“Dead head”

Color names

Lüpertz, Poet, 1997

It’s happened to me more than once: going to my art material supplier and meeting some costumers are totally taken aback by the names of some colors their teachers tell them to buy.

And well, if you think about it, some names are quite weird. Cadmium red, Titanium White or Zinc White remind us of chemical elements. But what about “Caput mortuum”? And “Mars Black”? Isn’t Mars the red planet? Or “Payne’s Grey”... who’s Payne? Or where?

Meléndez, Still life with plums, figs, bread, cask, jar and
another containers, XVIII century

So, since we had enough talking about perspective and optical illusions, so we’ll talk about colors and their names. But first, what’s naming a color?

How many times have you ever disagreed with anybody about a color’s name? “That dress is plum-colored” and then someone else says it’s dark brown. Assigning a name to a color doesn’t depend that much on the color itself but on the viewer, and then many factors are involved, most of them, cultural factors. When does a blue color stop being blue to be violet?

Monet,  Blue waterlilies, 1916

We can distinguish between 100000 and 1 million shades, but we don’t have that many names. A red can be darker or lighter, with more than 30 shades, such as “carmine”. We can describe any object, though, with “red”, “blue”, “yellow”, “white”, “black”, “gray”, “green”, “orange” and “violet” without too much detailing.  Moreover, not all languages have these 9 names, but that doesn’t mean that any of these colors doesn’t exist to their speakers: they just are grouped in a wider range of shades. When we don’t want to specify too much, we make up names like “French”, “Navy”, “Marine”, “Ultramarine”, “Royal” and “Klein Blue”.

But when you work with colors, it all gets harder. If I ask my hairdresser to dye my hair “Burnt Umber” she will think I’m crazy. Hair colors have their own name and code (for example, brown hair is represented with a 4.0; while light blonde is 8.0). Same happens with food colorings, cloth pigments, etc. Color Index was invented to solve all these issues: all colors are represented with a 5 digit code depending on its chemical component. To painters, every paint tube is marked by a P (pigment), the color’s initial in English (R= red) and its number.

Champaigne, Still life with skull, 1660

And the “dead head”? It's the color named “caput mortuum” (PR101), with red and brown tints (You can see it here). The origin of its name is found in Middle Ages, and the alchemist that wanted to turn lead into gold.  They worked with sulfur, heating it several times; when evaporating, it would leave a purplish blue dust. It also received the name of “Golghota”. Of  course, nowadays only its name is left: it’s produced in laboratories with iron oxides.

We’ll know more about weird and curious color names in future posts. If you ever are interested in knowing about any color name’s origin, ask me and I’ll tell you about it!

Sources: Doerner, M. Malmaterial und seine Verwendung im Bilde. Stuttgart, Enke V. 1989

Welsch,N.-Liebmann, C.Chr. Farben. München, Elsevier V., 2004

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