Medieval minesongs described green as the color of love, on the other hand it also represented demons and evil serpents. Dragon had a positive connotation in the philosophy of ancient Chinese where it represented divine power of change and supernatural wisdom and strength. Thus it was often associated with the color green. This positive symbol was reversed in Christianity and the dragon became a monster of evil and destructive powers. Christian demons were green-skinned and green-eyed dragon-like creatures spitting deadly venom and emanating the smell of Hell. Fertility and with it color green became suspicious as possible effects of unrestrained sexuality. The Devil hunting lost souls was wearing a green frock.From Pigments Through the Ages on colors used by painters. The writing's not great, but I've read about that same reversal of green from natural=good to "pagan=evil" in many religious history books (it goes along with the co-opting of pagan symbols, rituals, festivals to make them Christianized), so it's not too wacko, either.
Association of both green and yellow with the concept of poison has not been fully abandoned until today, even if some medieval painters did use green pigments for painting the Cross or draperies of saints as a symbol of hope.
Discovery of the pigment emerald (Schweinfurt green) in 1800 further worsened the repute of green as the color of poison. Emerald was prepared from verdigris and copper arsenite to result in one of the deadliest poisons ever used in painting.
Within a few years of Napoleon Bonaparte's death in 1821 (at the age of 51) locks labelled 'Bonaparte's hair' (which his doctor incidentally reported at the time of his death as 'thin, fine and silky') commanded quite a price on the open market. But it was not until 140 years later that one of them caused a mild sensation. After being bought at auction in 1960 it was chemically analysed. The owners were looking for any clue to greatness, perhaps; but what they found instead was a clue to the fall of greatness. They found arsenic, and in substantial qualities, which led to a spate of questions: did the ex-emperor really die of cancer, as his doctors had declared, or did something more sinister happen during his six years of exile after he lost at Waterloo?On preview: ha, rokusan, you beat me to it on the Napoleon story!
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There was a possible answer to the arsenic question, and it was connected to paint. Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a chemist working in Sweden at the end of the 18th century. In the 1770s, when he was scarcely into his thirties, he isolated chlorine and oxygen, invented a bright yellow paint (which would be named Turner's Patent Yellow after the British manufacturer who stole the patent) and then – almost accidentally, while he was in the middle of experimenting with arsenic in 1775 – produced a most astonishing green. He was not going to repeat his mistake on the patent front, and very soon he was manufacturing this copper arsenite paint under the name Scheele's Green. There was, however, something that troubled him, which he confided to a scientist friend in a letter of 1777, a year before the colour went into production. He was worried about the paint, he wrote. he felt that users should be warned of its poisonous natureBut what's a little arsenic when you've got a great new colour to sell? Soon manufacturers were using it in a range of paints and papers and for years people happily pasted poison on to their walls.
Perhaps, historians began to think, this might explain the mystery of St Helena's poisoner. The, in 1980, a British chemistry professor signed off his science programme on the BBC with a little teaser: if only we could see the colour of Napoleon's wallpaper we might know whether this was the cause of the poison, he said. And to Dr David Jones' astonishment he received a letter from a woman who had a sample of the wallpaper from Longwood [Napoleon's residence on St Helena]. An ancestor who had visited the house had stealthily torn a strip off the wall of the room where Napoleon died, and stuck it in a scrapbook. Dr Jones tested it and to his excitement found traces of Scheele's arsenic in its pattern, which was of green and gold fleurs-de-lis on a white background. When he learned of how wet St Helena was he became more excited: the mould reacting to the arsenic would have made the whole atmosphere poisonous. The Scheele's Green theory explained the arsenic, and the possibility of fumes in the air gave a clue as to why the formerly active soldier spent so many of his last months lying on one of his two camp beds (he could mever decide between them) inside the house.
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It Took the medical world a long time to react to cases of wallpaper poisoning. As late as January of 1880, more than a hundred years after Scheele invented his green, a researcher called Henry Carr stood in front of the assembled members of the Society of Arts in London and held up a sample of cute nursery paper. It was printed with pictures of boys playing cricket on a village green. This innocent-looking paper, he told them, had recently killed one of his young relatives and had made three of the child's siblings seriously ill. He then went on to give other examples of arsenic poisoning – an invalid who went to the seaside for a cure, and ended up almost dying from the paint in her hotel; a team of decorators who developed convulsions; even a Persian cat who became covered with pustules after being locked in a green room.
posted by OlderThanTOS at 9:54 AM on March 22, 2008