The Color of Passion

Three days after the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar fell in December last year, I ventured out to an al-Qaeda camp in the pale-gray flatlands behind the airport. This was where Osama bin Laden kept his horses. By the time I got there, the terrorists were long gone. Prowling around the bombed-out stables, I found a pile of dented steel lockers, maybe 30 of them, filled with chunks of lapis lazuli. There were booby traps all over the campone of them had blown the head off bin Laden’s grazing stallionbut I opened one of the lockers anyway. The lapis stones had a celestial radiance that I couldn’t resist, and I pocketed a few nuggets.

The purest blue lapis on earth comes from Afghanistan. I felt like I was holding a sliver of the fallen sky in my hand, and the fact that I’d robbed it from bin Laden added to its intensity. For thousands of years, painters have coveted lapis.Ground to powder and mixed with oils, it can render the perfect azure of the sea, the Virgin Mary’s robes, or heaven. I wondered why bin Laden wanted all that lapis. Baubles for his four wives? I doubt he was trying to approximate the color of heaven; his experiments have all been in the crimson shades of hellfire.

Where and how we draw our colors is the subject of Victoria Finlay’s book, Colour: Travels through the Paintbox. A British author and adventurer, Finlay embarks on a quest for the origins of colorsher favorites, anyway. Finlay is part scholar, part mad scientist and always a sprightly and engaging storyteller. This search takes her, inevitably, to Sar-e-Sang mine in northern Afghanistan, the main source of lapis. “The first 20 meters would have given the stones for the Egyptian tombs,” she writes. “A little later was where the Bamiyan Buddhas got their haloes.” Deeper down was “where Titian may have got his sky froma whole art history in one little pathway.”

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The genesis of Finlay’s book began when she was eight, touring the Chartres Cathedral near Paris with her father. She was entranced by the sunlight beaming through the stained glass, “the blue and red lights dancing on white stones.” Her father remarked that artisans had lost the secret for making the blue in the 800-year-old glass, and that comment stuck with Finlay. During a stint as a journalist in Asia, working as arts editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, she broadened the spectrum of her color obsession into ocher, indigo, yellow, green and violet.

But what really matters for Finlay are the stories behind a color: the thieves who conspired to steal the secret ingredients of an exquisite shade or the purple ooze of a rare sea snail or the red cochineal beetle that feeds off cactus. She traces why red ocher is sacred among Australian Aborigines, then jumps over to Renaissance Italy to muse on the unique blood-orange varnish that Stradivarius used to anoint his violins. Along the way, we learn that NapolEon could have died of arsenic poisoning from green wallpaper then in vogue. We are also taught that bureaucratic red tape comes from ribbons dipped in a safflower-red dye that were used to tie bundles of legal documents in England, and that 19th-century painters favored an autumnal brown made from the remains of Egyptian mummies.

Much to the relief of Egyptologists, today there’s no need to keep grinding up those mummies. In 1856, William Henry Perkin, a bright, just-18-year-old chemistry student, was looking for a synthetic substitute for quinine, a cure for malaria. Perkin was at home, doing experiments infusing coal tar with hydrogen and oxygenand had failed. Washing out his test tubes, he noticed a residue that resulted in a “strangely beautiful color”mauve. Hidden inside a lump of coal tar, writes Finlay, was “the potential for thousands of colors.” This is where most of our dyes come from now.

Today, we take our colors for granted. Why else would so many people dress in black? The delight of Finlay’s prose is that it reawakens the dazzle of colors. It’s timely, too; in this digital age, colors are in danger of disengaging from their symbolism. Toward the end of her journeys, Finlay visits the “Color King,” Lawrence Herbert, whose New Jersey company, Pantone, has catalogued more than 15,000 shades of basic colors. But, as it turns out, Herbert is replacing his exquisite descriptions”wood violet” and “sulphur spring” are twowith drab numbers. “Computers don’t need names,” he huffs. “People talk about ‘barn red,’ but they never saw a Scandinavian barn in their life.”

I see the Color King’s point. I’ve always liked “oxblood red,” which I imagine as a deep, earthy red. Honestly, however, I’d be hard pressed to differentiate the color of an ox’s blood from a dog’s or a pigeon’s (often used to describe the reddest of Burmese rubies). But then, Finlay’s vivid writing colors my judgment. By bringing out the darker side to colors, she makes them all the brighter.