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Learning from a “Living Source” in Working with Historical Recipes: Reflections on the Burgundian Black Collaboratory

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By Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen

This week, we continue our series of cross-postings on a fascinating hands-on, collaborative research project into recipes for Burgundian Black, organized by Dr. Jenny Boulboullé. In today’s selection, we hear from Jessie Chen on her experiences of the project. This post is our second entry in the series, reproduced from Artechne, July 3rd, 2019. (Joshua Schlachet)

Burgundian Black Collaboratory

Between the 16th and 18th of January, I was invited to participate in the Burgundian Black Collaboratory.[1] For this workshop, experts from different fields joined forces to experiment with reconstructions of early modern black dyeing technologies based on a selection of historical recipes (Fig. 1).[2] The workshop is part of the research for a collaborative exhibition project that will be on view at Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen later this year, and an edited-volume-in-planning on the subject of “Burgundian Black.” For now, I want to write about some thoughts on the method of learning from a “living source” using my own experience of the workshop.

Fig. 1. Experts from different fields experimenting with different recipes in our temporary lab, which was a greenhouse on the farm De Kreake in Húns in Friesland.

What is a “living source”?

In her article, Timea Tallian proposed three groups of living sources that can help fill the gaps in understanding historical recipes: experts, masters, and practitioners.[3] The definition of the three groups is more suggestive than hard-drawn. In general, “expert” refers to a person who conducts practical and/or scientific experimentation or reconstruction based on historical documentation. “Master” refers to a person who has acquired an art or craft through apprenticeship and continued to practice it for a long time. “Practitioner” refers to a person who has gained most knowledge from personal experience in making art/craft and self-motivated research into historical techniques.[4]

A simplified experience of working as an apprentice

During the Burgundian Black Collaboratory, I was in the same group as Jo Kirby-Atkinson, former Senior Scientific Officer at the National Gallery in London and co-author of the seminal book Natural Colorants for Dyeing and Lake Pigments.[5] Jo is, in every aspect of the term, an expert on natural colorants and materials, whereas I am a novice with no prior experience in working with natural dye and textile. While not strictly, the dynamic of my group resembles a historical workshop, with an expert/master showing the ropes to an apprentice. Our group was given three seventeenth-century recipes to decode, with two originally written in Dutch, but translated into English, and one in French.[6] All three recipes yielded rich black dyes (Fig. 2), even though we had to compress the multiple-day dyeing-processes into only a few hours.

Fig. 2. Top left: our equipment for the experiments; Top right: the different textiles we gathered before dyeing them black; Bottom left: in the middle of dyeing following the instructions of one of the Dutch recipes; Bottom right: final results of our experiments.

For three days, I followed Jo around, gathered and prepared the needed materials as she had instructed, and attentively listened to her explaining the reasons behind the decisions she made to follow or modify the recipes when dyeing our textile. Unlike many historians that start working with recipes by reading and interpreting the texts right away, I started by listening to and absorbing the knowledge of the expert/master.

In fact, this has always been how I learned historical techniques, or any artistic techniques. When I was in art school, manuals and how-to guides were always part of the assigned readings for classes, but I seldom consulted them. Instead, I observed what the professors did during demonstrations and tried to replicate the processes and results. For my first lesson in historical remaking, I learned an eighteenth-century metal-casting technique (Fig. 3) through the step-by-step explanations from an Amsterdam-based silversmith and conservator.[7] Similarly, I gained my knowledge in early modern printing (Fig. 4) by working alongside a master printer who learned the trade in a workshop. While historical recipes and instructions still play an important part in my research of these techniques, I do not usually read them until after I have some hands-on experiences.

Fig. 3. Left: removing the lion head ornament from the casting flask; Right: the cast and the original lion head ornament.

 

 Fig. 4. Two process photos of printing with a hand press.

Limitation or liberation?

How does learning from these experts affect my reading of historical recipes then? Does knowing the practical aspects of a technique help me understand the recipes better? Or does it prevent me from finding other possible interpretations of a recipe because I am conditioned by what the experts have shown me?

Upon reflection of the workshop, I noticed that my take on the original source is, indeed, shaped by Jo. When going through the recipes afterwards, my mind replayed the steps we took to dye our textile black. Interestingly, the recipes became so straight forward. In the imagined laboratory, my mind automatically filled in the gaps in the recipes with the decisions and measurements Jo made during the workshop. She has taken all the guess work out of interpreting the recipes, and what I have is a very cleaned-up, and perhaps all-too-easy, version of the processes.

However, I also noticed that I started to question some other things that are not necessarily directly related to the texts in the recipes we were testing, but to the broader historical contexts. For example, for one of the recipes we put linen and woolen materials in the same dye bath for the experiment. The linen came out more of a gray than black. Jo explained that in order for linen to get to the same level of blackness as wool, it would require a much longer time to mordant the fabric with alum. Historically and practically speaking, linen would not have been dyed with this particular recipe anyway because the cost of the overdyeing process (dyeing with multiple dye baths) would have been too expensive for the fabric. Such a recipe, thus, would have only been used for high quality material like wools and silks. These comments got me curious about the alum trade and the regulations of dyeing certain fabrics in the early modern period to which I have never paid attention before.

From novice to expert, eventually…

To answer my own questions, I think that gaining the hands-on skills from an expert/master is beneficial to prevent me from getting caught up with words and sentences as a novice; instead, I can focus on connecting the technique of investigation to its larger historical and social context. Learning from these experts also makes me become more aware of the oral knowledge transfer in a workshop in addition to written recipes. As I am only at the beginning of working with historical recipes, there will be more opportunities to interpret and experiment with recipes for different materials and techniques without the aid of an expert. Much like an apprentice who would become a master, I think that I will eventually find my own perspective on working with recipes.

 

[1] The workshop was organized by Jenny Boulboullé (ERC Artechne Project, Utrecht University & University of Amsterdam) and Claudy Jongstra (textile artist), and prepared in collaboration with Natalie Ortega Saez (University of Antwerp) and Art Proaño Gaibor (Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands). It was hosted by Claudy and her team in Húns in Friesland, The Netherlands, and received funding from the Museum Hof van Busleyden, the ERC Artechne Project, and Studio Claudy Jongstra.

[2] For more academic blogging on historical recipes and how historians have been studying them, see The Recipes Project, https://recipes.hypotheses.org/about. 

[3] Timea Tallian, “Living sources: experts, masters, and practitioners,” in The Artist’s Process: Technology and Interpretation: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of the Art Technological Source Research Working Group, eds. Sigrid Eyb-Green, Joyce H. Townsend, Mark Clarke, Jilleen Nadolny, and Stefanos Kroustallis (London: Archetype Publications, 2012), 10.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jo Kirby-Atkinson, Martin van Bommel, and André Verhecken, eds., Natural Colorants for Dyeing and Lake Pigments: Practical Recipes and Their Historical Sources (London: Archetype Publications, 2014).

Jenny was also part of our group; but due to her role as the organizer, she was much needed by other participants and thus I mostly worked with Jo on the hands-on aspect of the experiments during the workshop.

[6] The two Dutch recipes, translated by Hofenk de Graaff, are from the so called Haarlem Manuscript (Recepten-boek om allerlei kleuren te verwen […], Frans Hals Museum, fol. 313-l-l and 95/r/3l) from the second half of the seventeenth century (after 1669). The unpublished French recipe, transcribed by Jenny, is from the first half of the seventeenth century. She found it in the Archives of the Royal Society in London (Classified Papers III(1)).

[7] This technique is one of the investigations for the PhD project of Thijs Hagendijk. To learn more, see Thijs Hagendijk, “Learning a Craft from Books: Historical Re-enactment of Functional Reading in Gold- and Silversmithing,” Nuncius 33 (2018): 198–235. Alternatively, Thijs has also written a few blog posts on the subject, see, for example, “How to Read Early Modern Instructions for Gold- and Silversmiths,” https://artechne.wp.hum.uu.nl/how-to-read-early-modern-instructions-for-gold-and-silversmiths/.

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Exploring Historical Blacks: The Burgundian Black Collaboratory

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By Paula Hohti

Here at The Recipes Project, we are proud to have the opportunity to, from time to time, amplify the incredible collaborative projects of our contributors by cross-posting their work in their own words. This is the first entry in a series of posts on collaborative research into recipes for Burgundian Black, organized by Dr. Jenny Boulboullé. We look forward to sharing more from their project throughout the month to come. This post is reproduced from their entry at Refashioning the Renaissance on February 21st, 2019. (Joshua Schlachet)

Last month, I participated in a workshop on historical black dyes in the Netherlands, titled “Burgundian Black Collaboratory.” co-organised by Jenny Boulboullè from the ERC ARTECHNE Research group and Claudy Jongstra—a talented and creative textile artist working on historical wool fibres and natural dyes—in collaboration with Natalia Ortega-Saez, and the Museum Hof van Busleyden.  Led by Jenny and hosted by Claudy on her farm in Hùns, I and the rest of the group spent three days in a green house in the Dutch countryside, trying out recipes and testing how ‘a perfect Burgundian black,’ once seen as the utmost civic and professional colour, could be created by using historical dye recipes. The aim of the workshop was to provide material for the planned exhibition at the Museum Hof van Busleyden, and an e-book project, edited by Jenny Boulboullé and Sven Dupré.

Black is the most difficult colour to dye, because it washes out easily and degrades faster than other colours. Given the complexity and expense related to dyeing black, historical recipe books are full of black dye recipes, from simple and cheap procedures that could be applied by men and women at home to complex and expensive recipes that required professional skill and economic capital.

In the ‘Burgundian Black Collaboratory,’ we worked in groups to test these recipes, using Flemish and Italian sources, including the Venetian Plichto by Rosetti (1548), which is the first known book of dye recipes intended for professional dyers. This allowed us both to explore the process and methodology of reconstructing historical recipes (the recipes are vague and rarely include accurate measures!) as well as to evaluate how well the original recipe might have worked in terms of creating black.

Black was traditionally produced from barks and roots that contain tannins (such as alder, walnut and chestnut). To provide a colour that stayed longer, dyers started combining tannins with iron salts that acted as a mordant. This produced a more beautiful black, but the result was corrosive to the fabric.

A better -but much more expensive and complicated – way to achieve black colour was to use a madder and woad base overdyed with tannins such as gall nuts. By the late sixteenth century, the best-known method to get a beautiful, deep black was to dip the silk or wool first in either a woad or indigo bath that gave the cloth a beautiful blue undertone, and then, when the fabric was dry, to overdye the fabric with madder (red dye) on an alum mordant.

The challenges of reconstruction, and the great differences between recipes of black, became well visualized and materialised in the results.  Some did not turn black at all, others were initially black but turned brown overnight when they were dry, while others were just beautifully deep black. These differences were due to the fact that some recipes did not provide as precise instructions as others, they were misleading, or they simply did not work.

The fascination and interest of dyers over black reflects the fact that black was an ultimate colour of power, status and fashion in early modern Europe. By the end of sixteenth century, it was essential for young men of wealthy families to have their portraits painted in black.  

Although deep, sumptuous blacks with blue, purple or red undertones are usually associated only with the elites and merchant classes, black was, in fact, the most important colour also in clothing of our ordinary artisans and shopkeepers.  Our initial data shows that, for example in Siena between 1550–1650, whenever colour was mentioned, 25% of all male and female clothing consisted of garments dyed with different types of blacks, including jackets, breeches, over-gowns among others.

Recipes for dyeing black, intended for domestic use by ordinary people, were available also for our artisan groups through cheap printed pamphlets and booklets that were sold at a cheap price by, for example, street peddlers. One of the recurring recipes for home-based black dyeing, described ‘for women after they have spun their yarn,’ was prepared by boiling oak gall with a small amount of copper sulphate and Arabic gum -the latter which was added to give the black a degree of lustre. While this might have produced a reasonably beautiful black colour, the copper made the woollen yarn weak. For this reason, professional wool dyers, at least in Venice, were forbidden by their guild to use this method.

We will be experimenting with the Refashioning the Renaissance team with domestic dyeing and colour, and investigating what kinds of blacks among other colours our artisans wore, what these looked like and how durable these were.

Please keep an eye on Michele’s talk and article on how to use printed sources as evidence for the history of lower-class dress, on Sophie’s dye experiment during our trip to Columbia University’s Making and Knowing Project, and my forthcoming articles on Colour, on red dyes, and the social and culture meanings of black in sixteenth and seventeenth century European fashions.

Literature:

Susan Kay-Williams, The Story of Colour in Textiles: Imperial Purple to Denim Blue (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Natalia Ortega Saez, Black dyed wool in North Western Europe 1680- 1850: The relationship between Historical Recipes and the Current state of preservation (unpublished PhD. dissertation submitted for University of Antwerpen, 2018).

Dominique Cardon, Natural Dyes: Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science (Archetype Publications, 2003).

Elizabeth Currie, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Riikka Räisänenm Anja Primetta, Kirsi Niinimäki, Luonnonväriaineet (Maahenki 2015).

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Seasonality and the (Re)creation of Early Modern Color Worlds

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By Jenny Boulboullé

Color played an important role in the early modern world across a number of areas from arts and crafts to Christian religion to politics to natural history and philosophy. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore how early modern men and women engaged, produced and conceptualized colors within and across color worlds.[1] Just as in early modern culinary and medical recipes, seasonality is a recurrent theme in artisanal recipes. The art of preservation was highly valued for its powers to make flavors and healing properties of foodstuffs, plants and herbs endure well beyond their seasonal availability. In my contribution to the seasonality series I focus on recipes that celebrate the art of color preservation and on the mindful attention to seasons called for in color making recipes. I am particularly interested in the challenges that recipes for making natural dyes and pigments from seasonal products posed to modern historians trying to reconstruct them.

Today the symbolic significance of colors in early modern Europe is perhaps most readily associated with the compellingly colorful medieval and renaissance art works that have survived in sacred spaces and museums.

Figure 1, Caption: Giotto (1266-1337), The Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, Padua, Italy. ca. 1305. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

But in the pre-modern period a deep concern with colors was not limited to the arts: colors were associated with the four humors and close attentiveness to colors was of vital importance to practices of healing in the Hippocritean and Galenic medical tradition.[2] The perception and display of colors was also highly charged with political meanings: colors were a form of symbolic communication and played an important role in consolidating and displaying religious and secular power relations. European courts and courtly events were important sites of “chromatic politics” as contemporary witness accounts and meticulous historical reconstructions of ephemeral, yet splendid and compellingly colorful festive events have shown.[3]

Figure 2, Caption: Peter Paul Rubens, Design for state decorations for the triumphal entry of Cardinal Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp, on April 17, 1635, Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Image from Pubhist.com

The historical reconstruction of a sixteenth-century dress, originally created for the Augsburg Imperial Diet from 1530, is a particularly compelling example of the politicized use of brightly colored dress made from dyed textiles.[4] The owner of this dress and his contemporaries might have regarded its colors “as related to intrinsic qualities and powers”. Deep scarlet reds were regarded at that time “as carriers of life and heat, while a strong yellow was linked to gold as metal, which had given its powers by the influence of the sun”. Ulinka Rublack notes the challenges encountered during the reconstruction process. The yellow color obtained in their first dying trials “was just not quite vibrant enough” which was detrimental “as faded hues of yellow could have negative associations of weakness and coldness”.[5]

Other sixteenth century recipes for ‘yellows’ from organic sources, demonstrate that making natural dyes of this color depended on local seasonal knowledge. As Marieke Hendriksen has discussed, here in Utrecht, we are building a new database of artisanal recipes. A quick search in the Artechne Database yields several fifteenth- and sixteenth century German recipes for green and yellow colors that call for buckthorn berries (some with precise indication for picking times, like this one for “Green color” from 1543). Here an Italian one from the anonymous Padua Manuscript (ca. end 16th/17th century), translated and published in English:

To make giallo santo

Take the berries of buckthorn towards the end of the month of August, boil them with pure water, until the water is loaded and thick with color; add a little burnt roche alum and then strain it. You may boil the strained liquor to make the color deeper, mixing with it some very pure gilder’s gesso; then make the color into pellets, and dry them in the shade.[6]

In color recipes such as this one, seasonality and intimate knowledge of seasonal products sensitivities to additives play a key role. Berries had to be picked at specific times of the year to attain the right hues, and while the juice of ripe buckthorn, available in most of Europe, gives a greenish color, also known as sap green, one needs to get hold of unripe berries, fresh or dried, in particular a species imported from the Middle East, also known as “Persian berries”, to attain the deep golden yellow hue that the reconstruction team had envisioned for this dazzling sixteenth-century dress.[7] Only by patiently repeating the dye processes using the right berries picked at the right moment, can the desired vibrant hue of rich quality be achieved – both in the early modern period and during 21th century reconstruction.[8]

Thus, the commission of brightly dyed dresses for display at important events must have been a time-consuming affair that required planning long ahead of the political event and entailed a collaborative process of sourcing and experimenting that depended not only on seasonal knowledge and availability, but was also prone to risks of seasonal change. As Rublack’s work shows, reconstruction research makes us of acutely aware of the complexities and risks posed to those who aspired a part in the “chromatic politics” of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century. Moreover, as I will show in my next post, color recipe reconstructions allow us to experience the efforts and knowledge that went into the creation of early modern color worlds, which have become unfamiliar to our modern period eye.

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[1] Tarwin Baker, Sven Dupré, Sachiko Kusukawa, and Karin Leonhard, eds., Early Modern Color Worlds (Brill, 2016).

[2] Baker, Dupré, Kusukawa, and Leonhard 2016, 4.

[3] Ulinka Rublack, “Renaissance Dress, Cultures of Making, and the Period Eye.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 23, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 6–34. doi:10.1086/688198.

[4] Rublack 2016.

[5] Rublack 2016, 23, 24.

[6] Maria Philadelphia Merrifield, Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting, in Oil, Miniature, Mosaic, and on Glass; Of Gilding, Dying, and the Preparation of Colours and Artificial Gems (John Murray 1849), 708.

[7] Jo Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon, eds. Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (Archetype Publications, 2010) Glossary, 447.

[8] Rublack 2016, 25.