Peacocking · Plate 04
Vermilion.
The colour this studio signs its work with has one formula and a history that runs from Roman plaster to a single line of hex.
HgS · mercury sulfide · #C63E14
I · Cinnabar
The colour begins as an ore
Vermilion begins underground, as cinnabar — mercury sulfide, HgS — which is also the principal ore of mercury itself. Alchemists later learned to make the same substance from mercury and sulfur directly; nature or the crucible, the formula never changes. At Almadén in central Spain the seams have been worked for more than two thousand years, the richest deposit the old world knew. Prise the rock apart and the red is already there, banked inside grey stone, waiting to be ground into light.
II · Pompeii
Rome painted its walls in it
Rome ground that rock to powder for the red of fresco. It coloured the walls of Pompeii and the grandest rooms of the empire — so costly that Pliny the Elder recorded a price fixed by law for it — and warned how routinely dealers cut and adulterated it. A wall of true vermilion was a wall that announced exactly what it had cost. The rooms buried by Vesuvius in 79 still hold that red today.
III · Lacquer & seal
China carved it and stamped it
In China the same red took a different life. Layered over lacquer and carved back in relief, it built the deep cinnabar of imperial boxes and screens; pressed into seal paste, it signed every scroll and painting. That paste was cinnabar itself, bound in oil and fine fibre, so the signature and the pigment were one substance. To finish a work was to leave a small square of vermilion — a mark, a name, a red that meant this is done, and mine.
IV · The rubric
It taught the reader in red
In the medieval scriptorium vermilion carried the reader. Chapter headings, feast days, the first letter of a prayer — the parts that guided you through the page were laid down in red while the body text stayed black. We still use the word: rubric, from the Latin ruber, red, because the instruction itself was written in this colour.
V · The poison
Glorious, and never quite safe
But the colour was made of mercury, and mercury does not forgive. The mines that fed it — Almadén above all — were places men were sent to and did not always leave; the ore’s own vapour was the danger. Vermilion could betray the painter too: in some works, exposed to light, the brilliant red slowly darkens toward grey or black. Glorious, and never quite safe.
VI · The signature
Two thousand years, one hex code
Modern chemistry offered a safer red — cadmium — and the studios changed hands. Vermilion stepped back from the working palette, but it never lost its meaning. William Arby signs everything in it: the dot on the W., the line beneath the word difference, the mark at the foot of every page. One hex code, and two thousand years of use standing behind it — the whole studio pinned to a single wavelength of red.
#C63E14