Vermilion
- HEX
- #E34234
- RGB
- 227 66 52
- HSL
- 5° 76% 55%
- CMYK
- 0 71 77 11
Vermilion or Scarlet?
A warm orange-red, softer than scarlet.
History
Vermilion is ground cinnabar, mercury sulfide. Rome got it from Almadén in Spain; Pliny says about ten thousand pounds a year arrived, at a price fixed by law. Generals celebrating a triumph had their faces painted with it, and the red walls of Pompeii's Villa of the Mysteries are cinnabar. See vermilion-pigment.
Science
Chinese makers probably learned to synthesize vermilion from mercury and sulfur, the two great principles of alchemy, by the 4th century BCE; an Arabic alchemical text described it by the early 800s. It has a flaw: around 1400 the painter Cennino Cennini warned that, exposed to air, it can turn black.
Culture
In China vermilion was the red of seals, carved lacquer and the emperor's own hand: Qing emperors answered officials' reports in vermilion ink, a privilege no one else had.
Art
In the early Middle Ages vermilion was priced like gold: until about the 11th century, filling a manuscript page with it cost as much as gilding. Guilds in Florence and Siena forbade painters to swap in cheaper red earth or red lead. By the Renaissance it had become cheap and everywhere, often laid under glazes of crimson lake.
Language
The name is a hand-me-down. St Jerome used vermiculum, 'little worm', for the red kermes dye, and the word later passed to the mercury red because the colors looked alike. Medieval red words are a famous tangle: minium could mean cinnabar or red lead, and a miniature first meant a picture painted with minium, not a small one.
Kin
- Crimson: Both names mean 'little worm', though only crimson is made of insects
- Scarlet: Mineral red against insect red, rivals for centuries
- Red: The prestige red of Roman walls and Chinese emperors
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Vermilion' (Pliny, Natural History 33; Cennini, Il libro dell'arte)
- Gettens, Feller & Chase, 'Vermilion and cinnabar', Studies in Conservation (1972)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Gage, Colour and Culture (1993)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Greenfield, A Perfect Red (2005)
- Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color (2017)
- Etymonline, 'vermilion', 'miniature'
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.