A proud taste for scarlet and cinnabar

Hellfire, toxins, tonics, and milking rubies for their red red juice

“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend; One day, the black will swallow the red.”
- John Logan (not Rothko!)

Some reds are made of iron, some are made of tree sap, others are boiled from roots or ground from bugs. But one, perhaps the most beautiful and iconic red, definitely the most dangerous, is made from mercury.

I’ve always been fascinated by mercury, ever since I learned about it in elementary school. It’s the only metal that stays liquid at standard temperature, which is how most of us imagine mercury—a shimmering water. Its original name, hydrargyrum, comes from the Greek words for “water” and “silver”. I’m glad we left that ugly name behind, though I do rather wish it was more commonly referred to as “quicksilver.” Because that’s a lovely and unusual combination of syllables, a composite word that peaks and slides, not to mention a perfectly descriptive name.

Cinnabarite, HgS; Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe, Germany.

Cinnabar sounds romantic, too, doesn’t it? That’s how most of it can be found on earth—as a metallic ore, composed from mercury atoms bonded with sulfur in a rhombohedral crystal system. Thousands of years ago, people in China began gathering the brilliant red crystals from the edges of hot springs and mining it from within the earth. Jewel-like on its own, the bright stones gained even more color when ground into a fine powder. It was the richest, most potent red available to painters for many hundreds of years. It was also a key ingredient in many Chinese immortality elixirs, a practice that resulted in dozens of untimely deaths, including that of six Tang dynasty emperors. One alchemist and poet, Po Chü-I, wrote of how his “gray hairs in autumn multiply” even as the “cinnabar in the fire melted away.” His quest to stave off wrinkles through magical means was fruitless, though he does note that all his “old friends” who took that particular medicine “fell ill or died suddenly; none of them lived through middle age” while he continued to pile up the years, “contrarily.” The writer didn’t dose himself, and unless something was lost in translation, it appears he never properly connected those dots. He mourned the gift of decades, though now he did achieve a small immortality through both his beloved works and his distant namesake; in 1976, the International Astronomical Union dubbed a dimpled crater on Mercury “Po Chü-I” after the writer.

Fresco from the Sala di Grande Dipinto, Scene VI in the Villa de Misteri (Pompeii). Scene representing a moment during the initiation ritual into the Bacchic Mysteries.

Although we don’t have the same level of evidence for this, it is possible that prehistoric people on the Iberian peninsula (the location of the world’s largest cinnabar mines) ingested or smoked cinnabar as part of burial rituals. High levels of mercury found in bones lead paleontologists to suggest that it could have been used as a skin paint, with disastrous results. The Romans knew of cinnabar, too. They used it to paint their walls, their sculptures, and their faces. Some of this pigment came from China, but most of it was mined from deposits in Spain. It was a more vivid red than the purple-tinged cochineal (a pigment made from ground-up insects) but their chromatic similarity meant eventually both pigments would be referred to as “vermillion,” from the Latin word for worm (vermis). Although the color was seemingly named for the method of production, I still enjoy this connecting thread. Red is a hot color, cinnabar is even hotter, and vermillion is the hottest of them all. It sings of fire and brimstone as eloquently as John Edwards. It’s a salamander red, a dragon red, a hellfire red. Like many powerful sights, it’s every bit as demonic as it is heavenly. An awe-full color made from an awful substance.

Dragon detail from miniature by The Beatus of Facundus (1047)

While there are plenty of vermillion artworks that have been dated back to the ancient world—including these fabulous pieces of Chinese lacquerware that date back to the Warring States Period (475 - 221 BCE), as well as those vividly painted walls in Pompeii (preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE)—the color is often linked to the European Old Masters and their output. At least, that’s where I found the most information about this material online, in English, which is a rather limited pool to draw from, I know. But for my purposes on this substack, here’s a little sampling of where you can see vermilion in all its finest of Fine Arts grandeur:

Titian (Italian, about 1488–1576), The Rape of Europa, 1559–1562. Oil on canvas. Titian used vermilion to form the foundation of the red drapery, which he then covered with red lake to give the silk a transparency and lightness.

Johannes Vermeer, The Wine Glass, 1660. Like Titian, Vermeer used a variety of different red paints, including vermilion. One reading of this painting is that the fella in the hat is trying to get the lady drunk on wine so he can… well.

Now, I’m going to rewind in time just a little, and jump backwards from the Renaissance to the Middle Ages. (I’m doing this because I didn’t want to leave out the Old Masters entirely, but I really wanted to focus most of my writing on the magic, mystery, and folk qualities of cinnabar, so I sacrificed chronological order in favor of theme.) Personally, I tend to associate cinnabar with manuscript illumination and the production of icons. The intensity of this particular red makes it feel right at home with the graphic, almost cartoonish style. Like lapis lazuli, which was ground to bits and used to make Marian blue, cinnabar has a perverse purity and admirable solidity. It is not a color made from trees or flowers or snails. It’s dense, it’s hard, and it’s resistant to penetration.

This is actually a facsimile edition of The Breslau Psalter. The original was likely made for a woman, since it featured mainly stories of female saints.

Take, for example, ​​The Breslau Psalter (c. 1255-1267). Held in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, it is (according to their website) “one of the most imposing and sumptuous Psalters to survive from the Middle Ages. Much larger than Psalters made for private prayer, with images on every page, it was intended to dazzle and impress.” The book of psalms was created by more than one craftsman but they shared a palette of gold leaf, lead white, ultramarine, vermilion and verdigris. The pages are highly detailed and gloriously busy, filled with angels and demons, dogs and horses, swords and castles. As I flipped through the digital copy, I was struck by how familiar the pages looked, and then I realized: Sleeping Beauty. Last week, when I was sick, I sat with my daughter and rewatched the 1959 Disney classic. While the plot leaves something to be desired (I don’t love it when my daughter pretends to be a passed-out princess, though it is a nice, quiet game) I have nothing but admiration for the animation. It’s so beautifully evocative and obviously based on European manuscript illustration. Like emojis and pictograms, the simplicity of this visual language makes it timeless. There was a tendency to read all Medieval artwork as primitive, a huge step backwards from the realism of the Hellenistic period, but that’s been (mainly) corrected. It’s not that people stopped revering beauty and producing technically skilled objects after the fall of the Roman empire—it’s that they weren’t trying to speak to the same values. Art doesn't just speak for the individual, after all. It articulates community values and a shared worldview. The further we get from the life of the artist, the more we view a piece of art as a relic of time and place, and thus the more we see it as a communal expression rather than an individual act of genius. This is Art History 101 stuff, but my point is this: Medieval art is weird and great and makes me feel closer to the common people of the past.

An absolutely beautiful Chinese box made with cinnabar carved lacquer, from The Met Museum’s collection

I could shift gears here and regurgitate someone else’s hard work about the stylistic choices of manuscript illuminations or the intended emotional impact of Gothic art, but I’ll just link out for that. Instead, I want to go back to vermillion, to cinnabar, to this toxic warm color that, to me, sings of Catholicism. More than blue, more than gold, more than the purple vestments of Lent, more than any other hue, vermillion reminds me of The Church, of bloody Christ on his cross, of ruby red glasses holding lit candles, of velvet-padded kneelers nestled below the maplewood pews, of heavy smoke pouring from a brass censer, swinging, swinging, in the stained light of morning mass.

In my book’s chapter on glass (“Deception and Damnation: The molten glow of screens, the beauty of stained glass, and the treachery of spectacles”), I tried to unpack my relationship to religion. Actually, that’s something I’m still trying to do, something I keep trying to do, for there is a very real part of me that misses Catholicism and the faith I once held. Whenever I’m writing about art, this early source of awe and wonder comes bubbling back up, for it shaped and defined so much of my understanding of the world. I found God and Mary both so beautiful, but I also couldn’t help but worship the aesthetic trappings of our parish. This orientation was only reinforced by my reading habits, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, most of my favorite fantasy books were designed to turn my head back towards the crucifix. From Monica Furlong’s lovely little books of good witches to Philip Pullman’s sprawling epics of heaven and hell, my bookshelves were stacked with fantastical tributes to Christianity. Like early Disney animations, the covers of these books were often inspired by the visual language of monks and monasteries. Two of the greatest illustrators of my childhood, a married couple named Leo and Diane Dillon, worked together to create an unmistakable style that drew from medieval illumination, stained glass windows, as well as African folk art and Japanese woodcuts. The result was strange, beautiful, and sophisticated. Legible enough for children, but intricate enough to pique the interest of adult book buyers.

Cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon

My mother was one of those parents who denied us plenty, but never books. We were given books for every birthday and holiday, and we had stacks of library books piled up in our shared bedrooms. I’m trying to replicate this for my daughter, and since she can’t read on her own yet, we read a lot together. Recently, we’ve been digging into The Chronicles of Narnia, and while some of the content is a little old for her, she is fascinated by the idea of visiting a magical land where human children are automatically exalted and talking animals are excited about Santa. At night, we listen to the audiobooks to wind down, and sometimes we read from my old box set. While she loves The Voyage of the Dawn Treader best, my favorite of the books has always been The Silver Chair.

On a recent reread, I found myself wondering about Narnain damnation and its possibilities. Towards the end of The Silver Chair, the main characters are given an opportunity to travel into the deepest underworld, a place called Bism. Our human adventurers glimpse this “Really Deep Realm” through a long gash in the underworld—Bism is the land below the underland, but it is clearly not hell. When we first go underground, we’re given cause to believe that these subterranean regions are all dreary and full of ugly and unhappy folk, but after the heroes rescue the prince and break the enchantment, the clouds (metaphorical) part and joy returns. The gnomes laugh and frolic, made cuter by their glee. Lewis compares Bism’s brilliance and color to that of a stained glass window, lit by a tropic sun at midday. Unlike our mines, which are dreary, dangerous, dark places that smell of sulfur and death, this extreme underland emits a rich, glorious fragrance. It’s alive with rivers of red and gold. It’s a shining promised land, an impossible temptation, an abyss filled with hope and glory.

Your honours, why don’t you come down to Bism? You’d be happier there than in that cold, unprotected, naked country out on top. Or at least come down for a short visit. . . Down there, I could show you real gold, real silver, real diamonds. . . I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism.

The imagination in that passage blows me away—drinking diamond juice, eating rubies! The idea of living stone wasn’t unique to Lewis (I talk about this on my chapter about marble) but I love how colorfully he renders it. I also love how he tricks us into thinking the world under ours is lesser, only to reveal it has its own specific forms of beauty, its own colors, its own sensory pleasures.

Although we’ve strayed a bit from cinnabar, I would like to suggest that the brightest of reds has this same twisting quality as Bism. It is, as Rothko once wrote, the color that draws forth the “basic emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.” It can be a happy color, a sexy hue, a color for dancing shoes and grand gestures. But it can also be a tragic color, brighter even than the freshest blood, the color of burning and being burnt, the color of anger and pain. There’s worlds of meaning packed into the color red, and I won’t pretend I can draw them all forth here. But cinnabar gives me that sense of fearful possibility—I don’t blame the ancients for wanting to eat it, not at all.