Green Springs Eternal

“What are those blue remembered hills?” muses Olivia Kuzio, lead technical imaging specialist in Getty Digital Imaging.

The line comes from an A. E. Housman poem and indirectly refers to the phenomenon where distant mountains that are actually green appear blue. Our atmosphere scatters blue light the farther something recedes in space. It’s why landscape paintings contain lush green foregrounds and floaty blue mountains, presumed to be miles away.

At the Getty Museum, this science collides with some of the artworks, inviting guests to witness the turning point when artists first used this technique to show depth. Such works can also invite us to consider the color green more broadly. After all, its history as a pigment and dye in the art world is a story of life itself, with some toxicity and secrets thrown in for intriguing measure.

Seeing and being seen

Green wasn’t always in the limelight; it wasn’t even always in the lexicon. The first believed written record of green was the Caedmon Manuscript from about 1000 CE, which contains the phrase “Adam stepped / On green grass, soul made worthy.” Yellow, red, white, and black were recognized first; the ancient Greeks didn’t consider green a named color until the Hellenistic period. Even today, northern Namibia’s Himba tribe has difficulty distinguishing between blue and green in a crisp way because their language has five color categories while English has 11.

In terms of vision, green sits in the middle of the ROYGBIV (rainbow) spectrum, the area our eyes are most sensitive to. “So we’re actually the best at perceiving differences in greens,” Kuzio says. “Our eyeballs are built for green. Evolutionarily, millions of years ago, our ancestors needed to differentiate a red ripe fruit from a green foliage background.”

Fortunately, as green established its identity on the light spectrum and in language, it extended into the creation of art.

The making of green

Ancient Egyptians used a copper-derived mineral called malachite in paintings and as an eye shadow with believed sunblock potential. The pigment’s creation process involved grinding the stone into a powder and mixing it with a base like oil or animal fat. Because malachite, considered the first green pigment, occurs worldwide, it emerged as a colorant elsewhere as well, including in ancient Rome. (The Romans also painted with minerals called “green earth” mixed with clay.) Eighth-century Chinese artists used malachite to color Buddha halos, and it also gained popularity in Japan and Tibet.

Eighth- and ninth-century China had its own green steeped in lore: mi se (English for “secret color”). Mi se pottery arose when a special iron-rich porcelain was painted with a pale gray-green glaze called celadon. Post firing, the resulting ceramics were considered so beautiful that they were exclusively seen and used by royalty. In Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay writes that in the Tang Dynasty, when the wares were eventually sold beyond royalty, they were still marketed as “secret green-ware only fit for a king.” In the 1980s, archaeologists found a historical secret stash of mi se pottery in China; true mi se stopped being produced in the 11th century, although celadon making continues today.

In drawings collection storage at the Museum, Michelle Sullivan, associate conservator of drawings, and Julian Brooks, senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings, closely study A Draped Figure Holding a Book. The drawing was made on a paper coated with a preparation layer consisting of green pigment, binder, and a filler. Based on the hue of the coating, Sullivan suspects that it derives its green color from the mineral malachite and that its purpose was to establish a midtone starting point for the design. The artist then layered black and white media to build “a kind of sculptural form,” says Brooks.

Another copper-based green tracing back to ancient Greece and Rome—also popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—was verdigris. Artists made it by hanging copper plates over a hot vinegar bath, the vapors forming a crust on the metal that was then scraped off and combined with binding agents. Associate Curator of Manuscripts Larisa Grollemond says, “I recently looked up how to make verdigris, and it’s actually amazing and heartening to me how much people wanted to make art back then that they would go to all that trouble to make a pigment in this way.”

In the Middle Ages, word spread that malachite and verdigris had poor lightfastness, but that disappointing discovery didn’t persuade artists to abandon them; Leonardo da Vinci loved verdigris for its brilliant shade of green blue. Portrait specialists in the Renaissance liked jewel-toned greens as vibrant backdrops. Department of Paintings Curator Anne Woollett points out the rich, dark green folds that form the backdrop in Portrait of a Man by Salviati.

“Salviati was an artist working in Florence, and all his palette choices were extra vivid,” says Woollett. “He was creating a chromatic complement to his very beautiful, shiny black, and purple. Together, you get a pretty memorable image.”

Pregnant with symbolism

“For the late medieval people, green was about life, rejuvenation, rebirth, and fertility,” says Woollett. She references The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, featuring a man and woman holding hands; the woman’s belly protrudes under the folds of a bright green gown. Woollett notes the woman was not pregnant, but that “the ideal female form was having a belly, indicating fertility.” Many theories circulate about the meaning of the painting, but the green gown certainly furthers childbearing thinking. In Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox, Finlay posits The Arnolfini Portrait is like an Adam and Eve of a later time, symbolic of fertility and gardens. She even adds another theory: that at the time of the painting, Van Eyck couldn’t have known if the pigment would have lasted, as verdigris had a habit of turning black, which could have represented “the fall of humanity.”

In medieval illuminated manuscripts and Renaissance painting, green could also be code for the middle to upper middle classes. “Green was a relatively difficult hue to achieve with dye, so green clothing generally signified some wealth—maybe not the highest of high, but wealthy,” says Grollemond. She mentions The Temperate and the Intemperate, a page by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book from a work about morals and customs. “In this feasting scene, several people are dressed in green, though it predominates among the intemperate folks in the image’s foreground. They seem to be having a lot more fun than the serious people dressed in black [the temperate] in the back,” she adds.

Seeing the forest from the trees

“Green is also very connected to nature themes,” says Woollett, linking it to another type of drapery, “a curtain of foliage.” This curtain appears in A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion by Lucas Cranach the Elder. At the time it was painted, “people believed that in the German lands, there were Indigenous, noble, and ancient wild people who lived at home in nature,” says Woollett. The green curtain separates wilderness and civilization, with the slain lion suggesting both danger and the ideal that this life was possible, joyful even. “The whole idea of a forest in the north, and something that was dense enough to still be mysterious and to hold a kind of cultural ideal, was really wonderful.”

Netherlandish painters began achieving fame for portraying the landscape as a subject itself. Woollett considers Mythological Scene by Dosso Dossi to be an example, and it’s one that uses the aforementioned depth technique: rendering the mountains blue while generalizing distant elements and rooting the foreground world in vivid greenery and figures. “This painting has a special, almost divine quality to it,” says Woollett. “It’s an ideal landscape.”

Around the same time, a similar effect took hold in the illuminated manuscript page Scenes from the Creation. “You can see the landscape going way off in the distance, which was kind of new for the 16th century, and in manuscripts in general,” says Grollemond. “There was definitely an association with Eden and the idea of earthly paradise.” According to Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette, nature surged in popularity again in the late 18th century through Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, whose prose positioned nature as “something wondrous rather than dangerous.”

But, nearing the end of the Middle Ages, “As a chemically unstable color, both in painting and dyeing, [green] was henceforth associated symbolically with all that was changeable or capricious: youth, love, fortune, fate,” writes Michel Pastoureau in Green: The History of a Color.

Luckily, green continued innovating and evolving.

Green everlasting

Chemists tried improving green’s range and light steadfastness for centuries, but results varied. In 1775, Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented Scheele green—made from copper arsenite—but quickly learned it darkened with time. Made with copper acetoarsenite, emerald green (also known as Paris green) arrived in 1814. J. M. W. Turner and Édouard Manet used both. But by 1839, emerald green had been branded toxic—it also blackened when mixed with sulfur-containing colors. And in the early 1800s, Royal Horticultural Society botanical illustrator William Hooker invented Hooker’s green specifically to paint leaves, apples, and other foliage. Hooker’s green is used to this day and beloved by renderers of nature and watercolorists.

Synthetically made chromium green, produced by Parisian color chemist and painter Antoine-Claude Pannetier and his assistant Binet, was squeezed onto palettes in the 19th century, earning praise for its light steadfastness and metallic sheen. “Because of the structure of the literal molecules, chromium green is not going to be affected by light,” says Kuzio. Chromium green was later utilized as camouflage in British Army uniforms, and, circling back to art, Andy Warhol used it in 1986 in a series of works aptly called Camouflage. Chromium green still circulates widely today; artists also brush nontoxic phthalo green, introduced in 1938, onto contemporary canvases.

With an array of safe choices and staying power, today’s green is in good standing in the panoply of pigments. But that doesn’t stop innovators from wondering if there are greens we simply haven’t met yet. Artist Stuart Semple claims the invention of “the world’s greenest green,” a retina-scorching hue that makes tennis balls look dull.

Our eyes are always evolving, so who knows what we’ll see in the future? But for green, which may sit in the middle of our visual spectrum, there’s nothing “middle” about it.