Prussian blue

Reviewed by: Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] by Alexander Kraft Agustí Nieto-Galan (bio) Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] By Alexander Kraft. Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2019. Pp. 312. Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] By Alexander Kraft. Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2019. Pp. 312. The history of a single dyestuff, pigment, or color could be considered a specific genre in the history of science and technology, but also in economic and business history. Indigo, cochineal, madder, sugar, tobacco, cacao, and many other materials have circulated for centuries across the continents on a global scale and have progressively acquired the status of historical actors themselves. However, this genre is not an easy one. Histories of the main sources of red, as explored by Jacqueline Jacqué, Dominique Cardon, et al. in Andrinopole. Le rouge magnifique (Éditions de la Martinière. Musée d'impression sur étoffes, 1995) and Robert Chenciner in Madder Red (Curzon, 2000)—and blue, as Jenny Balfour-Paul did in Indigo (British Museum Press, 1998)—were pioneering examples in the history of a single natural dyestuff. In the same way, mauve attracted the attention of historians as a pristine synthetic and artificial color, as demonstrated by Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers (Lehigh Associated University Press, 1993) and Simon Garfield in Mauve (Faber and Faber, 2000). In spite of their uneven scholarship, these histories provide new, rich, sound data on the different dyestuffs, but also, and most importantly, on inventors, chemists, entrepreneurs, trade companies, and merchants who circulated the colors across the globe. Likewise, the famous Berliner Blau or Prussian blue, a new source of blue that revolutionized the art of dyeing and painting from the early eighteenth century, also deserves its place in the Olympus of the histories of single dyestuffs. This is a major achievement of Alexander Kraft's Berliner Blau, which will help historians of dyestuffs and colors to add new actors to the play. Exploiting new archival material and assembling a good part of the research already published in previous articles, Kraft meticulously describes the complexities of the discovery of that "mysterious" blue as a subtle collective endeavor. Supposedly originated in an accidental discovery from animal blood by dye maker John Jacob von Diesbach and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel in Berlin—probably in 1705–6, as described by German physician George Ernst Stahl some years later in 1732—Kraft brings other relevant actors to the fore. Johann Leonard Frisch is a key figure for the commercial success of the new dye as a pigment for painting, as described in his correspondence with Leibniz. Kraft also stresses the key role of apothecary Caspar Neumann in the transfer of the recipe to physician and naturalist John Woodward, and its publication in Philosophical Transactions, in 1724. [End Page 644] Kraft also attempts to write an ambitious, long-term history of Prussian blue through its changes in production methods; its application as a dyestuff for textiles in competition with indigo; its trade across the world to become a global commodity that reached America, China, and Africa; its later utility, in the nineteenth century, in photography and analytical chemistry; and its transformation into other commercial products. Finally, the narrative reaches the present, with a description of the role that the old Prussian blue—the modern ferric hexacyanoferrate (II)—plays today as a high-technology material. Berliner Blau is a meticulous, erudite work by a chemist-historian. It provides useful, sound data and a long-term account of the color. Nevertheless, the result of the exploitation of new manuscript and printed primary sources should be situated/placed/elaborated in the framework of the historiography of chemistry and technology. Also, it does not consider other histories of single dyestuffs, such as those mentioned above. Issues such as the technological competition between Prussian blue and indigo; the construction of the blurred boundaries between natural and artificial dyes; a more detailed account of the transfer of the seminal Berliner

Art · Art history · Indigo · Prussian blue · Visual arts · Chemistry · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine