Indian art is overwhelmingly blue and red, and unusually iridescent, a research project is finding.

Mapping Color in History is an initiative led by Jinah Kim, the George P Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard University, and supported by three Harvard institutions (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Lakshmi Mittal institute under the Harvard Global Research Support Centre India, and the Radcliffe Institute), as well as the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

“We do not have a baseline understanding of the history of pigment use in South Asia,” Kim says. “All the pigment databases and studies I consulted were focused on the Western European canon, and there was no way of knowing, for instance, whether a pigment known to have been popularised in Europe, such as smalt (a cobalt-based glassy blue), was in use in South Asia or was only introduced through overseas trade.”

Indian art is overwhelmingly blue and red, and unusually iridescent, a research project is finding.

Mapping Color in History is an initiative led by Jinah Kim, the George P Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard University, and supported by three Harvard institutions (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Lakshmi Mittal institute under the Harvard Global Research Support Centre India, and the Radcliffe Institute), as well as the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

“We do not have a baseline understanding of the history of pigment use in South Asia,” Kim says. “All the pigment databases and studies I consulted were focused on the Western European canon, and there was no way of knowing, for instance, whether a pigment known to have been popularised in Europe, such as smalt (a cobalt-based glassy blue), was in use in South Asia or was only introduced through overseas trade.”

Her project aims to track the appearance and use of pigments in Asia, to fill in some of these gaps in the timeline and supply-chain history.

They are creating a database of select South Asian paintings dating from the 5th to the 20th centuries, searchable by colour, pigment and chemical elements and filterable by region, medium, artist and date. They aim to generate a critical mass of data available for historical research by 2026.

There are 228 entries currently on the site (mappingcolor.fas.harvard.edu), half of which have had their analysis published. The works include 120 from India, 37 from Iran, 12 from Tibet, six each from Pakistan and Iraq, four from Uzbekistan, three from Japan, and two each from Afghanistan and Nepal.

More works are being analysed and added as the team — consisting of curators, art historians, conservation scientists and data and computing specialists — continues to gather data from existing research, and conduct material analysis of pigments in paintings, handscrolls and manuscript folios accessed from the collections of 13 museums in Asia, the US and Europe.

The institutes involved range from the Harvard Art Museums and Boston Museum of Fine Arts to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj museum and Asiatic Society, both in Mumbai.

Work on the project began in 2018. Initial findings mark indigo as the most frequently used pigment across works so far, followed by brilliant red vermilion (which incidentally contained the highly toxic mercury in large doses).

Orpiment, a mineral composed of arsenic trisulfide that occurs naturally in volcanic vents and hot springs, is the most dominant yellow pigment. It is followed by “Indian yellow”, which has its roots here and was produced in large quantities between the 15th and 20th centuries, originally from the bright yellow urine of cows that had been restricted to a diet of mango leaves. Its production was outlawed in India in the early 1900s, because of how harmful it was to the cattle. But the pigment lives on in some of the world’s most beloved art, perhaps most famously in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889).

Textures are being studied too. “Painting, like most art in India is a multisensory experience,” says Kim. “We found that there is much emphasis on the tactility of painted surfaces.” This is seen in the use of gold and other metallic pigments, and the use of iridescent beetle wing cases or elytra, in Indian paintings, often to bring depictions of jewellery alive.

Interesting differences are emerging in the way water, for instance, is represented across cultures and time periods. “Most Persian paintings from the 16th century onwards in the Harvard Art Museums collection use silver to paint water, to represent its reflective nature, which unfortunately is tarnished now,” Kim says. “However, many Indian paintings of the same period in the collection use lead white and carbon black, rendering it grey.”

Kim first decided to focus on the material history of Indian paintings when she was in India researching her second book, Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting (2021). She wanted to understand why certain colours like red seemed to dominate the palette, but she ran into roadblocks when she tried to dig deeper into the materials used. A colour term such as sindura in Sanskrit could mean various pigments, she points out.

“Relying only on written sources or optical assumptions was just not adequate,” she adds. “To be able to discern a historical pattern, we needed a lot more analytical data, preferably collected following consistent methods and using controlled vocabulary.”

Institutes collaborating with the team have accordingly been provided with reporting templates. Over time, the researchers hope to begin seeing patterns emerge of when and where certain pigments were first predominantly used, which would in turn present clues about where to dig further when researching the origin of a hue.

There are plans to expand the operation to five to six more institutes in India, and maybe even take the research mobile, to scan and study works in more locations, Kim says.