COLOR PALETTE: RED

Fun fact: Santa Claus, who actually inspired this article, hasn’t always been associated with red. His look – deriving first from St. Nicholas of Bari’s iconography, later from Scandinavian god Odin – was formerly green, as we can also see from the Ghost of the Christmas Present’s clothes in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Things changed with an advertising campaign: in 1931 a well-known drink company wanted to suggest that cola can be drunk all year. To emphasize this, illustrator Haddon Sundblom made Santa debut as a testimonial, and for the first time his white fur trimmed red jacket and pants were introduced.

In his Remarks on Colour (1950), Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote ‘today we say ‘red’ and we figure out the idea of it’, describing an almost archetypical colour. To explain this, we have to remember that red was first of all a dye, obtained between 16500 BC and 15000 BC (as seen in the Cave of Altamira, Spain) from the iron oxide of haematite to draw the haunted animals on rocks.
Ancient civilizations are plenty of red coloured details – from Egyptian maquillage to Greek vases to architectures and frescos in ancient Rome. It happened in the West as well as the East, where the Chinese created a synthetic vermilion pigment obtained by heating a blend of mercury and sulfur: the final result, brought to Europe by the Arabic alchemists, was widely used by Masters of Renaissance such as Titian, who gave his name to a particular shade of very warm and reddish brownish-orange colour.

Although widely celebrated by artists, at a certain moment of the 15th and the 16th century red became unpopular: the Catholic Reformation, for example, soon associated the colour with luxury items, soon considered regrettable. The studies of Sir Isaac Newton, especially those on the spectrum in 1666, also played a key role, since the discovery and the diffusion of new shades stole power to the most notable colours.
Luckily, red continued inspiring the arts, including the youngest ones such as cinema. The association with blood shaped highly popular genres like horror, inspiring the imagination of Brian DePalma (we’re not going to spoil the finale of Carrie, 1976) and Stanley Kubrick (it’s hard to think of the Overlook Hotel from Shining, 1980, without figuring out a bloody river in its hallways). It’s not about horror, but the use of red by Steven Spielberg in Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List (1993) is also notable.