Drugs and Colours in History: Ritual, Art and Science

Revisiting Ancient Pharmacies and Artist’s Workshops

Book cover: Drugs and Colours in History: Ritual, Art and Science

Extent: 338 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: World Archaeology

Language: English, Italian, Spanish

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(January 2027)

ISBN: 9781805834021

8.07 x 11.46 inches

Price: $98.00

This book explores the intertwined roles of pigments and medicines from Antiquity to the present. Examining their artistic, medicinal and ritual uses, it traces how colours, drugs and sacred practices were linked across cultures, highlighting enduring traditions through interdisciplinary and international research.


Pigments have been used for medicinal and ritual purposes since ancient times. For example, as described by Dioscorides in the 1st century, the priestesses of the temple of the goddess Artemis on the island of Lemnos were responsible for producing Terra Lemnia, which ancient Mediterranean societies distributed for three purposes: artistic, as a pigment; medicinal, for example, women used it to relieve menstrual pain; and ritual -its very context of origin, in the goddess’s sanctuary, justified this purpose-. Colours and drugs were sacred in the cultures of the past, which is why their production was linked to temples and sanctuaries, and later to convents and monasteries, which usually included an apothecary in their premises. Their respective materiality, based on compounds of iron, lead, mercury, arsenic, and copper, among many others, also endowed them with magical-religious properties associated with deities, planets, meanings and sacred rituals.

 

The book Drugs and Colours in History: Ritual, Art and Science. Revisiting ancient pharmacies and artists’ workshops explores these connections from Antiquity to the present day, where it is possible to trace survivals in this regard, especially in rural communities in Europe and other continents, as confirmed by the research being carried out in Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland by the European Route of Historic Pharmacies and Medicinal Gardens, a Cultural Route of the Council of Europe.