detection, “Journal of Chromoto- graphy A, 1122 (2006), 105–113 (maps 2, 37, 41, 94); Ulrich Burkmaier, Arie Wallert, and Andrea Rothe, “A Note on Early Italian Oil Painting Technique,” in Wallert, Hermens, and Marja Peek (eds.), Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice (Los Angeles, 1995), 117–130, 123; Hugh McAndrew et al., “Tintoretto’s Deposition of Christ in the National Gallery of Scotland,” Burlington Magazine, CXXV (1985), 501–517, 515.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 351 Fig. 5 Titian, Venus and Adonis, Venice, c. 1555–1560. Oil on Canvas

SOURCE J. Paul Getty Museum, 92.PA.42, Los Angeles.

The largest number of European paintings to have been ex- amined for their red lakes are in the National Gallery, London. The works there by El Greco, Veronese (6), Van Dyck (5), Pietro da Cortona, Canaletto (2), Velázquez (3), Tiepolo, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence, and others have been found to be primarily cochineal. Also important is the analysis of works in Spain: Marisa Gómez of the Instituto del Patronato Cultural de España (IPCE) identified it in glazes over the estofado in the polychrome sculptures of the later sixteenth-century altarpieces of San Mateo de Lucena and the Church of Las Plácidas (Pacheco would have instructed so). The IPCE also found it in El Greco’s Christ Blessing in the Casa del Greco, Toledo, and the three paintings by Zurbaran, or his workshop, discussed above. The samples in all of these works came mainly from areas in the draperies. In an anony- mous Virgin Mary Spinning in the Denver Art Museum, newly identified as Spanish (from Seville, formerly considered Peruvian),

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 352 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Fig. 6 Tintoretto, Christ Carried to the Tomb, Venice, c. 1590. Oil on Canvas

SOURCE Scottish National Galleries, NG2419, Edinburgh.

Mackenzie has shown that cochineal was used in the red bow in Mary’s hair.24 West and East Asia were important centers for the trade in American cochineal, at least as early as the second half of the six- teenth century, when Sahagún reported that it was already known in Turkey and China. Its identification in individual objects from

24 The National Gallery Technical Bulletins contain numerous discussions of cochineal. See especially Jo Kirby Atkinson and Raymond White, “The Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs and a Discussion of their Use,” XVII (1996), 56–80; Roy, “Van Dycks”;Kirby,Marika Spring, and Catherine Higgett, “The Technology of Red Lake Pigment Manufacture: Study of the Dyestuff Substrate,” XXVI (2005), 71–87; idem, “The Technology of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Red Lake Pigments,” XXVIII (2007), 69–87. Marisa Gomez, “Los materiales de la policromía: empirismo y conocimiento Científico,” Grupo español de conservación: Retablos: técnicas, materiales, y procedimientos, Valencia (2004), 13–15, available at http://geiic.com/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=40.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 353 that vast area, however, is scarce. Only Phipps’ textiles from the Metropolitan Museum are known to have been analyzed and found to contain cochineal. However, the catalogue entries for three seventeenth-century illuminated Gospel books from Isfahan in the Matenadaran-Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manu- scripts, Yerevan, by Mesrop Xizanći, dated between 1624 and 1642, report the presence of cochineal in the letters from Eusebius to Carpianus, representations of the four evangelists, canon tables, title pages, decorated initials, and some marginalia.25 Cochineal as Symbol and Commodity Cochineal was chosen in at least one instance as a symbol of Western Europe in its relations with Asia. Simpson reports that the most expensive and impressive gift that Philip III of Spain gave to Shah Abbas I, ruler of the Safavid dynasty of Iran, in 1618 were five large barrels of cochineal. Simpson suggests that the cochineal, like the spices included in the presentation, might have been meant to highlight the Hapsburg control of the trade in such exotic goods. This notion is certainly plausible, and the substance, which don García de Silva y Figueroa— the ambassador who delivered it—described as “one with which one dyes the extremely fine color carmesi, a much esteemed thing,” was probably little known in Persia at that point in the seventeenth century.26 Commercial and personal journals describe the importation of cochineal into such cities as Aleppo and Damascus in the second half of the seventeenth century. The writings of Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux, a French merchant and diplomat, about his lengthy stay in Syria during the 1650s list cochineal among the items that he imported from Europe. Records of a transaction between the British East India Company and Armenian merchants who bought cochineal in England for sale in Persia and India on March 9, 1663, refer to a notice that the “Court now gave way for Nazareth an

25 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, fol. 268; Mikael Arakelian, “The Manuscripts Illumi- nated by Mesrop Xizanc’i from the Matenadaran Collection,” Iran & the Caucasus, VII (2003), 147–182, nos. 294, 3598, 6320. 26 Marianna Shreve Simpson, “Gifts for the Shah: An Episode in Hapsburg-Safavid Relations during the Reigns of Philip III and ʼAbbas I,” in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts (New Haven, 2011), 125–141; Don García de Silva y Figueroa (ed. Rui Manuel Loureiro et al.), Comentarios de la embaxada al rey Xa Abbas de Persia (1614–1624)-Parte I (Lisbon, 2011), Book 4, 336. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for providing this reference, and for particularly incisive suggestions concerning my discussion of this region.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 354 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Armenian to take passage to Surratt in the Charles…. And likewise for Chiragos an Armenian to take passage for Surratt on the Charles with [other items]…100 li of cocheneele…all at Dover.” In some cases, the Armenian merchants took cochineal in partial payment for silks that the English bought from them while in the Armenians’ home territory.27 In every other place that American cochineal had been intro- duced, it rapidly obliterated competition from established organic reds, especially kermes and Polish cochineal. Did that conquest extend to Persia, where Armenian cochineal had long been available, though much more arduous to harvest? Like kermes, Armenian cochineal had to be found, dug out of the ground, and collected manually, and despite a similarity to its American counterpart in the amount of carminic acid in its composition, it was not only labor-intensive but also contained much less dye. Thus, only entrenched traditional marketing practices would seem to have kept its commerce alive, but no evidence of such protectionism exists. Similar lacunae persist in our knowledge of cochineal’s use in Japan and China, despite its exportation to Japan through contact with Portuguese and Italian missionaries between 1549 and 1597, the traffic of the Manila galleons from Mexico to Guangzhou during the same century, the British trade with China in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the documented presence of red insect dyes in fifty Japanese Edo-period paintings analyzed at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Two nineteenth-century hanging scrolls, one on silk in the Eishi style (F1906.11) and another on paper, attributed to Hokusai (F1907.369—the accession number in the Freer Gallery), were examined with HPLC and found to contain cochineal.28

27 Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “The Memoires of a French Gentleman in Syria: Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux (1635–1702),” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, XI (1984), 125–139, 132; Vahé Baladouni and Margaret Makepeace (eds.), Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources (Philadelphia, 1998), 57, xxiii. 28 Leanna Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade: Chinese Silks and the British East India Com- pany,” Winterthur Portfolio, XVII (1982), 21–41; Jennifer Giaccai and John Winter, “Chinese Painting Colors: History and Reality,” in Paul Jett, Winter, and Blythe McCarthy (eds.), Scientific Research on the Pictorial Arts of Asia: Proceedings of the Second Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art (London, 2005), 99–108; Winter, Giaccai, and Marco Leona, “East Asian Painting Pigments: Recent Progress and Remaining Problems,” in Jett et al. (eds.), Scientific Research in the Field of Asian Art: Proceedings of the First Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art (London, 2003), 157–163, 161.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 355 The presence of cochineal in painting seems always to have carried meaning. In the case of Pre-Columbian and early-contact Mesoamerican painting, Magaloni-Kerpel innovatively and per- suasively asserts that the mineral hematite red extracted from below the surface of the earth in the Zapotec mural paintings of Tomb 5 at Suchilquitongo depicts the Zapotec underworld, whereas the insect red cochineal represents the world above ground: “These different places could be related symbolically to the realm of the dead as imagined by the Zapotecs: The organic Zapotec red in the back- ground, a life-and-light charged substance, was used to transform the tomb into a living repository from which the ancestors emerged; this space was a man-made cave and served as the symbolic womb of the lineage. The minerals hematite and cinnabar were used to paint the figures representing the deified ancestors…these red mineral pigments [were] used to represent the passage of time in the underworld.” Magaloni bolsters her argument that the organic red is cochineal and not anatto, another local and commonly used organic red, by tracing the various Zapotec words for red, explaining that Córdoba’s sixteenth-century dictionary called it niçcaxitopea, in which the suffix “pea”“refers to the dried, rounded and small cochineal insects.”29 Similarly, Magaloni sees red conveying meaning related to time in the Beinecke Map and Florentine Codex. The three horizontal red lines on the map represent “movement through space and time,” as it does in the Pre-Columbian Codex Selden and Codex Bodley.In addition, she stresses the symbolic importance of the maize through its depiction with the colorant. Signaled in Sahagún, the day signs referring to pre-contact dates in Book 4, which describes the Aztec calendar, are colored mostly with cochineal; the post-contact events are depicted using the European pigment minium, or red lead. For Magaloni, the application of vermilion over cochineal in the spiny oyster shell forming the name of don Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin must be meaningful, since the resulting colors are almost identical, unlike in European painting, where the cochineal glaze enhanced the depth and luster of vermilion underneath it, while hindering vermilion’s tendency to blacken. Magaloni views this use of reds as evocative of the Zapotec tombs in the deliberate

29 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Aesthetic of Red,” 70, 71.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 356 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Fig. 7 Codex Huejotzingo, Plate III, Huejotzingo, Mexico, c. 1531. Painting on Maguey Paper

SOURCE Library of Congress, Harkness Collection F129.56.H83 1531, Washington, D.C.

combination of references to the underworld in the mineral cinnabar origin of vermilion and to the “solar world…extracted from a living insect that feeds on the fleshy leaves of the nopal cactus, their growth generated by the sun.”30

COCHINEAL AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE WORLDS OF PAINTING AND TEXTILES The relationship between paintings and textiles was close in both the ancient and early-contact Americas and early modern Europe. So far as the early-contact Americas are concerned, Miliani asserts that “the abundance of dyes used in the painting of Codex Cospi suggests that the practice of codex painting was in some way more akin to textile dyeing than to mural or pottery painting, where mineral pigments were mostly used.” The Codex Huejotzingo (Library of Congress Harkness 1531, also known as Codex Monteleone) sheds interesting light on the issue of cochineal and textiles in prehispanic and early-contact Mexico. The long- held assumption is that given the absence of sheep or camelids in ancient Mesoamerica to provide wool, cochineal was probably not widely used there in textiles, which were largely made of cotton, but restricted primarily to rabbit fur or feathers.31 Codex Huejotzingo accompanied a lawsuit filed by Cortés dis- puting tribute amounts demanded of his domains. Dated c. 1531,

30 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Traces,” 82–83; Rutherford J. Gettens, Robert L. Feller, and W. Thomas Chase, “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” Studies in Conservation, XVII (1972), 45–69, 55. 31 Miliani, “Nuttall,” 678.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 357 Fig. 8 Band, Probably Mexico, Late Fifteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Century. Slit Tapestry with Warps of Spun Cotton and Wefts of Spun Rabbit Hair and Goose Feathers Woven with Cotton

SOURCE Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902 (1902-1-374-a). Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. Photo Credit: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, New York.

the manuscript contains several painted illustrations of textiles, including two—Plates III (Figure 7) and IV—depicted with a trans- parent red colorant identified spectroscopically as consistent with cochineal. Inscriptions on the versos of the plates record observa- tions by witnesses called to testify in the suit. Relating to Plate III, a witness described “veynte paños pintados de algodon,” or twenty painted (that is, not dyed) cotton panels. The manuscript’screa- tion so soon after contact would suggest that tribute still consisted of, at least to some degree, native production; in fact, the motifs depicted in the twenty cotton panels of Plate III are three Aztec calendrical glyphs—Flower (Xochitl), Rabbit (Tochtli), and Reed (Acatl). Hence, cochineal did find use in conjunction with cotton but on the surface, showing a clear link between painting and textiles.32 Plate IV depicts, according to another witness, a textile woven of rabbit fur with the same red, in this instance with a stepped-fret motif. It is similar to a slightly later tapestry in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Figure 8) with European quatrefoil motifs in woven rabbit fur, feathers, and cotton, featuring a red that has been positively identified as cochineal. In both depictions, the dye that would have actually colored such textiles is also the one that

32 Albro and Albro, “Huejotzingo Codex,” 113, n. 12; Xavier Noguez, “The Problem of the Identification of the Cloths,” in John R. Hébert and Barbara M. Loste (eds.), Codice de Huexotzinco (Mexico, 1995), 135; Noguez, “Description of the Plates,” in ibid., 103–122, 107.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 358 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON depicts them. The connection between textiles and paintings through cochineal is further affirmed by Sahagún who says, in the Florentine Codex,thatthe“grana,purified and made into ‘small bread’ shapes, is called tlaquauac tlapalli, i.e., fine grana. It is sold in the market in this form to painters and to dyers of rabbit skin,” but not, apparently, to dyers of fiber textiles.33 Although the main European interest in cochineal was as a dye for textiles, this function also seems to have been a path to its use in painting, as Kirby and White have noted. Painters and dyers tradi- tionally made purchases from the same vendors, first apothecaries and later specialized sellers of both pigments and dyes, as we have seen was the case in Mexico. In Europe, cochineal required alum in textile dyes as a mordant and in lake pigments “as a reagent to form a substrate for the dyestuff, to make a pigment.” Painting in this pe- riod was increasingly executed on a textile, rather than on a wooden support, and the more common linen canvas. Pacheco writes of a type of heavy silk cochineal damask with painted decorations, made since 1594, to serve as standards on ships. Painting, which could be translated into textiles as well, was considered a bon teint in what an anonymous observer of the Gobelin family manufactory called “achieving the subtle shades of paintings made into tapestries.”34 The textile and painting industries were intimately bound not only through common vendors, supports, and the use of alum but also by virtue of their dependence, until the seventeenth century, on textiles to supply their red lakes, which were obtained by pre- cipitating the dyes from strips of dyed cloth immersed in water. As Vermeylen put it, “the expertise that had been developed in the dyeing of textiles resulted in a spin-off that would become the main source of pigments for artists.” In fact, one clue to whether a red lake is an insect dye is the presence of textile fibers.35

33 Noguez, “Description,” 108; Phipps, Cochineal Red, 17; Piero Baglioni et al., “On the Nature of the Pigments of the General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex,” in Wolf and Connors (eds.), Colours, 47–78, 86. 34 Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment,” 56; Matthew, “Pigment Trade in Europe,” 301–316; Roland Krischel, “The Venetian Pigment Trade in the Sixteenth Cen- tury,” in Wolf and Connors (ed.), Colours, 317–334; Kirby, Spring, and Higgett, “Red Lake Pigment Manufacture,” 71; Pacheco, Arte, 492; “How Tapestry Is Dyed at the Gobelins,” Decorator and Furnisher, XVI (1890), 130–131. 35 Burkmaier, Wallert, and Rothe, “Early Italian,” 123; Filip Vermeylen, “The Colour of Money: Dealing in Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp,” in Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon (eds.), Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (London, 2010), 356–365, 357.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 359 In the early decades following cochineal’s arrival in Europe, cochineal-dyed textiles could be mixed with other red shearings— usually from the kermes, lac, or madder insects—obtained by pain- ters from a tailor’s shop. Since this mixture of available reds was common at this point, no deliberate choice seems to have been involved, as apparently was the case with Titian’s Venus and Adonis (Figure 5), which shows a mixture of cochineal and other reds. As cochineal became more common in Europe, however, the practice of extracting the dye from cloth clippings gradually declined in favor of taking the lake pigment directly from the cakes in which cochineal was shaped and shipped from the New World. Never- theless, painting sometimes continued to be characterized with textile terminology. Taylor quotes Karel Van Mander in Het Schilderboeck (1604) about the painting of draperies: “To weave cloth beautifully [that is, to paint cloth beautifully], apply yourself to skillful glazing, which helps in the make of velvets and beautiful silks, when a glowing translucent effect is needed.”36 Several painters in Italy and the north known for their early adop- tion of cochineal had strong connections to the dyeing industry. Jacobo Robusti’s sobriquet “Tintoretto” translates as “little dyer”; he was the son of a dyer in Venice, a prominent European center for the silk industry during the sixteenth century. Analysis detected cochineal in two of his works—the murals for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco of 1562 to 1588 and in two areas of drapery in his Christ Carried to the Tomb (Figure 6) from an altarpiece in San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, dated c. 1594. The altarpiece was commissioned by the dal Basso family, which seems to have had involvement with the Venetian textile industry. According to McAndrew, Howard, and Dick, “Tintoretto maintained close contacts with the world of textiles both through his patrons and certainly through his use of lake pigments, which were by-products of the cloth-dyeing industry. This gives us fresh insight on this extraordinary painter, whose dis- tinctive use of colour was apparently firmly grounded in his deep knowledge of the developing technology of the dyer’s craft.” Tintoretto also executed an altarpiece for cloth dyers in the Church of the Servites in 1581, and his murals for the Scuola Grande di

36 Burkmaier, Wallert, and Rothe, “Early Italian,” 123; Taylor, “Glow,” in Hermens, Ouwerkerk, and Costaras (eds.), Looking through Paintings, 163.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 360 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON San Rocco were subsidized through the patronage of a group of Venetian textile barons.37 Antwerp was an important textile center in northern Europe, and Peter Paul Rubens and Van Dyck, its most illustrious painters, are known to have used cochineal. Rubens’ second wife, Helena Fourment, was the daughter of a prosperous Antwerp silk mer- chant, and Van Dyck, who used cochineal in several portraits that have been subjected to pigment analysis, was the son of another such merchant. When invited to visit Genoa in 1622 by Gio Agostino Balbi, Van Dyck painted several portraits of the Balbi family, whose wealth derived from the import and export of silk and wool. The portraits show the family members not only dressed in sumptuous silks and velvets but also surrounded by them, many in red but sometimes even green, as in the curtains of The Balbi Children (Figure 1)—especially scintillating because of its cochineal glazes.38 The cochineal identified so far in European paintings was both derived from textiles or their sources and, at least from evidence collected to date, primarily employed to depict textiles, especially the silks and silk velvet garments and draperies that were markers of status in portraits of high clergy, royalty, and nobility. In view of the fashion for lighter and more brightly colored drapery fabrics and for cochineal red at the time, the omnipresent red drapery swag in Baroque portraiture is probably reflective of both tastes, as well as for cochineal itself. Pacheco wrote of the importance of cochineal in depicting velvets: “With this carmine color, I have made some very convincing velvets, but all lag behind those of my friend Alonso Vázquez, who was unequaled in this.”39 Hamann argues that in Las Meninas (1656), Velázquez delib- erately depicted cochineal-dyed draperies, given that surviving inventories specify them in the Cuarto Bajo del Príncipe, in which the scene takes place, and that Velázquez, as aposentador del palacio, would have understood cochineal’s prized characteristics when he

37 McAndrew et al., “Tintoretto’s Deposition,” 502; Janet Sethre, The Souls of Venice ( Jefferson, N.C., 2003), 181; Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs,” 67, citing Joyce Plesters and Lorenzo Lazzarini, “Materiale e la tecnica del Tintoretto della Scuola di San Rocco,” Atti di Convegno Internazionale di Studi su Jacopo Tintoretto nel IV Centennario della Morte (Padua, 1994), 275–280. 38 National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XX; Roy, “Van Dycks,” 50–83. 39 English translation in Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 73. Pacheco, Arte, 485.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 361 ordered curtains for the prince’s nurseries in 1652. Since the paint- ing’s innovatively handled red lakes have not yet been analyzed, we cannot know whether Velázquez used cochineal to represent the cochineal-dyed draperies in the room that he was portraying. But he used cochineal for draperies in three other paintings—the Immaculate Conception, St. John on Patmos,andPortrait of Archbishop Fernando de Valdés (c. 1645–1650), in which cochineal was identified in the red glaze of the curtain behind the clergyman. Moreover, because he learned his basic techniques from Pacheco, his father-in-law, who, like Roger de Piles and others, advocated the use of the highest-quality red lakes as glazes—meaning cochineal—he likely used it as such in Las Meninas.40 Analyses continue to show that cochineal was used as a glaze over fabrics painted by other northern painters as well. Ter Brugghen’s Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving Him Leah (1627) has New World cochineal in Jacob’s waistband. At least three Rembrandt portraits reveal the presence of cochineal in glazes deepening the luminosity of silks and silk velvets in the garments and swagged draperies of their noble, powerful, or wealthy subjects—Alexander the Great, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,andThe Jewish Bride.Thesame findings apply to eighteenth-century British portraits by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, and Thomas Gainsborough.41 In this age of genre paintings celebrating local and foreign goods, a sub-group of examples from the Old and New Worlds concentrates in various ways on the depiction of textile manufacture or trade, often prominently displaying red examples. To my knowl- edge, none of these works has been tested for the presence of cochineal, but any of them would be prime candidates. If Velázquez

40 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay,” Art Bulletin, XCII (2010), 6–35, 18–19. That cochineal was important enough to specify in documents is evident in the inventory compiled in 1557 after the death of Ruy Gómez de Silva, a courtier to Philip II. The inventory described a coach upholstered in cochineal-dyed satin. See James Boyden, The Courtier and the King: Ruy Gómez de Silva, Philip II and the Court of Spain (Berkeley, 1995), 120. Gridley McKim Smith, Greta Andersen-Bergdoll, and Richard Newman (eds.), Examining Velázquez (New Haven, 1988), 66. Cochineal was also discovered in the tacking edge of the Bust of Philip IV (c. 1626) in the Prado, but Smith, Bergdoll-Anderson, andNewmaninExamining Velázquez do not state what it was used to depict (86). Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs,” 71. 41 Brown, Christopher, and Roy, “Rembrandt’s ‘Alexander the Great,’” Burlington Magazine, CXXXIV (1992), 286–298, 294; Phipps, Cochineal Red, 35; Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam, 2002), 236; Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs,” 73.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 362 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON consciously used cochineal to depict cochineal-dyed fabrics in Las Meninas, analysis of the red lakes in Las Hilanderas, which is on one level about the subject of producing textiles, many of them red in the painting, would be informative. In the north, Isaac van Swanenburg’s series of The Old and New Trades, produced between 1594 and 1596, documents the decline of Leiden’swooltradeinthe wake of the rising price of English wool during the 1530s and its subsequent resurgence later in the century with the introduction of the “New Draperies” mentioned above. Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild is another example in which the leaders of the organization are shown amid their wares, also predominantly red.42 Also available to check are the highly detailed renderings of costumes that appear to be advertisements for local and imported finery in eighteenth-century casta (mixed-race) paintings from New Spain as well as those in which families are shown with textiles in market stalls or in the act of producing textiles or clothing. In one by Miguel Cabrera (1763) in a private collection in Monterey, Mexico, a well-dressed creole, his Indian wife, and mestiza daughter stand before a kiosk of neatly rolled local textiles with inscriptions identifying their place of manufacture. Ramon Torres and Francisco Clapera depicted, with heavy use of red, a casta family of spinners and tailors in the 1780s. García Sáiz observes that “it is precisely this color, red, which dominates all of Clapera’s work with an extra- ordinary vividness, akin to works produced by some of the best interpreters of the casta genre.”43 European painters introduced easel painting in the Americas during the sixteenth century in a transplantation of the oil and tempera techniques employed in the representation of the new Christian subject matter. Analysis of sixteenth-century Hispano- American paintings has yet to reveal the use of cochineal, although organic red lakes have been detected in the paintings by the Sevillian Andrés de Concha for the Dominican church of Santo Domingo in Yanhuitlan, situated in the cochineal district of Nochistlan, as well as for other churches in Oaxaca. These works would be excellent

42 Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past (London, 2011), 152–153. 43 María Concepción García Sáiz, “The Artistic Development of Casta Painting,” in Ilona Katsew (ed.), New World Orders: Casta Paintings and Colonial Latin America (New York, 1996), 30–41, 40.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 363 choices for cochineal examination. Yet even though it is tempting to assume that cochineal is responsible for the transparent organic reds in the art of this region, so far the substance has not been found in the red incised decorations on the seventeenth-century furniture from the Mixtec town of Villa Alta de San Ildefonso recently sampled by Mackenzie and analyzed by Newman in the Museo Franz Mayer.44 Another Sevillian ex-patriot likely to have utilized the ready supply of cochineal in Mexico was Vázquez, the master of cochineal praised by Pacheco, who emigrated to Mexico in 1603 and worked there until his death in 1607. Presumably, he took advantage of cochineal’s abundance in the portrayal of his famous velvets, al- though none of his few surviving Mexican paintings has been tested to date. Samples taken from Saint Michael and the Bull—one of the few Mexican viceregal paintings found to contain cochineal (Fig- ure 4)—by Sebastián López de Arteaga, a younger native of Seville, and the Andean paintings mentioned earlier, seem to confine cochi- neal to the depiction of textiles worn by exalted personages. A typical problem with devotional paintings in the Americas is that subsequent over-painting has obscured the original materials and even the artistic style. A number of the painted panels and sculptures, mostly of single saints, from eighteenth- and nineteenth- century New Mexico, have cochineal reds in their draperies. In some instances, however, an original layer of cochineal is submerged under cheaper red paints, as if the understanding of cochineal’svisual and symbolic importance had been lost by the time restoration was deemed necessary, especially in rural churches and private chapels. The submersion of the expensive cochineal under the cheaper vermilion is probably an unconscious reversal of the admonition by Pacheco and others in Europe to make the most of expensive colors by using cheaper ones underneath. Was the predominant employment of cochineal to depict status via expensive red silks and velvets enhanced by an implicit but obvious reference to the dye itself? No direct references have been found, but cochineal was certainly a highlight in the Spanish inventories cited above. In China, the color was distinctive enough to be called “foreign red.” In Don Juan (1823), Lord Byron paid

44 Pablo Amador et al., “Y hablaron de pintores famosas de Italia,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, XCII (2008), 49–84, 72, 79.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 364 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON a backhanded tribute to cochineal, signaling its demise in an era suspicious of associations with royalty: “If from a shell-fish or from cochineal / So perish every tyrant’srobepiece-meal.”45

OTHER ASSOCIATIONS Cochineal glazes were primarily used to depict rich fabrics, but they were also applied to enhance the sparkle of jewels, the luster of fruits, the sheen of flower petals, and the vaporous tonal modulations of cloud-filled skies. Cochineal was commonly painted over vermilion to create the rosy complexions of women and children; the ruddier flesh of males was produced with earth pigments, distinguishing between the delicate blush of one gender or age and the sturdy, rough thickness of the other. Many of the newly evolved subtleties of European painting from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and the chief hall- marks of the Baroque painting style—soft and nuanced tonalities, drapery swags, and sumptuous textured garb—were facilitated, if not generated, by cochineal. Previously, transparent lake glazes contributed to the depiction of much harder-edged, more sculptural forms—making even flesh appear marbleized. When the intro- duction of American cochineal enabled a greater production of, and a broader clientele for, fine, soft wools, silks, and velvets, these textiles began to appear prominently in paintings, thanks to the new accessibility of cochineal glazes. This tendency coincided with the development of a more painterly style that privileged the depiction of veiled luminosity and melting and the plush tactility of cloth and flesh. For the first time, painters were able to achieve the effect of softness. Cochineal could well have been a catalyst in the formation of a new painting style.46

How conscious were painters and their clients of making refer- ences to the New World through the use of cochineal? The evi- dence is mostly circumstantial. Hamann argues that Velázquez deliberately included cochineal-dyed draperies in Las Meninas as a reference to the New World, as he did a Mexican búcaro and various silver objects. Such a canny allusion to the glory of the far-flung

45 Phipps, Cochineal Red, 40; George Gordon (Lord) Byron, Don Juan (1823), III, Canto 16, verse 10. 46 Pacheco, Arte, 499.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL’SUSE | 365 Fig.9 Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), Self Portrait with Sunflower.Oil on Canvas

SOURCE Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

Hapsburg Empire certainly seems plausible in this portrait of the royal family. Another suggestive work is Van Dyck’s enigmatic Self Portrait with Sunflower (c. 1633; Figure 9). The accepted interpretation is that the portrait demonstrates, among other things, the artist’s loyalty to Charles I of England and his familiarity with the intellectual ideas of the day, manifest in the inclusion of a gold chain that the king had recently presented to him and the sunflower, which continually turns to face the sun, just as the king’s devoted servants must move to follow his directions. Factors not considered, however, are the sunflower’s New World origins and its new-found popularity in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century.47 John Parkinson, Charles’ botanist, who avidly collected plants from around the world for Covent Garden, included both the opuntia (cochineal’s host) and the sunflower on the title page of his Paradisi in Sole (1629), describing them in that text as well as in his Theatrum Botanicum (1640). Parkinson was also an apothe- cary, with a distinct knowledge of cochineal, like his and Van

47 John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck: The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of the Painter (Aldershot, 2006).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021 366 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON Dyck’s friend, Théodore de Mayerne, the royal physician. The New World origins of the opuntia and the sunflower were well understood in the royal circles within which Van Dyck mingled. Van Dyck was well aware of the importance, and the derivation, of cochineal in textiles. Is his portrait of himself in deep pink satin, holding a sunflower, a mere coincidence, or is it a subliminal or conscious comment about the Americas (see Figure 9)? As Greenfield notes, the most direct and telling acknowledgment of the broadly understood impact of the dye and its American origin was in a satirical remark about syphilis voiced by the ever-cheerful Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide (1759): “It was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contami- nates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”48 Painters working in the first years after cochineal’s arrival in Europe may have been misled about the insects’ American origins and quality because they obtained superior processed dyestuff from Italy. But by the early seventeenth century, cochineal red was already beginning to be esteemed for its provenance as well as its properties, and even beginning to be used as a cultural sym- bol in both art and literature, tracing the same rising and falling arc of prestige as the Age of Empire that it helped to define.

48 John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole (London, 1629), 295, 433. Théodore Turquet de Mayerne, physician to Charles I, who filled a notebook (British Library, MS Sloane 2052) with observations on Van Dyck’s working methods and materials, wrote front-matter testimonials for Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole and Theatrum and organized royal apothecaries in experiments with pigments and dyes, including cochineal. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Life of Sir Théodore de Mayerne, 1573–1655 (New Haven, 2006), 345–346. Greenfield, Perfect Red, 85; Voltaire, Candide, Pro- ject Gutenberg e-book (1998), Chap. 4, 9, available at http://archive.org/stream/candide19942gut/ 19942.txt.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00722 by guest on 28 September 2021