A Vault of Color: Protecting the World's Rarest Pigments

The Harvard Pigment Library

Harvard University has a library devoted to the collection and preservation of pigments. The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies holds some 2,500 pigment sources, some of which can only be found in this collection: Ground shells of extinct insects; barks of long gone trees; poisonous metals. The Center also does restoration of art and tests for fraud in artwork.

For example, their work was instrumental in proving that a Jackson Pollock painting "rediscovered" in 2007 was actually a fake, after pigment analysis revealed that a specific red color was manufactured 20 years after the artist's death. The color, Red 254, was a by-product of a chemical reaction first documented in 1974; it's also nicknamed "Ferrari red." - Fastodesign article  

Some of the pigments in the collection include:

• Mummy Brown - from the resin used to preserve Egyptian mummies.
• Indian Yellow - from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves.
• Dragon's Blood - from the rattan palm.
• Ultramarine Blue - both real and artificial. The real stuff is made from Lapis Lazuli: "People would mine it in Afghanistan, ship it across Europe, and it was more expensive that gold so it would have its own budget line on a commission."
• Emerald Green - made from copper acetoarsenite.
• Lead in a rainbow of colors.
• Tyrian purple - prepared from the secretion from the predatory sea snail Bolinus brandaris, once only worn by emperors.
• Kermes - an Old World pigment created by grinding tiny blisters produced by the insects Coccus ilicis, which lived on the kermes oak tree. Kermes is also the source of the word "crimson."
• Flakes from car paint from the last hundred years.
• And hundreds more.

See also: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/09/a-wall-of-color-a-window-to-the-past/ and http://hyperallergic.com/162532/the-pigment-library-that-launched-american-art-conservation/