The Pigments
The materials themselves — where they were dug or synthesised, what they cost, how they behaved under the brush, and which painters they reached. Each pigment cuts across centuries and movements.
Blue
Ultramarinec. 600 CEFor eight centuries ultramarine was the most expensive substance a painter could put on a panel — worth more, by weight, than gold. Its name means "beyond the sea", the direction the ships carrying it came from.19 eras · 30 artists · 35 colorsPrussian blue1706The first modern synthetic pigment, and an accident. Prussian blue was made by mistake in a Berlin laboratory in 1706, and it changed what a blue could cost, which changed who could paint the sky.9 eras · 18 artists · 27 colorsCobalt blue1802A clean, cool, slightly greenish blue with no violet in it — the blue of a clear sky at the zenith. Cobalt is the pigment that made plein-air painting possible, and it appears in more eras of this atlas than any blue except ultramarine.16 eras · 29 artists · 32 colorsCerulean blue1805A pale, opaque, distinctly green-leaning blue — the colour of a sky near the horizon rather than overhead. Cerulean is the specialist among blues, and painters keep it on the palette for one job that nothing else does as well.9 eras · 11 artists · 11 colorsAzuritec. 2500 BCEThe blue that most medieval and Renaissance skies are actually made of. Azurite did the work while ultramarine got the credit, and it has a habit of turning green over the centuries, which is why so many old paintings have skies the colour of a shallow sea.5 eras · 9 artists · 13 colors
Red
Vermilionc. 7000 BCEVermilion is mercury sulphide: a brilliant, opaque, faintly orange scarlet that was the strongest red available to European painters for fifteen centuries, and that is poisonous enough that the people who made it rarely lived long.19 eras · 40 artists · 62 colorsRed leadc. 500 BCEA bright orange-red made by roasting lead white, cheap enough to use by the pot, and the pigment that gave the word "miniature" to Western art — a miniature was originally simply a small painting done in minium.6 eras · 8 artists · 8 colorsMadder and the red lakesc. 1500 BCEThe transparent reds: not ground minerals but dyes, precipitated out of solution onto a colourless powder and used as glazes. Red lakes gave European painting its crimsons, and most of them are quietly fading.9 eras · 13 artists · 15 colorsAlizarin crimson1868The first natural dye ever synthesised, and the pigment that ended a European agricultural industry within ten years of being invented. Alizarin crimson is deep, cool, transparent — and, despite a century of assuming otherwise, not permanent.8 eras · 11 artists · 12 colorsCadmium redc. 1910The red that retired vermilion. Cadmium red arrived around 1910 with the same brilliance and opacity as mercury sulphide, none of the darkening, and none of the mercury, and within a generation it had taken over.14 eras · 25 artists · 33 colors
Yellow
Orpimentc. 3000 BCEA brilliant golden yellow that is pure arsenic sulphide — the only yellow before the eighteenth century with the saturation of gold, and one of the most poisonous substances ever put on a palette.6 eras · 7 artists · 8 colorsLead-tin yellowc. 1300The yellow of the Old Masters, forgotten so completely that it had to be rediscovered in a laboratory in 1941 — nobody had made it for two hundred years, and nobody knew what the yellow in a Vermeer actually was.7 eras · 13 artists · 14 colorsNaples yellowc. 1600 (as oil paint)A soft, opaque, slightly pinkish pale yellow — the colour of stone and sunlight rather than of a lemon. Naples yellow is the yellow that replaced lead-tin yellow, and it built the warm atmospheric skies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.5 eras · 8 artists · 9 colorsChrome yellow1809The first cheap brilliant yellow, and the reason Van Gogh's sunflowers are turning brown. Chrome yellow gave the nineteenth century a colour it had never had, and then began, slowly and irreversibly, to take it back.8 eras · 13 artists · 18 colorsCadmium yellow1840sThe yellow that finally worked. Cadmium sulphide is brilliant, opaque, completely lightfast and mixable with anything, and its arrival ended a search that had run through arsenic, lead and chromium without ever getting all three qualities at once.14 eras · 34 artists · 44 colors
Green
Green earthc. 100 BCEA soft, grey-green clay with almost no tinting strength, and one of the most consequential pigments in European painting — because for four centuries it was what human flesh was painted on top of.11 eras · 17 artists · 21 colorsVerdigrisc. 400 BCEThe most brilliant green available before the eighteenth century, and the most treacherous. Verdigris is corroded copper — literally rust, deliberately grown — and it is beautiful, transparent, intense, and capable of eating through the paper it is painted on.5 eras · 10 artists · 10 colorsMalachitec. 3000 BCEAzurite's green twin — the same copper carbonate family, found in the same deposits, prepared the same way, and behaving according to the same rules. Where azurite is the old blue, malachite is the old green.6 eras · 7 artists · 8 colorsEmerald green1814A copper arsenite of extraordinary brilliance, sold under a dozen cheerful names, used in wallpaper, dresses, sweets and children's toys, and poisonous enough that it was simultaneously marketed as an insecticide. Emerald green is the most notorious pigment ever manufactured.5 eras · 6 artists · 6 colorsViridian1838The green that solved the problem. Viridian is cool, transparent, deep, completely permanent and entirely non-toxic, and its arrival ended a two-thousand-year search for a green that was neither weak, nor poisonous, nor doomed to turn brown.13 eras · 28 artists · 33 colorsChrome greenc. 1810sNot a pigment but a ready-made mixture — chrome yellow and Prussian blue, ground together and sold in a tube. Chrome green is a commercial convenience that became a period style, and it carries the weaknesses of both its parents.8 eras · 13 artists · 14 colorsSap greenc. 1200A green made from berries, stored in a pig's bladder, and guaranteed to fade. Sap green is the most beautiful transparent green of the medieval palette and the least permanent thing in this atlas.2 eras · 2 artists · 2 colors
Violet
Earth
Ochrec. 300,000 BCEThe oldest pigment in human use, by an enormous margin, and still one of the most used. Ochre is iron oxide mixed with clay, it is lying on the ground on every continent, and people were collecting it before our species existed in its current form.23 eras · 64 artists · 126 colorsUmberPrehistoricThe brown that made shadow possible. Umber is ochre with manganese in it, and that manganese does two things: it darkens the colour, and it makes the paint dry faster than anything else on the palette.21 eras · 40 artists · 66 colorsSiennaPrehistoricThe transparent earth. Sienna sits between ochre and umber, and what distinguishes it is not its colour but its clarity: it is the only iron oxide that glazes properly, and that single property gave it a permanent place on the palette.20 eras · 38 artists · 48 colorsBitumenc. 1600 (as oil paint)The pigment that destroyed the paintings it was used in. Bitumen gives a deep, glowing, transparent brown unlike anything else, and it never dries — decades later it is still moving, and the surface above it tears itself apart.5 eras · 6 artists · 6 colors
White
Lead whitec. 400 BCELead white is the most important pigment in the history of European painting, and the one that killed the most people who made it. For two thousand years there was no serious alternative, and every white in this database before the nineteenth century is this one.21 eras · 57 artists · 144 colorsZinc white1780sThe first non-toxic white, and the coldest. Zinc white gave nineteenth-century painters a way to lighten a colour without warming it, and it is now the pigment conservators worry about most, because a great deal of the painting made with it is quietly falling apart.9 eras · 12 artists · 12 colorsTitanium white1921The whitest white ever made, and by a wide margin the most-produced pigment on earth. Titanium dioxide is in paint, paper, plastic, sunscreen, toothpaste and the icing on cakes, and it arrived in the artist's studio as a side effect of an industrial revolution in coatings.4 eras · 7 artists · 11 colorsLime whitec. 7000 BCENot really a pigment so much as the wall itself, used as a colour. Lime white is slaked lime — the same material as the plaster — and in true fresco it is both the ground, the binder and the lightest value available.3 eras · 4 artists · 13 colors
Black
Lamp blackc. 30,000 BCESoot, collected from a flame. Lamp black is the simplest pigment there is — pure carbon, made by burning something badly on purpose — and it is the black of cave painting, Chinese ink, printing and seventeen separate eras of this atlas.19 eras · 41 artists · 60 colorsBone blackc. 3000 BCECharred bone, ground fine. Warmer and browner than soot, and less absolutely black, bone black is the black most European painters actually reached for — and the name on the tube, ivory black, is a historical fiction that has outlived the material it referred to.13 eras · 20 artists · 21 colors
Metal
Gold leafc. 2500 BCENot a pigment but a metal, beaten thinner than anything else humans make by hand — a sheet of gold leaf is around a ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick, and a single gram covers half a square metre. In medieval painting it is not a colour but light itself.8 eras · 8 artists · 8 colorsSilver1839 (photographic)Photography is a silver medium. For a century and a half, every black-and-white photograph was an image made of metallic silver particles suspended in gelatin — the grey of a print is not a pigment at all but finely divided metal.9 eras · 9 artists · 20 colors