Pigment Supply in New Spain
*ROCÍO BRUQUETAS
Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico Español
Fig. 1. Mural, mid-sixteenth century. Tempera on wall. Augustinian
Thus indigenous artists of the colonial period employed the same local pigments and colorants that their ancestors had passed down through the generations. The simple images that those painters of the colonial period created were not intended to convey either tonal complexity and nuance or saturation of color; in many cases, in fact, they were executed in mono- chrome.
Pre-Hispanic artists had made use of a fairly wide variety of raw mate- rials to produce colors. A number of chroniclers from the sixteenth cen- tury comment on this, including Hernán Cortés himself, in his descrip- tion of the bustling marketplace in the city of Temixtitan (Tenochtitlan): “They sell colors for painters, as many as can be found in Spain and of
tones as superb as can be.”2
The chroniclers’ and conquerors’ admiration for this wealth of colors was soon echoed in Spain. For instance, in his Comentarios de la pintura, written around 1560, Felipe de Guevara states, “They are fortunate in colors, whether from the earth or from extracts of plants, not to mention
cochineal, which is a very rare carmine.”3
Moreover, pre-Hispanic painters were familiar with most of the min- eral-based pigments that Europeans knew: yellow, red, and brown clays; cinnabar; azurite and malachite; asphalts and bitumens; carbon black and lampblack. However, they also made use of a wide array of organic pigments of plant or animal origin, as described in the accounts of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. As a result of their transparency, these organic colorants were suitable for manuscript illumination. They could even be used, in some cases with modification (as in the case of Maya blue), for murals in tempera and for sargas. This required that they be combined with an organic adhesive, such as an agglutinant based on paste or glue, to produce a water-based medium that impregnated the pictorial support. In contrast, the oil technique was a complete novelty in the New World. Brought by the first generations of artists who migrated there from Europe, the oil medium quickly became widespread, just as it was in the Iberian Peninsula, in part because its ability to create subtle transitions of tone and color made it ideal for painted altarpieces and the polychromy of
2. “Venden colores para pintores, cuantos pueden hallar en España, y de tan excelentes matices cuanto pueden ser.” Second letter-report sent by Hernán Cortés to Emperor Carlos V (October 30, 1520). Cortés, Cartas de Relación a Carlos V, p. 59.
3. “Son dichosos en colores ahora sean de tierra, ahora de zumos de yerbas, sin contar la cochinilla que es carmín rarísimo.” Guevara, Comentarios de la pintura.
Fig. 2. Detail, Virgin of Guadalupe, mid-sixteenth century. Tempera
painting on canvas.
religious sculpture (figs. 3, 4). In Spain, the professional painters of altar- pieces and imaginería (religious sculpture) formed the principal group in the painters’ guild. Other areas of pictorial expertise established in Castile in the final quarter of the fifteenth century were painters a lo morisco (in the Moorish style) or al romano (in the Roman style), painters of sargas, and gilders. The painters a lo morisco painted lacerías (geomet- ric motifs of Arab origin); painters al romano created Renaissance-style decorations inspired by ancient Roman models. Sarga painters, as men-
According to both the Spanish guild tradition and its continuation in the New World, the painter of religious sculpture was required to have a command of oil painting technique, which was compulsory in painting panels in altarpieces. This was stipulated in the ordinances and it was mentioned repeatedly in Spanish contracts for altarpieces from the final third of the fifteenth century. Beginning in the 1440s, oil had gradu- ally displaced egg tempera in European painting, and by the start of the colonial period, it had become the preeminent technique. Flemish artists had played a preeminent role in developing and refining oil painting, and close artistic and economic ties between Spain and the Low Countries during the fifteenth century led to early introduction of the technique into Castile via artists and paintings arriving from Northern Europe.
Oil was compatible with all pigments known in the early Middle Ages. Another of its principal advantages was the opportunity it gave art- ists to experiment with different optical properties. The replacement of the tempera medium by oils enormously expanded the variety and wealth of tonal nuance at painters’ disposal. Opaque colors could be combined with those that were transparent, or deeper tonalities with brighter hues. Fig. 3. Altarpiece, c. 1505. Oil and gilt on wood. Cathedral of Santo
Domingo de la Calzada, La Rioja, Spain.
Fig. 4. Detail of oil painting from altarpiece, c. 1505. Oil painting on
wood. Cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, La Rioja, Spain.
tioned, were artists who specialized in painting in tempera on primed or unprimed cloth. These areas of expertise—painting a lo morisco or al romano, painting sargas, and gilding—were all associated with specific genres or decorative typologies, as well as specific techniques: fresco, tem- pera, or oil. This organizational hierarchy of professional painters, which we find, for example, in the 1527 guild ordinances of Seville, was trans- ferred to Mexico with the first painters’ ordinances, promulgated in 1557
by Viceroy Luis de Velasco.4
Glazing, a superimposition of fine layers of transparent oil glazes over an underpainting of opaque pigments, had been highly developed by fifteenth-century Flemish artists. Though oil painters in Europe con- tinued to employ the mineral pigments universally used in other paint- ing techniques, such as clays, carbon black, cinnabar, and orpiment, the introduction of oil also encouraged artists to explore new pigments, most of them manufactured rather than natural. Artificial pigments could also be used in tempera, but they lent themselves particularly to the expressive richness inherent in the oil technique. Lead-based pigments (lead white, lead-tin yellow, and minium) could be mixed with other pigments to cre- ate the opaque layers of underpainting over which transparent glazes were applied. Lead white was the most important white in oil painting. On account of its opacity, luminosity, and drying properties, it was used in priming or was blended with other pigments, and it was the key element in creating the lustrous flesh-toned surfaces of contemporary polychromed sculpture. Organic lake pigments were used to achieve the subtle glazing, especially red lake—produced from insects of the genus Kermes or from madder plants (Rubiaceae)–which had long been an Italian specialty. The
same is true of verdigris, a pigment that had been used since the Middle Ages for transparent green glazes, either on top of applied gold or silver surfaces or as an overlay to an opaque green layer below (fig. 5). Smalt, which was made from pulverized blue glass that took its color from cobalt oxide, was another very important artificial pigment in oil painting from the end of the sixteenth century onward.
In New Spain, mural painting and book illumination continued to employ traditional local pigments, a fact confirmed by the presence of
Maya blue in murals in monasteries throughout the sixteenth century.5
It is in oil painting that indigenous artists broke radically from the tech- niques employed by pre-Hispanic artists. Apparently it was the demands and possibilities of oil painting that led to the importation of European pigments. It was almost a commonplace in the contracts for altarpieces commissioned from artists such as Simon Pereyns (fig. 6), Andrés de la Concha (fig. 7), and other European painters to mention that the paint- ings had to be done “al óleo con colores finos de Castilla” (in oil with fine
colors from Spain).6 On the other hand, the documents also distinguish
between “colores de Castilla” and “colores de la tierra” (local or domestic pigments), which confirms that pigments continued to be produced and
used in New Spain during the colonial period.7
It is difficult to gauge the extent to which oil painters in sixteenth-cen- tury New Spain relied on domestic or imported pigments. Our knowledge of the pigment trade between America and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is limited by a paucity of historical documentation. The volume of trade devoted to meeting the needs of painters was tiny in comparison to the traffic in lucrative staple items such as textiles.
The documentary records of ships bound for New Spain between 1550 and 1600 allow us to make a preliminary assessment of the pigment market there during the colonial period. A sampling of the lists of mer- chandise shipped during this time (from the years 1556, 1557, 1568, 1588,
5. Reyes Valerio, De Bonampak al Templo Mayor.
6. Los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, “Más ha de tener este retablo.”
7. An example of this distinction may be found in “Cuentas de los diferentes reparos real- izados en la Catedral metropolitana y por las fiestas del santísimo Sacramento, 26 de marzo–19 de junio de 1602” [Accounts of the different repairs carried out in the Metropolitan Cathedral for the celebrations of the Eucharist, 26 March–19 June, 1602], which contains several listings for the costs of purchasing “colores de la tierra” [local colors] and “colores de Castilla” [colors from Spain]. Sotos Serrano and Ángeles Jiménez, Cuerpo de documentos y bibliografía, p. 141.
Fig. 5. Detail of oil painting from altarpiece, c. 1505, showing layering with
and 1600) only turned up records of lead white and verdigris.8 Obviously, this does not rule out the possibility that other pigments might have been imported, but it does suggest that lead white and verdigris were the only two of significant commercial interest, probably because the demand for them was greater than for others. One should remember that both substances had other uses, being employed in medicines and cosmetics. (Lead white, for example, was used by women to whiten their faces.) An example of the diversity of genres represented is the cargo that Pedro de Villegas, a painter from Seville, sent by galleon to Honduras in May 1557. (Much of the merchandise sent to New Spain was shipped in this fash- ion by private parties not necessarily connected to the great mercantile firms, to be sold for the consignors.) In addition to an arroba (11.5 kg) of
8. Eufemio Lorenzo does not even mention the presence of lead white and verdigris in his classic study of trans-Atlantic trade at the time of Philip II. Lorenzo Sanz, Comercio de España con América.
lead white, Pedro de Villegas’s consignment included altarpieces, crosses,
paxes, portraits, fabric, clothing, thread, and wax.9
In a recent research project on pictorial materials in seventeenth-cen- tury Lima, I similarly tried to assess the painters’ dependence on imported
pigments.10 Trade between Seville and Lima, based on the Spanish trea-
sure fleet system, was of considerable volume. According to data from archives in Lima and Seville, it is clear that most of the pigments used by painters in Lima from the late fifteenth century through the sixteenth
were imported.11 Pre-Hispanic Peru was also the source of a wide vari-
ety of mineral pigments and organic colorants, but I have not found any documentary evidence from the viceregal period for the existence of any commercially significant local production. Nor have I been able to find any indication of internal trade routes that would suggest that Lima was
9. Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Contratación 1079, no. 8, fol. 58. The document reads,
En 21 de mayo de 1557 Registro Pedro de Billegas pintor de imagineria v[ecin]o de Sevilla que envia cargado / para la provincia de honduras en la nao nonbrada de los tres rreyes magos de que es maestre / Bartolome rrodriguez v[ecin]o de cartaya consignada a diego manuel estante en puerto de caballos / y rriesgo del d[ic]ho pedro de billegas lo sig[uient]e
quatro rretablos de a ocho palmos de alto y cinco de ancho pintados de pinturas, ytem otros dos rretablos menores de quatro palmos en quadra pintados de pinturas ytem seis portapazes de madera pintadas y labradas
ytem seis cruzes doradas y pintadas para altares ytem beintisiete retratos de príncipes de a palma ytem quatro d[ocena]s de xerguillas de mujer ytem dozena y media de camisas de rruan
ytem otras seis camisas del d[ic]ho rruan labradas de negro y blanco y algunas de punto real
ytem una arroba de albayalde
ytem quarenta y quatro libras de hilo galludero ytem seis libras de hilo laso
ytem cinco d[ocena]s de sobrecargas de cáñamo
ytem diez y siete d[ocena]s de madexuelas de cordel terçiado ytem dos arrobas de cerca blanca labrada
ytem tres d[ocena]s de capillejos de rreo
juro a Dios que esta que [...] que todo los cont[eni]do en este /reg[istr]o no me questa mas de quarenta y seis mil y / novecientos y cochenta y quatro m[aravedi]s mil / m[aravedi]s mas o menos y que no ynbio cosa por registrar
P[edr]o de Billegas.
Other examples of shipments of lead white and verdigris by private parties are recorded in the same shipment on the Tres Reyes Magos, in the year 1557, on folios 32, 36, 37, 55, 103, and 112.
10. Bruquetas, “Técnicas y materiales de la pintura y la escultura virreinales en el Perú.” 11. The archives consulted were the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Archivo General de la Nación de Perú, and the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima.
Fig. 6. Simon Pereyns, altarpiece, 1586. Oil painting. Church of San
supplied by inland centers such as the copper-mining zone of Lipes and Atacama, which according to the chroniclers was rich in blues and greens, or Huancavelica, a center of vermilion production.
On the other hand, a fair amount of evidence supports the presence of trade in pictorial materials between the Iberian Peninsula and Peru. This is confirmed by data from arrival records of ships to the port of Callao and inventories of shop merchandise carried out in the context of commercial transactions, deaths, or seizures of property by the Inquisition. (The last were quite common, given that a considerable number of merchants were converted Jews.) These documents corroborate the existence of European pigments among the merchandise habitually imported to supply Lima, the capital of the Peruvian viceroyalty. It appears to have been easier to acquire pigments directly from Seville than to augment local production
of artificial pigments, such as lead white, verdigris, and minium.12 This
was also true for lakes and purified mineral pigments, despite the abun- dance of raw materials for natural pigments in Peru.
Unlike Lima, Mexico City—the landlocked capital of New Spain— did not receive goods sent on Iberian galleons directly. Merchandise sent by sea to the ports of Veracruz or Honduras had to be transported by land to Mexico City, and the overland transport networks may have given the capital more access to locally produced pigments, and so more indepen- dence from Spanish imports, than Lima enjoyed. Nevertheless, Mexico City was the largest economy in the viceroyalty, and thus the largest con- sumer of goods from Spain. Further research is necessary into the surviv- ing accounts and inventories from Mexico City before we will be able to analyze the pigment market there and assess the role that Spanish imports played.
With its iron-fisted monopoly on trade with New Spain, Seville sup- plied the viceroyalty with the largest portion of consumer goods, including
pictorial materials.13 With its concentration of merchants from Flanders,
Italy, France, and other countries, and the abundance of products they brought with them, Seville was more than able to meet the high demand for pigments among its local workshops (many of them veritable factories of paintings and sculptures) and could still ship massive quantities of their wares to America. In turn, Seville was Europe’s distribution center for products arriving from the Americas in the Spanish treasure fleet.
Most pigments used in Spain during the sixteenth century were imported from Italy and Flanders, the most important European centers for the manufacture and distribution of painting materials in the sixteenth century. The Spanish imported the classic pigments produced in Venice, such as red lake, lead white, verdigris, lead-tin yellow, and clays; those made in Germany and Flanders, such as smalt, lead-tin yellow, ochre, and yellow lake; and others that came from Asia, such as orpiment and realgar. In the Iberian Peninsula, there was no major tradition of pigment production. Only scant references to it can be found, and those are partic- ularly among craftsmen. The Jewish albayalderos (lead-white producers), who were quite common in the Middle Ages, languished throughout the
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Fig. 7. Andrés de la Concha, main altarpiece, 1580. Oil painting.
sixteenth century, as did many other industries associated with Jews. Nei- ther is there documentary evidence of the production of verdigris, which was brought from Italy and later from France, nor of those pigments asso- ciated with the glass industry, such as genuli (lead-tin yellow) and smalt.
Production of pigments in Spain was limited to some clays, such as the renowned almagres (red iron-oxide clay) and ochres from diverse localities on the east coast of Spain and in Andalusia; azurite, which was still extracted in the sixteenth century from scattered deposits throughout Spanish lands; and vermilion. Vermilion in its natural form had been excavated since antiquity from the famed Almadén mines in the province of Ciudad Real, and these continued to be exploited for centuries. Dur- ing the Middle Ages, the Arabs had developed new methods of obtaining mercury for the production of vermilion, which they made in Almadén itself. From the mid-sixteenth century, artificial vermilion was produced in Seville from sulfur and mercury, which arrived in large shipments from
Almadén to be sent by galleon to the silver mines in New Spain.14 It is
probable that they also sent Sevillan vermilion to the viceroyalty, since the extraction and sale of sulfur and mercury were royal monopolies, which at least in theory limited the entry of vermilion from other countries.
Another red pigment, cinnabar, was known in New Spain, and in fact, efforts were made to exploit the cinnabar beds there in the sixteenth century. Bargallo mentions the mines of San Gregorio, but these proved unprofitable because of low production levels and the necessity of accept-
ing prices set by the royal treasury.15 Almadén could not meet the urgent
demand for mercury used in the amalgamation of silver in Mexican mines. This led to the importation into New Spain of mercury produced in the rich Peruvian mines of Huancavelica, and even from deposits in China (through trade with the Philippines, which was also subject to the Spanish monopoly). In both these cases, however, the trade was quite lim- ited, and for the moment it is unclear whether these mercury shipments were accompanied by vermilion.