Evidence of Cochineal in Painting

Barbara C. Anderson

Evidence of Cochineal’s Use in Painting The organicred dye known as cochineal has played a number of key roles in his-tory, most important as a superb colorant for animal-based textiles,especially silks and woolens, with a great range of hues and shadesfrom purple to coral. Coveted for more than two millennia, its reachultimately extended over the globe, providing handsome revenueswherever it was traded. This article concentrates on its use in paintingbefore the nineteenth century.1

COCHINEAL’S DERIVATION The dye is extracted from the insectdactylopius coccus, the host for which is the nopal or opuntia cactus,originally indigenous only to South and Central America andMexico. Long cultivated in Pre-Columbian Mexico, where itwas used as a dye for rabbit fur and feathers, and as a lake pigmentin mural, manuscript, and textile painting, it was also a majorcolorant in ancient Andean textiles, although no evidence is availableto indicate that the insect had a domesticated presence in SouthAmerica. Shortly after Hernando Cortés and his soldiers movedinto Tenochtitlan, Bernal Díaz del Castillo recorded it among thedazzling array of goods available in the vast market, and many ofthe early European chroniclers of the New World’s offerings wereaware of its allure. In illustrated documents of the early contactperiod, such asCodexMendoza, the dye’s depiction as a primary sourceof tribute demonstrates its value.2

The exact species of dactylopius coccus was initially a mystery,fostering a debate about whether it was a worm or an insect. Onlywith the invention of the microscope in the late seventeenth century

1 Ana Roquero, Tintes y tintoreros de América: Catálogo de materias primas y registro etnográfico deMéxico, Centro América, Andes Centrales y Selva Amazónica (Madrid, 2002); Elena Phipps, CochinealRed: The Art History of a Color (New Haven, 2010).2 Robin A. Donkin, “Spanish Red: An Ethnogeographical Study of Cochineal and theOpuntia Cactus,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, V (1977), 1–8.

Barbara C. Anderson retired in 2012 as the director of the Museum Resources Division of theNew Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Previously she was head of exhibitions andconsulting curator for Spanish and Latin American art at the Getty Research Institute. Sheis currently working on The Red that Colored the World, an exhibition opening in 2015 atthe Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

© 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00722

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLV:3 (Winter, 2015), 337–366.

were Europeans finally able to establish its true identity and to begindevising ways to wrest its control for their own gain. In fact, thecochineal bug was one of the first subjects of microscopic investiga-tion. Even today the identification of the substance in a work of artcan be elusive since its organic nature precludes routine methods ofanalysis, including the most powerful microscopy (more on currenttechniques below).3

THE RISE OF COCHINEAL IN EUROPE When the emperor Charles Vbecame aware of cochineal, he immediately appreciated its im-portance as a revenue source. It first saw export from Mexico toSpain during the 1540s and then to the rest of Europe and Asia,becoming the second-most profitable trade item from the NewWorld after silver. Five main conditions in Europe favored the in-creasingly enthusiastic reception of cochineal: (1) a long-established,thriving textile industry based on silk and wool, to which cochinealtook most readily, in northern and southern Europe from the Mid-dle Ages onward; (2) the loss of the murex shell source of purpledye, which popes and kings favored, after the fall of Constantinopleto the Ottomans in 1453, leading to Pope Pius II’s decree in 1464that made red the color of cardinals; (3) the discovery of an alumquarry in Tolfa, Italy, just after the primary source of the mordantcritical for organic red dyes in the Ottoman Empire became un-available; (4) cochineal’s exceptional saturation and colorfastness,and its cultivation in Mexico, which enabled higher productionlevels than the labor-intensive manual hunting and gatheringrequired for kermes and Polish cochineal, its rivals; (5) the devel-opment of lighter-weight fabrics in northern Europe during thefourteenth century to substitute for the heavier English wool thathad become scarce.4

Color became increasingly desirable, and, by the sixteenth cen-tury, increasingly available via the “transoceanic shipping that

3 Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire(New York, 2006), 143–156.4 For the history of cochineal’s cultivation and commercial exploitation from various per-spectives, see Raymond Lee, “American Cochineal in European Commerce,” Journal of ModernHistory, XXIII (1951), 205–224; Donkin, “Spanish Red”; Carlos Marichal, “Mexican Cochinealand the European Demand for American Dyes,” in Steven Topik, idem, and Zephyr Frank (eds.),From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy,1500–2000 (Durham, 2006). Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571: TheFifteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1978), 240.

338 | BARBARA C. ANDERSON

brought tropical dyestuffs to northern ports via the Atlantic coast,bypassing the Levantine bottleneck and undermining Italian mono-polies in the luxury trade.” Cochineal was the most highly prized ofthese dyestuffs. The trade networks for cochineal, which supplantedall other red insect dyes within a few decades of its arrival in Europe,are well known. Its main routes were first from New Spain toSeville and later, after 1520, to Cadiz. By the 1540s, it had reachedFrance, Flanders, England, Livorno, Genoa, Florence, and Venice.From Venice it went to the Levant, Persia, Syria (especially Isfahan,Aleppo, andDamascus), Cairo, and India, as well as to Constantinopleand the ports on the Black Sea and the Caspian region. By the 1570s,it had gone from New Spain to East Asia via Acapulco and thePhilippines.5

COCHINEAL’S USE AND MEANING IN PAINTING Although primarilyvalued as a textile dye, cochineal was also embraced by paintersfor its translucency, especially as a lake pigment; lakes producedluminous effects in mural, easel, and manuscript paintings wher-ever they were created, beginning in the ancient Americas. InMesoamerica, according to Magaloni-Kerpel, the artists of MonteAlban Tomb 204 of Monte Alban Period I (c. 200 B.C.) and Tombs104 and 105 from the Classic Period (600–750 A.D.), as well asof Tomb 5, Cerro de la Campaña, Suchilquitongo (c. 750 A.D.),used a combination of three organic reds; cochineal predominated,along with small amounts of hematite in the earlier periods, andhematite and cinnabar at Suchilquitongo, to make what has beencalled “Zapotec Red” for the backgrounds of scenes of funeraryrituals.6

At the well-preserved Suchilquitongo, “it is still possible toperceive that the red organic background has a very particularoptical quality: it remains transparent, because it is a dye, but reflectsthe light, so as to produce the sensation of a living screen. Whenilluminated with candlelight (the manner in which the tombs wouldhave originally been seen) this red acquires an immaterial quality.The human figures emerge from the red screen and acquire aconcrete presence, creating an optical illusion, because their bodies

5 Jane Schneider, “Peacocks and Penguins: The Political Economy of European Cloth andColors,” American Ethnologist, V (1978), 413–437, 434.6 Diana Magaloni-Kerpel, “The Hidden Aesthetic of Red in the Painted Tombs of Oaxaca,”RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, LVII/VIII (2010), 55–74.

EVIDENCE OF COCHINEAL ’S USE | 339

were painted with dark hematite, a saturated earth pigment thatcontrasts sharply with the transparency of the background.”7

In European painting, the substance called both carmine andcochineal (or cochinilla, cochinelle, and cucciniglia with their variousspellings) in the early modern period was used to create specialeffects, its primary applications being the glaze over other lakesand vermilion. Artists and writers—such as Roger de Piles, in Lespremiers elements de la peinture pratique (1684)—recommended thistechnique for the most beautiful and economical results, in theprocess ensuring that an upper layer of cochineal lake left the mostexpensive materials in the hands of the master, rather than hisassistants, who commonly painted in the cheaper lower and middlelayers.8

Veronese’s Four Allegories in the National Gallery, London,executed in the 1570s, exemplify the possibilities of cochineal: “Agenerous use of and reliance on red lake pigments is also a charac-teristic of Venetian painting; in the ‘Allegories’ the deep purple-red glazes have been identified as based on the dyestuff extractedfrom cochineal…. Although no other red lake type was detected,Veronese has constructed a considerable colour range in the redsby superimposing red glazes over pink or red underlayers consist-ing of white, red lake and vermilion in varying combinations andproportions, occasionally adding red lead to widen the colour rangefurther.”9

In Antony Van Dyck’s Balbi Children of 1625–1627 (Figure 1),Roy comments that the artist’s “method of painting for the chil-dren’s clothes and particularly for the large hanging curtain involvesa more extensive glazing technique than is seen in his earlier workand, in fact, is not much used later. This presumably reflects aninterest in Venetian methods of drapery painting for which glazes,particularly red lakes…play such an important part. The back-ground curtain to the right is a most elaborate piece of draperypainting and involves undercolours consisting of orange-toned

7 Ibid., 69.8 Margriet van EikemaHommes, “Painters’Methods to Prevent Colour Changes Described inSixteenth to Early Eighteenth Century Sources on Oil Painting Techniques,” in Erma Hermens,AnnemiekOuwerkerk, andNicola Costaras (eds.), Looking Through Paintings: The Study of PaintingTechniques and Materials in Support of Art Historical Research (Leiden, 1998), 91–132, 107.9 Nicolas Penny, AshokRoy, andMarika Spring, “Veronese’s Paintings in theNational Gallery,Techniques and Materials: Part II,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XVII (1996), 32–55, 39.


pure vermilion mixed with white and red earth, and then furthermodeled in two contrasting paints, one based on deep blue indigoand the other on a rich crimson red lake, likely to have been pre-pared from cochineal. The final shimmering effect of the shotcolours was achieved by glazing and scumbling with further redlake, red lake mixed with indigo, and pure indigo.”10

Fig. 1 AnthonyVanDyck,The Balbi Children, Flemish, Painted inGenoa,c. 1625–1627. Oil on Canvas (219 151 cm). Bought, 1985 (6502).National Gallery, London

SOURCE ©National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.

10 Roy, “The National Gallery’s Van Dycks: Technique and Development,” ibid., XX(1999), 50–83, 63. In an email response of February 20, 2013, to an inquiry of mine about theseeming inconclusiveness concerning cochineal, Jo Kirby responded, “It has never been possible


Cochineal glaze was also applied over the dark areas of thegreen curtains in the portrait, a method also commonly employedby the Venetian painters that Van Dyck revered. Rembrandtglazed with cochineal over vermilion in the brilliant red dress ofThe Jewish Bride, and in the shadows of a black garment worn bythe subject in Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Taylorobserves that red “tints in the depths meant that they advancedto the eye…and so could hold their own against the brighterhighlights. Thus, the unity of painting chiaroscuro was preservedby a distortion of nature.”11

The geographical origin of the cochineal used in this periodhas been a source of confusion ever since Europe’s first experienceof it. Francisco Pacheco and other Europeans writing about paint-ing in the seventeenth century insisted that Florentine cochinealwas superior to that from the Indies. Despite later scholarly endorse-ment of this view, however, painters probably did not know thatItalian cochineal was actually Mexican cochineal. According toMatthew, by the early seventeenth century, red lakes seem to havebeen identified more often by a place name than by the originalplant or insect source of the dye substance; red lake “of Florence,”“of Venice,” and “of Antwerp” are themost common of such usages.The implication is that the pigment was being processed in some,if not all, of the large manufacturing cities where it was being usedin great quantities as a dye.12

Bruquetas has shown that Spain had no major tradition ofpigment production, except for the locally extracted vermilionand ochre. Thus, despite Pacheco’s pronouncement, cochinealfrom Florence actually came from the Indies (as the Americas werecalled), later to be processed in Italy. The Medici family imported

to perform HPLC analysis to confirm the initial identification of the lake in the Balbi Children viamicrospectrophotometry in the visible region; no sample is available for this purpose. However,the pigment has the characteristics observed by the same technique inCharity [another Van Dycktested in the National Gallery], which is known to contain cochineal dyestuff, and on this basis,cochineal is the most likely candidate.”11 Roy, “The National Gallery’s Van Dycks”; Karin Groen, “Investigation of the Use of theBindingMedium byRembrandt: Chemical Analysis andRheology,” available at http://alexandria.tue.nl/repository/freearticles/617823.pdf, 220. Paul Taylor, “The Glow in Late Sixteenth andSeventeenth-Century Dutch Paintings,” in Hermens, Ouwerkerk, and Costaras (eds.), Looking,159–178, 173.12 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (Madrid, 2009; orig. pub. 1649), 454; Louisa Matthew,“Pigment Trade in Europe,” in Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (eds.), Colour Between TwoWorlds (Florence, 2011), 301–316, 293.


cochineal from the Indies to Florence and elsewhere in Italy assoon as it became available for purchase in Spain. The commonbelief is that sixteenth-century tapestries of the Sala dei Duecentoin Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio were dyed with Mexican cochineal.Juan Pantoja de la Cruz’s inventory of 1608 included twice as muchcarmin de indias as carmine from Florence. Moreover, a contract foran altarpiece dated 1632 by Vicente Carducho, a Florentine work-ing in Spain, specifies only carmin de indias, even though Carduchowrote of his preference for Florentine carmine just a year later inhis Diálogos de la Pintura. An analysis performed by the NationalGallery London on Velázquez’s Immaculate Conception and St. Johnon Patmos, both from his Seville period c. 1618/19, shows thatthe pupil and son-in-law of his fellow Sevillian Pacheco included,knowingly or unknowingly, Mexican cochineal in his palette, thirtyyears before the publication of Pacheco’s book.13

Historical Documentation and Instruction Historical documenta-tion and instruction about the best employment of cochineal inpainting survive from the sixteenth century onward. For instance,Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex of 1576/77 describedthe cultivation, preparation, and use of cochineal in Mexico byweavers and painters (see Figure 2), and in the seventeenth cen-tury, Carducho and Pacheco reported on its various uses in Spanishpainting. Carducho explained the laying-in stage, in which outlineswere transferred to the canvas: “Taking outlines is when an oiledpaper is placed over a painting and the parts of the painting seenthrough the transparent paper are drawn on the paper with pencil:this may be done also by outlining the parts of the painting withcarmine, and placing the paper on top; pressing with the hand, thepaper takes the carmine and thus the design is transferred.”14

Pacheco added, “as a boy, I used a mixture of white andcarmine, or white and black in oil, to paint a history or figure on

13 Rocío Bruquetas, “Sources for the Study of Pigments Used by Goya and Other 18th-Century Spanish Painters,” in Sigrid Eyb Green, Joyce H. Townsend, and Mark Clarke (eds.),The Artist’s Process: Technology and Interpretation: Proceedings from the Fourth Symposium of the ArtTechnological Research Working Group (London, 2012), 138–146, 145; Lea Markey, “‘Istoria dellaterra chiamata la nuova spagna’: The History and Reception of Sahagún’s Codex at the MediciCourt,” in Wolf and Connors (eds.), Colours, 199–220, 214; Bruquetas, Técnicas y materiales de lapintura española en los siglos de oro (Madrid, 2002), 216, 133; Zahira Veliz, Artists’ Techniques inGolden Age Spain (New York, 1986), 26; Larry Keith, “Velázquez’s Painting Technique,” inDawson W. Carr and Xavier Bray, Velázquez (London, 2006), 70–79, 7.14 Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 28.


a small canvas, in this way it was easier to blend and adjust, removeand rework.” Throughout his treatise, Pacheco mentions cochinealwhenever he discusses the proper colors for illuminations, frescoes,oil paintings, and polychrome sculptures; for the depiction of drap-eries, rosy flesh; and for mixing with other pigments to make richhues such as purple. Bruquetas found references to cochineal intreatises and numerous documents related to painting and poly-chrome sculpture during Spain’s Golden Age but not always con-nected to specific works. Zurbarán, for example, is known tohave used it extensively, but only three of his paintings have under-gone scientific examination to date: Two paintings in the Monasteryof Guadalupe and one of the Roman Emperor Domitian on horse-back ascribed to his workshop were recently found to containcochineal.15

Although cochineal has often been characterized as more fugi-tive than other reds used in European painting, its allure as a colortended to outweigh that disadvantage. Joshua Reynolds—according

Fig. 2 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex (Historiageneral de las cosas de la Nueva España), Mexico, 1576–1577,Book 11, Fol. 368. Woodcut

SOURCE Biblioteca Mediceo Laurenziana Mediceo Palatino, 218–220, Florence

15 Pacheco, Arte, 434 (English translation in Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 35); Bruquetas, Técnicas,133. Zurbarán’s painting is in a private collection in Spain.


to Northcote, his follower and biographer—clung to it for fleshtones, even though Northcote attempted to convince him “toabandon those fleeting colors, lake and carmine, which it was hispractice to use in the flesh, and to adopt vermilion in their stead asinfinitely more durable, although not, perhaps so exactly true tonature as the former. In reply, Reynolds looked at his hand and said,‘I can see no vermilion in flesh.’”16

Modern Detection But although a corpus of tested paintingsis growing slowly, comparatively little is known about cochinealin individual objects. Written descriptions are rare, preserved mainlyin a few inventories and contracts (some of which will be mentionedbelow). Absolute verification of cochineal in undocumented objectsis currently possible only through analysis of paint samples taken bythe few experienced scientists with access to, and familiarity with,expensive and sophisticated equipment, especially high performanceliquid chromatography (HPLC), which has been tracing organic pig-ments since the 1980s. Many works of art have no inconspicuousareas from which to take samples, and not all reds in an individualwork can necessarily be identified. Since reds that appear similar tothe naked eye may often reveal their differences only with scientificexamination, generalizations about the use of a substance are difficultto draw. Hence, the body of paintings to which cochineal can bedefinitively tied is likely to remain small until new, noninvasiveand less-specialized methods are developed. The scientific staff ledby Marco Leona at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New Yorkare at the forefront of HPLC analysis and noninvasive techniques.Kirby, Roy, Larry Keith, and others in the National Gallery inLondon have compiled the greatest number of cochineal identifica-tions in European paintings from the sixteenth through the nine-teenth centuries. Other, more narrowly focused studies of thistype will be discussed below.17

A relatively small number of painted objects have been subjectedto chemical tests; others have been examined with spectroscopy,

16 James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., etc., Late President ofthe Royal Academy, Comprising Original Anecdotes of Many Distinguished Persons, His Contemporaries,and a Brief Analysis of his Discourses (London, 1818), I, 183.17 Phipps, Cochineal Red. For the cochineal identifications, see National Gallery TechnicalBulletin XVII (1996), XX (1999), XXVI (2005), and XXVIII (2007). European and SouthAmerican institutions are in the process of testing items in their collections, but results havenot been published.


which can give good, if not conclusive, evidence when resultsare compared with the molecular structure of a reference sampleof cochineal. Representing the pre- and post-contact eras in theAmericas, for example, the presence of cochineal is strongly indi-cated in three wall paintings, eight manuscripts, several qeros, foureasel paintings, and two lacquerware furniture pieces. Themanuscriptof the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, thought to have been composed in theValley ofNochistlan (“the place of cochineal” inNahuatl), Oaxaca—a major center of cochineal production in Pre-Colombian andcolonial Mexico—underwent various types of spectroscopic analysisin 2008. The emission spectra were consistent with insect dye,which, in the Americas almost certainly means cochineal, but noneof the red areas examined was indicated in the report, probablybecause all reds were thought to be cochineal. The same type ofexamination also appeared to indicate that the roughly contempora-neous Codex Cospi was painted with cochineal. The Codex Beckerno. 1, another Oaxacan manuscript, is also said to contain cochinealbut without further elaboration concerning its method of identifica-tion or its sample sites in the manuscript.18

Manuscripts from the viceregal period have received more fre-quent discussion in conferences or publications than have otherpainted objects. Magaloni-Kerpel, a leading figure in the study ofPre-columbian and colonial Mexican painting, wrote not only aboutthe reds in tomb paintings at Monte Alban and Suchilquitongo, asdescribed above, but also contributed to its study in two chaptersin Colours between Two Worlds, which largely concerns Sahagún’sFlorentine Codex of c.1576/77. In it, she reports, among other usesof cochineal in painting, that harlots and witches tinted their lipswith cochineal. Straulino found cochineal and other reds in theMapade Cuauhtinchan no. 2 from the mid-sixteenth century, though shedid not indicate their locations. Stanley recently reported evidenceof cochineal found through microscopic and spectroscopic examina-tion in a mid-sixteenth-century deerskin map from Central Mexico

18 Costanza Miliani, “Materials and Techniques of the Pre-Columbian Mixtec Manuscript,The Codex Zouche-Nuttall,” Access, Research and Technology for the Conservation of the EuropeanCultural Heritage, MOLAB User Report (2008), available at http://www.eu-artech.org/files/Users_report_final_NUTTAL.pdf; Miliani, Davide Domenici, et al, “Colouring Materials ofpre-Columbian Codices: Non-Invasive In Situ Spectroscopic Analysis of the Codex Cospi,”Journal of Archaeological Science, XXXIX (2012), 672–679; Leonor Nayar, “Codices precolombinos,”Documentos de Trabajo (Buenos Aires, 2009), II, 1–49, 23.


now housed at Princeton University. Newman and Derrick iden-tified cochineal in pale pink areas—specifically the horizontal linesseparating land-parcel sections, a conch shell, and cornstalks—ofthe Beinecke Map at Yale University (dated to the 1560s) using HPLC,and Magaloni provided artistic and historical analysis. Emissionspectra of samples taken from the Codex Huejotzingo (the Libraryof Congress) and maps of Ameca, Atlatlauca, and Cholula that ac-company their respective Relaciones geográficas, dated 1581 (the NettieBenson Library of the University of Texas), also show propertiesconsistent with cochineal.19

Although most of the pigment analysis has focused on earlycontact-period manuscripts, a few other categories in colonial paint-ing have also received attention. Cochineal is currently a specialfocus of a project devoted to the study of the pigments decorat-ing colonial Andean qeros undertaken by scientists at the NationalMuseum of the American Indian; the Metropolitan Museum; theCotsen Institute for Archaeology at the University of California,Los Angeles; the American Museum of Natural History; and theMuseum of New Mexico.20

Cochineal has been identified in a number of South Americanpaintings: Pedro Fernández de Noriega’s Vision of the Flask (1671)from his series on the life of St. Francis in the convento dedicated tohim in Lima; Juan Zapata’s Death of Saint John of God (c. 1685)from Cuzco, now in the Museo de Arte de Lima; an anonymous

19 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Hidden Aesthetic of Red”; idem, “Painters of the NewWorld: The Pro-cess ofMaking the Florentine Codex,” inWolf andConnors (eds.),Colours, 47–78;Marina Straulino,“ANew View: The Conservation and Digital Restoration of theMapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2,” inDavid Carrasco and Scott Sessions (eds.),Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey throughthe Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (Albuquerque, 2007), 49–80, 60; Ted Stanley, “Case Study: Ex-amination andAnalysis of aMesoamericanDeekskinMap,”oral presentation, American Institute ofConservation 40th Annual Conference, Albuquerque, 2012; Newman and Derrick, “AnalyticalReport of the Pigments and Binding Materials Used on the Beinecke Map,” in Mary E. Millerand Barbara Mundy (eds.), Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City (New Haven, 2012),91–100, 99; Magaloni-Kerpel, “The Traces of the Creative Process: Pictorial Materials and Tech-niques in the Beinecke Map,” in Miller and Mundy (eds.), Painting a Map, 75–90. Sylvia RodgersAlbro and Thomas C. Albro, II, “The Examination and Conservation Treatment of the Library ofCongress Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo Codex,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation,XXIX (1990), 97–115, 113, n. 13; Mary Elizabeth Haude, “Identification and Classification ofColorants Used during Mexico’s Early Colonial Period,” American Institute for Conservation: TheBook and Paper Group Annual, XVI (1997), 1–20, 7–8.20 Emily Kaplan et al., “The Qero Project: Conservation and Science Collaboration overTime,” American Institute of Conservation Research and Technical Studies, I (2012), 1–24, availableat http://www.conservation-us.org/_data/n_0001/resources/ live/RATS-003-2012.pdf.


Cuzco painter’s Saint Ignatius as Doctor of the Church in the Museode Arte Hispanoamericano “Isaac Fernández Blanco”; TomásCabrera’s late eighteenth-century Virgin of the Carmelites fromSan Pedro, Jujuy; and several eighteenth-century examples byMarco Zapata and others. All of these paintings show cochinealin the draperies of the subjects.21

Cochineal in painting produced in the British colonies andthe federal-era United States does not seem to have been subjectedto systematic investigation, but there are certainly interesting pathsto follow. The red inks in the elaborately decorated PennsylvaniaGerman Fraktur documents are said to have been made from co-chineal (Figure 3), which we knowwas available from such local paintsellers as Samuel Wetherill in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia.Wetherill’s papers include a manuscript recipe book in which co-chineal is a primary ingredient in the manufacture of red. By this timeand in this region, cochineal would have come the long way backto the New World, starting its journey in Mexico or Guatemala,traveling to England and across the Atlantic again to the Easternseaboard of the new United States.22

Work to identify the presence, exact location, use, and meaningof cochineal in paintings continues. Additional New World objectshave recently undergone HPLC analysis in the studios of Newmanat the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; of Leona at the MetropolitanMuseum, NewYork; and of Mackenzie in the NewMexico Depart-ment of Cultural Affairs, as part of a larger project organized at theMuseum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Leona identified itin the billowing red draperies of the archangel in Sebastián López deArteaga’s St. Michael and the Bull, dated c. 1650, in the Denver ArtMuseum (Figure 4). Newman found cochineal in an eighteenth-century lacquered chest from Michoacán, now in the Franz MayerMuseum in Mexico City, and Leona identified it in a lacqueredeighteenth-century costurero, or sewing box, from Michoacán now

21 Francisco Staastny and Noemi Rosario Chirino, “Perfil tecnológico de las escuelas depintura limeña y cuzqueña,” Iconos: Revista peruana de conservación, arte y arqueología, IV(2000–2002), 19–29, 22, 28; Alicia Seldes et al., “Green, Yellow, and Red Pigments in SouthAmerican Paintings, 1610–1780,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, XLI (2012),225–242; Gabriela Siracusano, El Poder de los colores: de lo material a lo simbóloco en las prácticasculturales andinas, sigos XVI–XVIII (Buenos Aires, 2005), 94–95.22 Wetherill papers 1762–1899, CD 3479. P5H8, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Mythanks to Julie Miller in the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress for introducing meto this manuscript.


in the Museum of International Folk Art. Mackenzie detected it inthe red cape of a late eighteenth-century hide painting depictingSantiago, in the style of the New Mexican santero Molleno, as wellas in other colonial objects in that collection.

As for European paintings and polychrome objects, cochinealhas been found in sculpture and furniture, oil paintings, manuscriptilluminations, maps, and drawings. In a manuscript at the Universityof Texas entitled “Tatres de la Real Cancilleria de la Gobernacióndel principat de Catalunya,” dated between 1338 and 1578, co-chineal is in text inks and a decorated initial from the sixteenth-century portion. It was similarly employed for text and decorationin Andalusian maps and drawings related to lawsuits in the eighteenthto nineteenth centuries, housed in the Real Audiencia y Chancillería

Fig. 3 Johan Adam Eyer,Marriage Blessing, Pennsylvania, 1784. Temperaon Paper

SOURCE Free Library, Rare Book Department, Fraktur 00636, Philadelphia.


de Granada. One of several versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis(c. 1555–1560), now in theGettyMuseum, has been found to containthe dye in drapery areas (Figure 5), as does Tintoretto’s Depositionof Christ (c. 1590) in the National Gallery of Scotland (Figure 6).23

23 Holly Robertson, “Conservation Portfolio, project number 2004-18, Number B 338,available at http://ischool.utexas.edu/~hollyr/portfolio/spain/arcguvak-bindings/2004-18.html (2004); Rosario Blanc et al., “Sampling and Identification of Dyes in Historical Mapsand Drawings by Liquid Chromatography with Diode-Ray Detection, “Journal of Chromoto-graphy A, 1122 (2006), 105–113 (maps 2, 37, 41, 94); Ulrich Burkmaier, Arie Wallert, andAndrea Rothe, “A Note on Early Italian Oil Painting Technique,” in Wallert, Hermens,and Marja Peek (eds.), Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice (Los Angeles,1995), 117–130, 123; Hugh McAndrew et al., “Tintoretto’s Deposition of Christ in the NationalGallery of Scotland,” Burlington Magazine, CXXV (1985), 501–517, 515.

Fig. 4 Sebastián López de Arteaga, St. Michael and the Bull, Mexico,c. 1650. Oil on Canvas

SOURCE Gift of Frank Barrows Freyer II for the Frank Barrows Freyer Collection by Exchangeand Gift of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 1994.27. Photo Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.


The largest number of European paintings to have been ex-amined for their red lakes are in the National Gallery, London.The works there by El Greco, Veronese (6), Van Dyck (5), Pietroda Cortona, Canaletto (2), Velázquez (3), Tiepolo, Gainsborough,Reynolds, Lawrence, and others have been found to be primarilycochineal. Also important is the analysis of works in Spain: MarisaGómez of the Instituto del Patronato Cultural de España (IPCE)identified it in glazes over the estofado in the polychrome sculpturesof the later sixteenth-century altarpieces of San Mateo de Lucenaand the Church of Las Plácidas (Pacheco would have instructedso). The IPCE also found it in El Greco’s Christ Blessing in theCasa del Greco, Toledo, and the three paintings by Zurbaran,or his workshop, discussed above. The samples in all of theseworks came mainly from areas in the draperies. In an anony-mous Virgin Mary Spinning in the Denver Art Museum, newlyidentified as Spanish (from Seville, formerly considered Peruvian),

Fig. 5 Titian, Venus and Adonis, Venice, c. 1555–1560. Oil on Canvas

SOURCE J. Paul Getty Museum, 92.PA.42, Los Angeles.


Mackenzie has shown that cochineal was used in the red bow inMary’s hair.24

West and East Asia were important centers for the trade inAmerican cochineal, at least as early as the second half of the six-teenth century, when Sahagún reported that it was already knownin Turkey and China. Its identification in individual objects from

24 The National Gallery Technical Bulletins contain numerous discussions of cochineal. Seeespecially Jo Kirby Atkinson and Raymond White, “The Identification of Red Lake PigmentDyestuffs and a Discussion of their Use,”XVII (1996), 56–80; Roy, “Van Dycks”; Kirby, MarikaSpring, and Catherine Higgett, “The Technology of Red Lake Pigment Manufacture: Study ofthe Dyestuff Substrate,” XXVI (2005), 71–87; idem, “The Technology of Eighteenth- andNineteenth-Century Red Lake Pigments,” XXVIII (2007), 69–87. Marisa Gomez, “Losmateriales de la policromía: empirismo y conocimiento Científico,” Grupo español de conservación:Retablos: técnicas, materiales, y procedimientos, Valencia (2004), 13–15, available at http://geiic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=40.

Fig. 6 Tintoretto, Christ Carried to the Tomb, Venice, c. 1590. Oil onCanvas

SOURCE Scottish National Galleries, NG2419, Edinburgh.


that vast area, however, is scarce. Only Phipps’ textiles from theMetropolitan Museum are known to have been analyzed andfound to contain cochineal. However, the catalogue entries forthree seventeenth-century illuminated Gospel books from Isfahanin the Matenadaran-Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manu-scripts, Yerevan, by Mesrop Xizanći, dated between 1624 and1642, report the presence of cochineal in the letters from Eusebiusto Carpianus, representations of the four evangelists, canon tables,title pages, decorated initials, and some marginalia.25

Cochineal as Symbol and Commodity Cochineal was chosen inat least one instance as a symbol of Western Europe in its relationswith Asia. Simpson reports that the most expensive and impressivegift that Philip III of Spain gave to Shah Abbas I, ruler of theSafavid dynasty of Iran, in 1618 were five large barrels of cochineal.Simpson suggests that the cochineal, like the spices included in thepresentation, might have been meant to highlight the Hapsburgcontrol of the trade in such exotic goods. This notion is certainlyplausible, and the substance, which don García de Silva y Figueroa—the ambassador who delivered it—described as “one with whichone dyes the extremely fine color carmesi, a much esteemed thing,”was probably little known in Persia at that point in the seventeenthcentury.26

Commercial and personal journals describe the importation ofcochineal into such cities as Aleppo and Damascus in the secondhalf of the seventeenth century. The writings of Chevalier Laurentd’Arvieux, a French merchant and diplomat, about his lengthystay in Syria during the 1650s list cochineal among the items thathe imported from Europe. Records of a transaction between theBritish East India Company and Armenian merchants who boughtcochineal in England for sale in Persia and India on March 9, 1663,refer to a notice that the “Court now gave way for Nazareth an

25 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, fol. 268; Mikael Arakelian, “The Manuscripts Illumi-nated by Mesrop Xizanc’i from the Matenadaran Collection,” Iran & the Caucasus, VII (2003),147–182, nos. 294, 3598, 6320.26 Marianna Shreve Simpson, “Gifts for the Shah: An Episode in Hapsburg-Safavid Relationsduring the Reigns of Philip III and ʼAbbas I,” in Linda Komaroff (ed.),Gifts of the Sultan: The Artsof Giving at the Islamic Courts (New Haven, 2011), 125–141; Don García de Silva y Figueroa (ed.RuiManuel Loureiro et al.),Comentarios de la embaxada al rey Xa Abbas de Persia (1614–1624)-Parte I(Lisbon, 2011), Book 4, 336. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for providing this reference,and for particularly incisive suggestions concerning my discussion of this region.


Armenian to take passage to Surratt in the Charles…. And likewisefor Chiragos an Armenian to take passage for Surratt on theCharles with [other items]…100 li of cocheneele…all at Dover.”In some cases, the Armenian merchants took cochineal in partialpayment for silks that the English bought from them while in theArmenians’ home territory.27

In every other place that American cochineal had been intro-duced, it rapidly obliterated competition from established organicreds, especially kermes and Polish cochineal. Did that conquestextend to Persia, where Armenian cochineal had long been available,though much more arduous to harvest? Like kermes, Armeniancochineal had to be found, dug out of the ground, and collectedmanually, and despite a similarity to its American counterpart inthe amount of carminic acid in its composition, it was not onlylabor-intensive but also contained much less dye. Thus, onlyentrenched traditional marketing practices would seem to have keptits commerce alive, but no evidence of such protectionism exists.

Similar lacunae persist in our knowledge of cochineal’s use inJapan and China, despite its exportation to Japan through contactwith Portuguese and Italian missionaries between 1549 and 1597,the traffic of the Manila galleons from Mexico to Guangzhouduring the same century, the British trade with China in the firsthalf of the eighteenth century, and the documented presence ofred insect dyes in fifty Japanese Edo-period paintings analyzed atthe Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Two nineteenth-centuryhanging scrolls, one on silk in the Eishi style (F1906.11) andanother on paper, attributed to Hokusai (F1907.369—the accessionnumber in the Freer Gallery), were examined with HPLC and foundto contain cochineal.28

27 Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “The Memoires of a French Gentleman in Syria: Chevalier Laurentd’Arvieux (1635–1702),” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, XI (1984), 125–139,132; Vahé Baladouni and Margaret Makepeace (eds.), Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth andEarly Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources (Philadelphia, 1998), 57, xxiii.28 Leanna Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade: Chinese Silks and the British East India Com-pany,” Winterthur Portfolio, XVII (1982), 21–41; Jennifer Giaccai and John Winter, “ChinesePainting Colors: History and Reality,” in Paul Jett, Winter, and Blythe McCarthy (eds.), ScientificResearch on the Pictorial Arts of Asia: Proceedings of the Second Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery ofArt (London, 2005), 99–108; Winter, Giaccai, and Marco Leona, “East Asian Painting Pigments:Recent Progress and Remaining Problems,” in Jett et al. (eds.), Scientific Research in the Field ofAsian Art: Proceedings of the First Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art (London, 2003),157–163, 161.


The presence of cochineal in painting seems always to havecarried meaning. In the case of Pre-Columbian and early-contactMesoamerican painting, Magaloni-Kerpel innovatively and per-suasively asserts that the mineral hematite red extracted from belowthe surface of the earth in the Zapotec mural paintings of Tomb 5 atSuchilquitongo depicts the Zapotec underworld, whereas the insectred cochineal represents the world above ground: “These differentplaces could be related symbolically to the realm of the dead asimagined by the Zapotecs: The organic Zapotec red in the back-ground, a life-and-light charged substance, was used to transformthe tomb into a living repository from which the ancestors emerged;this space was a man-made cave and served as the symbolic wombof the lineage. The minerals hematite and cinnabar were used topaint the figures representing the deified ancestors…these redmineral pigments [were] used to represent the passage of time inthe underworld.” Magaloni bolsters her argument that the organicred is cochineal and not anatto, another local and commonly usedorganic red, by tracing the various Zapotec words for red, explainingthat Córdoba’s sixteenth-century dictionary called it niçcaxitopea,in which the suffix “pea” “refers to the dried, rounded and smallcochineal insects.”29

Similarly, Magaloni sees red conveying meaning related totime in the Beinecke Map and Florentine Codex. The three horizontalred lines on the map represent “movement through space and time,”as it does in the Pre-Columbian Codex Selden and Codex Bodley. Inaddition, she stresses the symbolic importance of the maize throughits depiction with the colorant. Signaled in Sahagún, the day signsreferring to pre-contact dates in Book 4, which describes the Azteccalendar, are colored mostly with cochineal; the post-contact eventsare depicted using the European pigment minium, or red lead. ForMagaloni, the application of vermilion over cochineal in the spinyoyster shell forming the name of don Diego de San FranciscoTehuetzquititzin must be meaningful, since the resulting colors arealmost identical, unlike in European painting, where the cochinealglaze enhanced the depth and luster of vermilion underneath it,while hindering vermilion’s tendency to blacken. Magaloni viewsthis use of reds as evocative of the Zapotec tombs in the deliberate

29 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Aesthetic of Red,” 70, 71.


combination of references to the underworld in the mineral cinnabarorigin of vermilion and to the “solar world…extracted from a livinginsect that feeds on the fleshy leaves of the nopal cactus, their growthgenerated by the sun.”30

COCHINEAL AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE WORLDS OF PAINTING AND

TEXTILES The relationship between paintings and textiles was closein both the ancient and early-contact Americas and early modernEurope. So far as the early-contact Americas are concerned, Milianiasserts that “the abundance of dyes used in the painting of CodexCospi suggests that the practice of codex painting was in some waymore akin to textile dyeing than to mural or pottery painting, wheremineral pigments were mostly used.” The Codex Huejotzingo(Library of Congress Harkness 1531, also known asCodexMonteleone)sheds interesting light on the issue of cochineal and textiles inprehispanic and early-contact Mexico. The long- held assumptionis that given the absence of sheep or camelids in ancientMesoamericato provide wool, cochineal was probably not widely used there intextiles, which were largely made of cotton, but restricted primarilyto rabbit fur or feathers.31

Codex Huejotzingo accompanied a lawsuit filed by Cortés dis-puting tribute amounts demanded of his domains. Dated c. 1531,

30 Magaloni-Kerpel, “Traces,” 82–83; Rutherford J. Gettens, Robert L. Feller, andW.ThomasChase, “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” Studies in Conservation, XVII (1972), 45–69, 55.31 Miliani, “Nuttall,” 678.

Fig. 7 Codex Huejotzingo, Plate III, Huejotzingo, Mexico, c. 1531. Paintingon Maguey Paper

SOURCE Library of Congress, Harkness Collection F129.56.H83 1531, Washington, D.C.


the manuscript contains several painted illustrations of textiles,including two—Plates III (Figure 7) and IV—depicted with a trans-parent red colorant identified spectroscopically as consistent withcochineal. Inscriptions on the versos of the plates record observa-tions by witnesses called to testify in the suit. Relating to Plate III,a witness described “veynte paños pintados de algodon,” or twentypainted (that is, not dyed) cotton panels. The manuscript’s crea-tion so soon after contact would suggest that tribute still consistedof, at least to some degree, native production; in fact, the motifsdepicted in the twenty cotton panels of Plate III are three Azteccalendrical glyphs—Flower (Xochitl), Rabbit (Tochtli), and Reed(Acatl). Hence, cochineal did find use in conjunction with cottonbut on the surface, showing a clear link between painting andtextiles.32

Plate IV depicts, according to another witness, a textile wovenof rabbit fur with the same red, in this instance with a stepped-fretmotif. It is similar to a slightly later tapestry in the Cooper-HewittNational Design Museum (Figure 8) with European quatrefoilmotifs in woven rabbit fur, feathers, and cotton, featuring a red thathas been positively identified as cochineal. In both depictions, thedye that would have actually colored such textiles is also the one that

Fig. 8 Band, Probably Mexico, Late Fifteenth to Mid-SeventeenthCentury. Slit Tapestry with Warps of Spun Cotton and Wefts ofSpun Rabbit Hair and Goose Feathers Woven with Cotton

SOURCE Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902 (1902-1-374-a). Photo: Matt Flynn. Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. Photo Credit: Cooper-Hewitt National DesignMuseum, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, New York.

32 Albro and Albro, “Huejotzingo Codex,” 113, n. 12; Xavier Noguez, “The Problem of theIdentification of the Cloths,” in John R. Hébert and Barbara M. Loste (eds.),Codice de Huexotzinco(Mexico, 1995), 135; Noguez, “Description of the Plates,” in ibid., 103–122, 107.


depicts them. The connection between textiles and paintingsthrough cochineal is further affirmed by Sahagún who says, in theFlorentine Codex, that the “grana, purified and made into ‘small bread’shapes, is called tlaquauac tlapalli, i.e., fine grana. It is sold in themarket in this form to painters and to dyers of rabbit skin,” butnot, apparently, to dyers of fiber textiles.33

Although the main European interest in cochineal was as a dyefor textiles, this function also seems to have been a path to its use inpainting, as Kirby and White have noted. Painters and dyers tradi-tionally made purchases from the same vendors, first apothecariesand later specialized sellers of both pigments and dyes, as we haveseen was the case in Mexico. In Europe, cochineal required alum intextile dyes as a mordant and in lake pigments “as a reagent to forma substrate for the dyestuff, to make a pigment.” Painting in this pe-riod was increasingly executed on a textile, rather than on a woodensupport, and the more common linen canvas. Pacheco writes of atype of heavy silk cochineal damask with painted decorations, madesince 1594, to serve as standards on ships. Painting, which could betranslated into textiles as well, was considered a bon teint in whatan anonymous observer of the Gobelin family manufactory called“achieving the subtle shades of paintings made into tapestries.”34

The textile and painting industries were intimately bound notonly through common vendors, supports, and the use of alum butalso by virtue of their dependence, until the seventeenth century,on textiles to supply their red lakes, which were obtained by pre-cipitating the dyes from strips of dyed cloth immersed in water. AsVermeylen put it, “the expertise that had been developed in thedyeing of textiles resulted in a spin-off that would become the mainsource of pigments for artists.” In fact, one clue to whether a redlake is an insect dye is the presence of textile fibers.35

33 Noguez, “Description,” 108; Phipps, Cochineal Red, 17; Piero Baglioni et al., “On theNature of the Pigments of the General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex,”in Wolf and Connors (eds.), Colours, 47–78, 86.34 Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment,” 56; Matthew, “Pigment Tradein Europe,” 301–316; Roland Krischel, “The Venetian Pigment Trade in the Sixteenth Cen-tury,” in Wolf and Connors (ed.), Colours, 317–334; Kirby, Spring, and Higgett, “Red LakePigment Manufacture,” 71; Pacheco, Arte, 492; “How Tapestry Is Dyed at the Gobelins,”Decorator and Furnisher, XVI (1890), 130–131.35 Burkmaier,Wallert, andRothe, “Early Italian,” 123; Filip Vermeylen, “TheColour ofMoney:Dealing in Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp,” in Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon(eds.),Trade inArtists’Materials:Markets andCommerce in Europe to 1700 (London, 2010), 356–365, 357.


In the early decades following cochineal’s arrival in Europe,cochineal-dyed textiles could be mixed with other red shearings—usually from the kermes, lac, or madder insects—obtained by pain-ters from a tailor’s shop. Since this mixture of available reds wascommon at this point, no deliberate choice seems to have beeninvolved, as apparently was the case with Titian’s Venus and Adonis(Figure 5), which shows a mixture of cochineal and other reds. Ascochineal became more common in Europe, however, the practiceof extracting the dye from cloth clippings gradually declined infavor of taking the lake pigment directly from the cakes in whichcochineal was shaped and shipped from the New World. Never-theless, painting sometimes continued to be characterized with textileterminology. Taylor quotes Karel Van Mander in Het Schilderboeck(1604) about the painting of draperies: “To weave cloth beautifully[that is, to paint cloth beautifully], apply yourself to skillful glazing,which helps in themake of velvets and beautiful silks, when a glowingtranslucent effect is needed.”36

Several painters in Italy and the north known for their early adop-tion of cochineal had strong connections to the dyeing industry.Jacobo Robusti’s sobriquet “Tintoretto” translates as “little dyer”;he was the son of a dyer in Venice, a prominent European centerfor the silk industry during the sixteenth century. Analysis detectedcochineal in two of his works—the murals for the Scuola Grande diSan Rocco of 1562 to 1588 and in two areas of drapery in his ChristCarried to the Tomb (Figure 6) from an altarpiece in San Francesco dellaVigna in Venice, dated c. 1594. The altarpiece was commissioned bythe dal Basso family, which seems to have had involvement with theVenetian textile industry. According to McAndrew, Howard, andDick, “Tintoretto maintained close contacts with the world oftextiles both through his patrons and certainly through his use oflake pigments, which were by-products of the cloth-dyeing industry.This gives us fresh insight on this extraordinary painter, whose dis-tinctive use of colour was apparently firmly grounded in his deepknowledge of the developing technology of the dyer’s craft.”Tintoretto also executed an altarpiece for cloth dyers in the Churchof the Servites in 1581, and his murals for the Scuola Grande di

36 Burkmaier, Wallert, and Rothe, “Early Italian,” 123; Taylor, “Glow,” in Hermens,Ouwerkerk, and Costaras (eds.), Looking through Paintings, 163.


San Rocco were subsidized through the patronage of a group ofVenetian textile barons.37

Antwerp was an important textile center in northern Europe,and Peter Paul Rubens and Van Dyck, its most illustrious painters,are known to have used cochineal. Rubens’ second wife, HelenaFourment, was the daughter of a prosperous Antwerp silk mer-chant, and Van Dyck, who used cochineal in several portraits thathave been subjected to pigment analysis, was the son of another suchmerchant. When invited to visit Genoa in 1622 by Gio AgostinoBalbi, Van Dyck painted several portraits of the Balbi family, whosewealth derived from the import and export of silk and wool. Theportraits show the family members not only dressed in sumptuoussilks and velvets but also surrounded by them, many in red butsometimes even green, as in the curtains of The Balbi Children(Figure 1)—especially scintillating because of its cochineal glazes.38

The cochineal identified so far in European paintings was bothderived from textiles or their sources and, at least from evidencecollected to date, primarily employed to depict textiles, especiallythe silks and silk velvet garments and draperies that were markersof status in portraits of high clergy, royalty, and nobility. In viewof the fashion for lighter and more brightly colored drapery fabricsand for cochineal red at the time, the omnipresent red drapery swagin Baroque portraiture is probably reflective of both tastes, as wellas for cochineal itself. Pacheco wrote of the importance of cochinealin depicting velvets: “With this carmine color, I have made somevery convincing velvets, but all lag behind those of my friend AlonsoVázquez, who was unequaled in this.”39

Hamann argues that in Las Meninas (1656), Velázquez delib-erately depicted cochineal-dyed draperies, given that survivinginventories specify them in the Cuarto Bajo del Príncipe, in whichthe scene takes place, and that Velázquez, as aposentador del palacio,would have understood cochineal’s prized characteristics when he

37 McAndrew et al., “Tintoretto’sDeposition,” 502; Janet Sethre, The Souls of Venice ( Jefferson,N.C., 2003), 181; Kirby and White, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs,” 67, citingJoyce Plesters and Lorenzo Lazzarini, “Materiale e la tecnica del Tintoretto della Scuola diSanRocco,”Atti di Convegno Internazionale di Studi su Jacopo Tintoretto nel IVCentennario della Morte(Padua, 1994), 275–280.38 National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XX; Roy, “Van Dycks,” 50–83.39 English translation in Veliz, Artists’ Techniques, 73. Pacheco, Arte, 485.


ordered curtains for the prince’s nurseries in 1652. Since the paint-ing’s innovatively handled red lakes have not yet been analyzed, wecannot know whether Velázquez used cochineal to represent thecochineal-dyed draperies in the room that he was portraying. But heused cochineal for draperies in three other paintings—the ImmaculateConception, St. John on Patmos, and Portrait of Archbishop Fernando deValdés (c. 1645–1650), in which cochineal was identified in the redglaze of the curtain behind the clergyman. Moreover, because helearned his basic techniques from Pacheco, his father-in-law, who, likeRoger de Piles and others, advocated the use of the highest-qualityred lakes as glazes—meaning cochineal—he likely used it as such inLas Meninas.40

Analyses continue to show that cochineal was used as a glazeover fabrics painted by other northern painters as well. Ter Brugghen’sJacob Reproaching Laban for Giving Him Leah (1627) has New Worldcochineal in Jacob’s waistband. At least three Rembrandt portraitsreveal the presence of cochineal in glazes deepening the luminosityof silks and silk velvets in the garments and swagged draperies of theirnoble, powerful, or wealthy subjects—Alexander the Great, AristotleContemplating the Bust of Homer, and The Jewish Bride. The samefindings apply to eighteenth-century British portraits by JoshuaReynolds, Thomas Lawrence, and Thomas Gainsborough.41

In this age of genre paintings celebrating local and foreigngoods, a sub-group of examples from the Old and New Worldsconcentrates in various ways on the depiction of textile manufactureor trade, often prominently displaying red examples. To my knowl-edge, none of these works has been tested for the presence ofcochineal, but any of them would be prime candidates. If Velázquez

40 Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay,”Art Bulletin, XCII (2010), 6–35, 18–19. That cochineal was important enough to specify indocuments is evident in the inventory compiled in 1557 after the death of Ruy Gómez deSilva, a courtier to Philip II. The inventory described a coach upholstered in cochineal-dyedsatin. See James Boyden, The Courtier and the King: Ruy Gómez de Silva, Philip II and the Courtof Spain (Berkeley, 1995), 120. Gridley McKim Smith, Greta Andersen-Bergdoll, and RichardNewman (eds.), Examining Velázquez (New Haven, 1988), 66. Cochineal was also discovered inthe tacking edge of the Bust of Philip IV (c. 1626) in the Prado, but Smith, Bergdoll-Anderson,and Newman in Examining Velázquez do not state what it was used to depict (86). Kirby andWhite, “Identification of Red Lake Pigment Dyestuffs,” 71.41 Brown, Christopher, and Roy, “Rembrandt’s ‘Alexander the Great,’” Burlington Magazine,CXXXIV (1992), 286–298, 294; Phipps, Cochineal Red, 35; Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt:The Painter at Work (Amsterdam, 2002), 236; Kirby and White, “Identification of Red LakePigment Dyestuffs,” 73.


consciously used cochineal to depict cochineal-dyed fabrics in LasMeninas, analysis of the red lakes in Las Hilanderas, which is onone level about the subject of producing textiles, many of themred in the painting, would be informative. In the north, Isaac vanSwanenburg’s series of The Old and New Trades, produced between1594 and 1596, documents the decline of Leiden’s wool trade in thewake of the rising price of English wool during the 1530s and itssubsequent resurgence later in the century with the introductionof the “New Draperies” mentioned above. Rembrandt’s Syndicsof the Drapers’ Guild is another example in which the leaders ofthe organization are shown amid their wares, also predominantlyred.42

Also available to check are the highly detailed renderings ofcostumes that appear to be advertisements for local and importedfinery in eighteenth-century casta (mixed-race) paintings fromNew Spain as well as those in which families are shown with textilesin market stalls or in the act of producing textiles or clothing. Inone by Miguel Cabrera (1763) in a private collection in Monterey,Mexico, a well-dressed creole, his Indian wife, and mestiza daughterstand before a kiosk of neatly rolled local textiles with inscriptionsidentifying their place of manufacture. Ramon Torres and FranciscoClapera depicted, with heavy use of red, a casta family of spinnersand tailors in the 1780s. García Sáiz observes that “it is precisely thiscolor, red, which dominates all of Clapera’s work with an extra-ordinary vividness, akin to works produced by some of the bestinterpreters of the casta genre.”43

European painters introduced easel painting in the Americasduring the sixteenth century in a transplantation of the oil andtempera techniques employed in the representation of the newChristian subject matter. Analysis of sixteenth-century Hispano-American paintings has yet to reveal the use of cochineal, althoughorganic red lakes have been detected in the paintings by the SevillianAndrés de Concha for the Dominican church of Santo Domingo inYanhuitlan, situated in the cochineal district of Nochistlan, as wellas for other churches in Oaxaca. These works would be excellent

42 Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: FeminizingSources and Interpretations of the Past (London, 2011), 152–153.43 María ConcepciónGarcía Sáiz, “TheArtistic Development of Casta Painting,” in Ilona Katsew(ed.),New World Orders: Casta Paintings and Colonial Latin America (New York, 1996), 30–41, 40.


choices for cochineal examination. Yet even though it is tempting toassume that cochineal is responsible for the transparent organic redsin the art of this region, so far the substance has not been found in thered incised decorations on the seventeenth-century furniture fromthe Mixtec town of Villa Alta de San Ildefonso recently sampledby Mackenzie and analyzed by Newman in the Museo FranzMayer.44

Another Sevillian ex-patriot likely to have utilized the readysupply of cochineal in Mexico was Vázquez, the master of cochinealpraised by Pacheco, who emigrated to Mexico in 1603 and workedthere until his death in 1607. Presumably, he took advantage ofcochineal’s abundance in the portrayal of his famous velvets, al-though none of his few surviving Mexican paintings has been testedto date. Samples taken from Saint Michael and the Bull—one of thefew Mexican viceregal paintings found to contain cochineal (Fig-ure 4)—by Sebastián López de Arteaga, a younger native of Seville,and the Andean paintings mentioned earlier, seem to confine cochi-neal to the depiction of textiles worn by exalted personages.

A typical problem with devotional paintings in the Americas isthat subsequent over-painting has obscured the original materialsand even the artistic style. A number of the painted panels andsculptures, mostly of single saints, from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Mexico, have cochineal reds in their draperies. Insome instances, however, an original layer of cochineal is submergedunder cheaper red paints, as if the understanding of cochineal’s visualand symbolic importance had been lost by the time restoration wasdeemed necessary, especially in rural churches and private chapels.The submersion of the expensive cochineal under the cheapervermilion is probably an unconscious reversal of the admonition byPacheco and others in Europe to make the most of expensive colorsby using cheaper ones underneath.

Was the predominant employment of cochineal to depictstatus via expensive red silks and velvets enhanced by an implicitbut obvious reference to the dye itself? No direct references havebeen found, but cochineal was certainly a highlight in the Spanishinventories cited above. In China, the color was distinctive enoughto be called “foreign red.” In Don Juan (1823), Lord Byron paid

44 Pablo Amador et al., “Y hablaron de pintores famosas de Italia,” Anales del Instituto deInvestigaciones Estéticas, XCII (2008), 49–84, 72, 79.


a backhanded tribute to cochineal, signaling its demise in an erasuspicious of associations with royalty: “If from a shell-fish or fromcochineal / So perish every tyrant’s robe piece-meal.”45

OTHER ASSOCIATIONS Cochineal glazes were primarily used todepict rich fabrics, but they were also applied to enhance the sparkleof jewels, the luster of fruits, the sheen of flower petals, and thevaporous tonal modulations of cloud-filled skies. Cochineal wascommonly painted over vermilion to create the rosy complexionsof women and children; the ruddier flesh of males was producedwith earth pigments, distinguishing between the delicate blush ofone gender or age and the sturdy, rough thickness of the other.Many of the newly evolved subtleties of European painting fromthe sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and the chief hall-marks of the Baroque painting style—soft and nuanced tonalities,drapery swags, and sumptuous textured garb—were facilitated, ifnot generated, by cochineal. Previously, transparent lake glazescontributed to the depiction of much harder-edged, more sculpturalforms—making even flesh appear marbleized. When the intro-duction of American cochineal enabled a greater production of,and a broader clientele for, fine, soft wools, silks, and velvets, thesetextiles began to appear prominently in paintings, thanks to the newaccessibility of cochineal glazes. This tendency coincided with thedevelopment of a more painterly style that privileged the depictionof veiled luminosity and melting and the plush tactility of cloth andflesh. For the first time, painters were able to achieve the effect ofsoftness. Cochineal could well have been a catalyst in the formationof a new painting style.46

How conscious were painters and their clients of making refer-ences to the New World through the use of cochineal? The evi-dence is mostly circumstantial. Hamann argues that Velázquezdeliberately included cochineal-dyed draperies in Las Meninas as areference to the New World, as he did a Mexican búcaro and varioussilver objects. Such a canny allusion to the glory of the far-flung

45 Phipps, Cochineal Red, 40; George Gordon (Lord) Byron, Don Juan (1823), III, Canto 16,verse 10.46 Pacheco, Arte, 499.


Hapsburg Empire certainly seems plausible in this portrait of the royalfamily.

Another suggestive work is Van Dyck’s enigmatic Self Portraitwith Sunflower (c. 1633; Figure 9). The accepted interpretation is thatthe portrait demonstrates, among other things, the artist’s loyalty toCharles I of England and his familiarity with the intellectual ideasof the day, manifest in the inclusion of a gold chain that the kinghad recently presented to him and the sunflower, which continuallyturns to face the sun, just as the king’s devoted servants must moveto follow his directions. Factors not considered, however, are thesunflower’s New World origins and its new-found popularity inEurope at the beginning of the sixteenth century.47

John Parkinson, Charles’ botanist, who avidly collected plantsfrom around the world for Covent Garden, included both theopuntia (cochineal’s host) and the sunflower on the title page ofhis Paradisi in Sole (1629), describing them in that text as well asin his Theatrum Botanicum (1640). Parkinson was also an apothe-cary, with a distinct knowledge of cochineal, like his and Van

47 John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck: The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of thePainter (Aldershot, 2006).

Fig.9 Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), Self Portrait with Sunflower. Oilon Canvas

SOURCE Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.


Dyck’s friend, Théodore de Mayerne, the royal physician. TheNew World origins of the opuntia and the sunflower were wellunderstood in the royal circles within which Van Dyck mingled.Van Dyck was well aware of the importance, and the derivation,of cochineal in textiles. Is his portrait of himself in deep pink satin,holding a sunflower, a mere coincidence, or is it a subliminalor conscious comment about the Americas (see Figure 9)? AsGreenfield notes, the most direct and telling acknowledgment ofthe broadly understood impact of the dye and its American originwas in a satirical remark about syphilis voiced by the ever-cheerfulPangloss in Voltaire’s Candide (1759): “It was a thing unavoidable,a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus hadnot in an island of America caught this disease, which contami-nates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, andwhich is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we shouldhave neither chocolate nor cochineal.”48

Painters working in the first years after cochineal’s arrival inEurope may have been misled about the insects’ American originsand quality because they obtained superior processed dyestufffrom Italy. But by the early seventeenth century, cochineal redwas already beginning to be esteemed for its provenance as wellas its properties, and even beginning to be used as a cultural sym-bol in both art and literature, tracing the same rising and fallingarc of prestige as the Age of Empire that it helped to define.

48 John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole (London, 1629), 295, 433. Théodore Turquet de Mayerne,physician to Charles I, who filled a notebook (British Library, MS Sloane 2052) with observationson Van Dyck’s working methods and materials, wrote front-matter testimonials for Parkinson’sParadisi in Sole and Theatrum and organized royal apothecaries in experiments with pigments anddyes, including cochineal. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Life of Sir Théodore deMayerne, 1573–1655 (NewHaven, 2006), 345–346.Greenfield,Perfect Red, 85; Voltaire,Candide,Pro-ject Gutenberg e-book (1998), Chap. 4, 9, available at http://archive.org/stream/candide19942gut/19942.txt.


Evidence of Cochineal in Painting

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