color

Cochineal

Colors & materials

A crimson dye from New World scale insects, later a global trade color. Not kermes, and not carmine as the purified lake alone.

Nahua tradition

  • Cochineal is used in Dye.

    The Florentine Codex treats nocheztli, the cochineal insect red, among Nahua dyestuffs and painted materials. A colonial-ethnographic dye use of the New World scale, not Mediterranean kermes and not scarlet as an English hue alone.

    from Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators · Florentine Codex, c. 1577

    used in · sourced · documented

sources

  • Florentine Codex · Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua collaborators

    Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex).