Great art-related read

Who knew that, in Rembrandt's day, steaming piles of manure were used by the Dutch to make lead for white paint? Or that Egyptian corpses were a main ingredient in a brown pigment called mommia, or "mummy"?

Anyone interested in such fascinating factoids will enjoy Color, A Natural History of the Palette, an elegant and entertaining book by Victoria Finlay. The book came out in 2003; Finlay has also come out with a book about precious gems that is in this same travelogue style.

The writer’s fascination with color began when she was a girl standing in Chartres Cathedral, when her father told her, as she watched “the blue and red lights dancing on the white stones….that the stained glass had been created nearly eight hundred years ago, and ‘today we don’t know how to make that blue.’”

Later in life, Finlay’s interest was rekindled when she picked up a book and opened it at random to read “INDIAN YELLOW: an obsolete lake of euxanthic acid made in India by heating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves” and “EMERALD GREEN: the most brilliant of greens, now universally rejected because it is a dangerous poison…Sold as an insecticide.”

That is just a small hint of the discoveries to come as Finlay travels the world to track down the origin of pigments. It’s a travel narrative, a history of paint, an education about colors and how we see them, a glimpse into the mind of artists throughout history. It will make you look at paintings with a new appreciation for the colors.

To learn more about Finlay's travels and what she missed being able to include in the book ("Had I had more time I should have loved to have met the Twareg nomads of the Sahara, (whose skin is blue with indigo dye)," read the author interview here. And for some excerpts, you can go here.