Medieval Colours

In the thirteenth century the red dyers, anxious that the colour blue was becoming so popular and threatening their profits,went and begged the stained-glass artists to start portraying the Devil as blue and make that hue reviled.Their pleas were ignored.

To unite the four elements,

They blended precious essences in harmony,

Following the planets and seasons,

Pursued dyes,pigments and metals around the world.

Heaven and earth must be synchronised.

Body,soul and spirit must accord

Through love and strife.


To make a black ink worthy of transcribing the Qur’an

Quadi Ahmad described a recipe requiring fourteen ingredients,

Inlcuding hemp-oil soot,henna,indgo and aloe,saffron and rosewater,

Cyprus alum,Indian salt,Egyptian sugar and Tibetan musk.

The very substance of God.


Ultramarine they extracted from lapis lazuli,

From the lands of Paradise,in the orient,

Heaven’s stone contaminated with earth’s impurities;

Patiently,laboriously,it must be purified,

Obedient to its sympathies and gods.


By the sacred marriage of mercury and sulphur

Vermilion was prepared,the red elixir,

The wedding of Hades and Persephone,

A union of fire and water,heaven and earth.

The Easter egg, skilfully incubated.


They dreamed of chimeras, of making Spanish gold,

Melding red copper,human blood,vinegar and basilisk ash,

They concocted miraculous hues from ideas,

Weaving planetary rays into tapestries of light.

They codified the rusts of iron,copper,lead and silver,

And the rusts of mercury and tin;

They quantified mixtures of darkness and light.


From the blood of elephants and dragons

Who had killed one another in combat,

Under the tree at the centre of the world

The artists mixed dragonsblood;

The snake had but a moment to squeeze

Through theStrait Gate,leaving its skin behind;

The Argo,navigating the Clashing Rocks,

Lost its stern in the struggle,passing the test.


Armenian red was harvested at the foot of Ararat,

At the meeting place of East and West;

Cochineal they collected on the Baptist’s feast day,

At the solstice,the midpoint of the year.


In Hagia Sophia pilgrims gazed

Upon the Virgin Mary’s robe:

White wool dyed with Tyrian purple,

The sea snail’s yellow juice transmuted

By the sun,a truth that would never wash out.