Is Your Favorite Painting Colored with Crushed Bugs?

Red is a museum’s loudest color, capable of halting visitors in their tracks. As Italian color expert Massimo Caiazzo has said, “red causes a slight acceleration of the heartbeat, an increase in blood pressure and respiratory rate.” The reason? Our bodies use more energy looking at red than other colors.

Its power over us goes back to early primates, when eyes evolved extra sensitivity to reds to better spot ripe fruit in the jungle. Such high visibility can also signal danger—think of stop signs—since we associate red with fire and blood.

At the Getty Museum, that history converges in one staggering red robe. The silk satin cloth nearly envelops the sitter—and our senses—in Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck’s luxurious, large-scale Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini (about 1621).

As long as we’ve known that red commands attention, artists have used it to do so. But the history of red pigments and dyes goes much deeper. It has also been utilized for power, piety, and profit.

The color of money isn’t always green

In Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini, the patron and painter had specific aims. Pallavicini, a nobleman, was the Genoese representative to the papal court. Although young, Van Dyck was already a celebrated artist and he hope to garnered elite patrons in Genoa. Anne Woollett, curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, says the saturation of red was used to convey status; hidden behind this color choice was access to expensive dyes.

When books were luxury objects, illuminated manuscripts were often bound in red velvet, says Beth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts. According to Victoria Finlay, author of Color: A Natural History of the Palette and other historians, deep red book fabrics were often dyed with the fluids from crushed insects like kermes and later cochineals—and both made certain people and cities rich through trade.

The cochineal, a bedbug-sized parasite of the prickly pear cactus, emits a scarlet fluid when squeezed, the basis for cochineal dye. Cochineals were first harvested in the precolonial Americas; in the age of the conquistadors, Spaniards turned them into a major export business. The gambit? Calling the dye carmine red and claiming it came from a berry. By the 1570s, the dye had become one of the most profitable trading goods in Europe. Between 1575 and 1600, shipments out of New Spain measured in the tons, or a few trillion insect bodies a year.

Wealthy Europeans also demanded it in their clothing dyes. Women dabbed it on their cheeks and lips. They too didn’t know it was made from bug fluid; it was only in the 18th century that French botanist Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville raided the cochineal fields of New Spain, smuggled out some infested nopal paddles, and exposed the secret to the entire world.

This discovery didn’t decimate the industry; it allowed Thiéry de Menonville to build his own cochineal business and other entrepreneurs to set up shop. In following centuries, the bug-based color was used in dyeing British officers’ broadcloth and Central Asian carpets. You can see cochineal-dyed buildings in Oaxaca, Mexico, a prime production zone; the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán is a prominent example.

Cochineal’s popularity endured into the 19th century, used by artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner. It was often painted on top of other reds to give oil paintings a deep crimson glaze, but by this point in history, artist were increasingly aware of its tendency to fade due to light exposure.

Making red: From caves to chemicals

Long before cochineal, red artist materials were mined came from earth itself. In the paper conservation laboratory at the Getty Center, conservator of drawings Michelle Sullivan holds up a sample sheet displaying an array of red chalks, both natural and manufactured. Swipes of orangey rose, blood red, and warm brown read like lipstick shades on a makeup artist’s palette, but they’re actually drawing materials that an artist would use.

Each of these red chalks obtains its red color from the mineral iron oxide, which occurs naturally in their earth. In natural chalks, variations in hue result from other minerals present in the ground, often related to geography and where the chalk was mined. In manufactured chalks, the addition of fillers, dyes, and other pigments also impact the final shade of red. Artists could further manipulate the appearance of red chalks by blending, moistening, and even grinding and applying it in powdered form.

Iron-rich red ocher was used to adorn bodies over 300,000 years ago; in the Paleolithic period, it was employed to paint caves with drawings of bison and other animals in Altamira, Spain. In ancient Egypt, red ocher was utilized for wall paintings and cosmetics, while China produced black and red pottery as early as 5,000 BCE. Pliny’s Natural History (77–79 CE) mentions red more than any other color, including that the Romans regarded the mineral cinnabar (a main ingredient in vermilion) as having great importance and sacred associations.

In medieval illuminators’ toolboxes, according to Morrison, you’d find vermilion, minium, madder, brazilwood, and cochineal, any of which would be bound in egg white or gum arabic. But vermilion, as expensive as gold during medieval times, was especially prized for its intensely bright orange-red hue. It also covered well. Vermilion remained popular among European oil painters well into the 19th century, with many using both vermilion and carmine. But in the 20th century, the art world’s interest in vermilion waned, due to its high cost and toxicity (it’s made with mercury and sulfur).

Vermilion was also being edged out by a new competitor. A synthetic pigment called cadmium red became available commercially in 1910. With its equally strong color and opacity, cadmium became a fashionable alternative in artists’ palettes and remains popular today.

Devotion, passion, and hell

Dieric Bouts’s Annunciation, with its deep red canopy, shows the geometric patterns of the folds, an admired feature at the time, and the weight of the thick red fabric. “Bouts’s use of this magnificent, saturated red helps define the architectural space of the Virgin Mary’s chapel and may also allude to the blood of Christ’s future sacrifice on the cross,” says Woollett.

Not far from Bouts’s Annunciation, An Allegory of Passion by Hans Holbein the Younger, employs red to signify affairs of the heart. The galloping, unbridled horse embodies the headlong rush of passionate love. Significantly, the rider himself wears a red tunic, which flies behind him. And fittingly, even his hair is red.

Morrison explains that in devotional manuscripts, “if you want to feel really bad about what Jesus did on your behalf, you might look upon a page like The Flagellation by Simon Bening, showing blood pouring from Christ’s wounds and actually pooling at his feet.”

She also notes a 2024 Getty exhibition called Blood: Medieval/Modern curated by Associate Curator Larisa Grollemond, which juxtaposed medieval side wounds and saintly sacrifice with contemporary works including Andres Serrano’s “Bloodscape X,” tracing how red has had immense symbolic power across time.

Scarlet vestments during Holy Week are also tied to Christ’s Passion and blood. In a more light-hearted aside, Morrison refers to Saint Jerome as the “big red guy,” because of the endless iterations of his red robes and hats, due to his supposed role as a cardinal. She notes the charming scene of Saint Jerome Extracting a Thorn from a Lion’s Paw, which she jokes, “looks like he’s giving a pedicure to the lion.”

Red is also synonymous with a much less charming subject: hell. In illuminated manuscripts, gaping red maws called hellmouths—flames as shorthand for damnation—symbolize eternal pain.

The fickle future of reds

But even hell has the ability to fade; greater if rendered in an organic red (the rosier tones made from madder, brazilwood, or cochineal), all of which Morrison describes as “quite fugitive” and susceptible to fading quickly with light exposure. This was being discovered around Turner’s time, but he refused to let his love of the color go.

Finlay opens her red chapter in Color: A Natural History of the Palette with a story about how Turner’s Waves Breaking against the Wind originally carried “a ruby slick of oil paint where the sun’s last colors were supposed to hit the clouds,” now faded. She also recounts that Turner’s color helpers at the art firm Winsor & Newton warned him about carmine’s poor lightfastness, but he allegedly told them “to mind [their] own business” and continued to use the insect-derived red because he preferred the brilliance in the moment over longevity.

Finlay also tells the story of when she visited Oaxaca for red research. In a surprising development, the cochineal-based dye business is booming again, thanks to contemporary demand for natural food and cosmetic coloring. Next time you’re grocery shopping, check the ingredients lists on labels for carmine, carminic acid, crimson lake, Natural Red 4, or E120. You just may be looking at a modern, edible manifestation of the color once fit for Pallavicini.

Some contemporary artists and dyers are also participating in the insect red rebirth, lured by its ephemeral brilliance and historical or cultural meaning. The Zapotec American artist Porfirio Gutiérrez uses cochineal to dye his large-scale textiles, and Los Angeles–based Meztli Projects hosts Indigenous dye-making workshops using the emissions of these tiny parasites (whose bodies, as a strange aside, are white).

Vermilion still exists and holds symbolism today. Hindu women use a vermilion known as sindoor along their hair parts to signal married status, while Hindu men often wear the pigment on their foreheads during religious ceremonies. In Taoist culture, Chinese vermilion is the color of life and eternity.

And even though cadmium red is often still an essential in adult painting classes and remains one of the 10 colors in Winsor & Newton’s basic oil set, it has recently come under fire both for its potential health hazards and attempts to curb its use. In 2019, the paint company debuted cadmium-free formulas.

Meanwhile, cadmium red’s predecessors can still be witnessed in the Getty galleries—on Pallavicini’s robe and in the hellmouths of illuminated manuscripts, for example—turning our heads and quickening our pulses to this day.