Description - A Red Like No Other by Carmella Padilla
The colour red has seduced viewers and inspired imaginations for millennia. A global symbol of power, wealth, mystery, and sexuality, red incites human emotion like no other colour. Blue may reflect the heavens, and green the earth, but red is the color of life itself--the bold blush of blood and love. In today's world, reproductions of the colour are ubiquitous in all media, but this was not always so. For thousands of years, European painters, weavers, and other artists engaged in a quest for the source of the perfect red: a red at once colourfast and resistant to light, a red to rival the best reds of nature. Then in the 1520s, Spanish explorers discovered in the grand Aztec markets of Mexico a dye derived from the cochineal insect. The ensuing global spread of American cochineal is an epic story of empire and desire that pushed art, culture and trade to the edge of the unknown.
A Red Like No Other translates the cochineal story into three dimensions, following the precious bug juice from Mexico to Europe and beyond as it insinuated itself into all forms of art, politics, and commerce. The images show how the colourant's cross-cultural appeal touched everyone from pre-Columbian weavers, to the Navajo weavers of the 18th- and 19th-century American Southwest. El Greco, Tintoretto, Vermeer, and Van Gogh used it, as did Spanish fashion icon Mariano Fortuny. Running throughout are essays from an international team of more than 20 consulting scholars and other experts whose work in art, history, economics, conservation and beyond is at once diverse, focused and far-reaching. These experts will bring to the Red book a wide spectrum of original research and innovative perspectives.
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