The organic red dye known as cochineal has played a number of key roles in history, most important as a superb colorant for animal-based textiles, especially silks and woolens, with a great range of hues and shades from purple to coral. Coveted for more than two millennia, its reach ultimately extended over the globe, providing handsome revenues wherever it was traded. This article concentrates on its use in painting before the nineteenth century.1
The dye is extracted from the insect dactylopius coccus, the host for which is the nopal or opuntia cactus, originally indigenous only to South and Central America and Mexico. Long cultivated in Pre-Columbian Mexico, where it was used as a dye for rabbit fur and feathers, and as a lake pigment in mural, manuscript, and textile painting, it was also a major colorant in ancient Andean textiles, although no evidence is available to indicate that...