("The Perfect Red")

[fiefoe]

We claim two degrees of separation with the author, Amy Butler Greenfield.

• Emily Dickinson: "Friday I tasted life / A circus passed the house - still I feel the red in my mind."
• In Hebrew, Adam means "red".
  
• In the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist is portrayed as a "great red dragon" cavorting in the depraved company of the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon.
  

• Because dyers changed the outward appearance of objects, the ancient Greeks regarded them as dabblers in deception, a shifty-eyed lot who had to be kept under close watch.
• One of the most infamous of these guilds, the Arte di Calimala in Florence, burned any cloth not dyed to standard and fined the dyer. If the dyer could not pay the fine... the Arte di Calimala chopped off one of his hands instead.
• Dyers who worked with different fabrics often belonged to different guilds, as did dyers who worked in different colors. Blue, black, and green were one common range, and red, violet, and yellow another.
• The silk workers of Lucca, for example, included in their ranks a host of specialized workers: reelers to unwrap the cocoons, throwers to twist the thread, boilers to clean it, dyers to color it, and warpers and weavers to turn the thread into cloth.
• Although dyers usually worked with finished cloth, sometimes they treated the unspun wool instead, a costly practice that yielded the most intense and enduring colors and gave us the expression "dyed in the wool".
• The term suggested the tiny dried insects were actually berries, a classical notion that persisted in Renaissance Europe... The word ingrained comes from the expression to dye "in grain" and reflects one of the insect dyes' best qualities, their fastness.
• Mexicans did, however, show great skill in cultivating insects, including not only cochineal but another form of scale known as Llaveia, which produced a wax used in cosmetics
• lake being the general term for any pigment made by attaching colorless inorganic compounds to translucent dyes
• From the Philippines, cochineal eventually found its way to China, where it became known as yang hung, "foreign red."
  

The Most Noble Order of the Garter
Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands
The Diet of Worms
__ When he was a child, Charles (V)'s lower jaw jutted out to an abnormal degree, and by the time he reached manhood his jaw was so massive that he found it a strain to keep his mouth closed.
__ (Seville) also played host to a wide and varied brotherhood of thieves - including the cortabolsas, who stole purses; the capeadores, who stole cloaks; and the devotos, who (oddly enough) went after religious images.