Professor Tyndall suggests that the soft green of the sea, shadowed by clouds, assumes a subjective purple hue. Homer must have observed this before he became blind.
Pliny gives us much information about this colour; he enumerates the different sea-shores and coasts, Egyptian, Asiatic, and European, whence came the shell-fish (the murex and pelagia) that produced the so-called Tyrian purple dyes.[293]
He says that Romulus wore the purple, and that the dyed garments, all purple, were sacred to the gods in those days. After saying that it was still a colour of distinction, he continues: “Let us be prepared to excuse the frantic passion for purple, though we are impelled to inquire why such a high value is placed on the produce of this fish, seeing that in the dye the smell of it is offensive, and the colour, of a greenish hue, resembles the sea when tempestuous.” He describes purples[294] as being differently coloured according as to whether these “conchylia” inhabited the sea mud, the reefs, or the pebbly shores, the last being the most valuable.[295] This purple, said to have been imported from the coasts of Tyre, was till lately sold in Rome for its weight in gold; it gave the burning rosy red dye of the Cardinal’s robes, and was called “Porpora encarnadina,” purple incarnadine. It is full of light and freshness, and never fades; in fact, it has all the qualities ascribed to it by Pliny. It intensifies in the light.[296]
After purple, scarlet was the colour most esteemed by the ancients. The Israelites must have carried with them the dyes which coloured the hangings, woven or embroidered, belonging to the sanctuary in the wilderness, of which the outer covering of rams’ skins was dyed scarlet, and was probably of the nature of red morocco.[297]
There was the mineral dye, (cinnabar or red sulphate of mercury), and the insect dye; the first was probably used in mural painting. It is translated in our Bible as vermilion, in the account given by Jeremiah of a “house, ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion.”[298] Also Ezekiel gives us another instance of house-painting in vermilion.[299] Homer, who as a rule does not describe colouring, says the Greek ships were painted red.
It is probable that cinnabar was tempered, by admixture of white or other colours, for the monochrome painting of the Egyptians and Greeks. It was called by the Greeks miltos, by the Romans minium.
The dye of the red portions of the funeral tent of Queen Isi-em-Kheb, Shishak’s mother-in-law, is found by analysis to be composed of hematite (peroxyde of iron) tempered with lime. This is a beautiful pink red.[300]
The mineral red now called vermilion must have borrowed its name from the insect dye which the Greeks and Romans called “kermes.” In the Middle Ages the dye from the kermes was still called “vermiculata,” of which the word vermilion is a literal translation.
We should be fortunate if we could find how the Greeks and Romans prepared the cinnabar for mural painting, of which we find remnants in ruins and tombs—a lovely and pure red, with a tender bloom on it like a fragment of the rainbow, and not the slightest shade of yellow.
One of the most beautiful specimens of this scarlet that I am acquainted with, is a small drinking-cup (a “rhyton”) at the British Museum, in the form of a sphinx, with a white face, gilded hair, and a little cap of pure cinnabar, which is so soft in tone that it suggests the texture of scarlet velvet.