Red Ochers as Simples in 16th-Century Pharmacy and Visual Arts

Red ochers have an extensive, global history as remedies for treating ailments of the blood, applied both externally and ingested. So, too, have red ochers long been incorporated into artworks as pigments, favored for rich, blood-like hues from varying concentrations of oxidized iron. The relationship between alchemy, pharmacy, and artists’ pigments has been explored by historians of both art and science, focused primarily on painting. This project considers the varied applications of red ocher by Early Modern artists, pharmacists, and medical practitioners instead from the perspective of its use in drawing, with a focus on anatomical and medical images from Iberia and Italy.

The introduction of red ocher into drawing as a mined natural chalk was popularized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its texture and tonal variation bred new techniques for artists, while also introducing increased use of color into the drawing medium itself. Desire for customization and consistency led eventually to experimentation with synthesizing chalks–artist manuals record recipes for grinding raw chalk to be heated, mixed, and dried into crayons, along with discussion of use.

Through analysis of red chalk drawings and contemporary reference to chalk fabrication and application, this paper adds to literature on the “epistemic image” traversing the co-development of representational practices and scientific visual epistemology. It considers how the use of chalk for representing life evolved as the tool was itself increasingly crafted using methods from chemistry and pharmacy, proposing questions on the relationship between artists’ materials and practices for visualizing medical and scientific debate.

The associated poster for this paper will include a collection of images that I've encountered in the archive that chart the adoption of red ochers in visual media between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with an emphasis on the role of red chalk as a discreet medium, chalk used in preparatory drawings for painting and anatomical prints, and chalk drawings of completed works composed by students and anonymous sources. It will place recipes for red ocher crayons side by side with recipes that use red chalk and other red earths as simples in medicines and therapeutic treatments from across Italy and the Spanish Empire. In placing these materials side by side, this poster will propose a visual argument that begins to thread the practical philosophies of pharmacy, anatomy, and drawing, all of which were debated and discussed in the Early Modern period and share similar rhetorics for interpreting and engaging Nature.