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Tribune News Service

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But who knew that books could kill?
That is the premise of “If Books Could Kill”, an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, that looks at four toxic pigments used for millennia and around the world to illustrate and bind books: mercury, arsenic, lead and the bright-yellow mineral known as “orpiment”.
The exhibit, open since December, ends on August 3.
These metals and minerals produced jewel-like, dazzling colours – a brilliant green, a reddish-orange, a bright golden yellow. Lead is the basis for a colour known as “lead white”, an opaque, silky pigment that retains its bright hue for centuries.
Some of these tints were so seductive and beguiling that death could be seen as almost worth the risk. They remained in circulation for hundreds of years after their dangerousness was documented.
For instance, the colour “Paris green”, introduced in 1814 and a favourite of artists like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt, contains arsenic.
“It was completely different from all the other green pigments, and people went crazy for it,” said Annette Ortiz Miranda, a conservation scientist for the museum who co-curated the exhibit with Walters staff Lynley Anne Herbert and Abigail Quandt.
“It was used in everything: clothes, wallpaper, book binding, pigment and make-up. By the mid-1800s, they knew it was making people ill – but it wasn’t fully banned until the 1960s.”

Although poisonous minerals have been found in works dating back thousands of years to ancient Egypt, Ortiz Miranda noted that harmful chemicals are not only found in artworks created in the past, but in some paintings made today as well.
The spray paint used for graffiti, for instance, contains volatile organic compounds and heavy metals that can cause respiratory problems and neurological damage if inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
“That is why you see graffiti artists wearing masks with filters,” Ortiz Miranda said. “They are protecting themselves. They still use toxic chemicals, but in a more responsible way.”
The exhibit consists of two dozen objects in the Walters collection, ranging from the 11th through the 20th centuries: books, manuscripts, leaves of parchment and minerals. There is a section on the methods ancient people used to protect their precious volumes from the critters that munched on them, including real-life bookworms – actually, book lice.
Some remedies worked fairly well, such as leaves from the citronella plant, used today to repel mosquitoes. Others were perhaps less effective, including an inscription intended to summon the protective plant’s “spirit”, but that contained no actual citronella.
“It is notable that this manuscript has no traces of insect damage,” reads the wall text accompanying a 16th-century illustrated Islamic book by the Persian poet Sa’di. “Perhaps those bookworms really could read!”

The inspiration for the exhibit began in 2016, when the Walters acquired a small missal, or worship book, created more than a century earlier by Clothilde Coulaux, a young Frenchwoman living in German-occupied Alsace. The 174-page book of illustrations is tiny – not quite five inches (13 centimetres) tall and 3.5 inches wide. But it was surprisingly heavy.
“The parchment used in the 20th century was of a much lower quality than parchment from the medieval era,” Ortiz Miranda said. “We examined the book and found that every page was coated on both sides with lead white to give it a nice smooth surface that made it easier for her to illustrate.”
Six years later, the Walters acquired a 1788 prayer book from either Germany or America. It included evidence of poisonous chemicals – in this case, lead arsenate, which was used as a pesticide to preserve the book, if not the humans who owned it.
And just like that, the Walters had the nucleus of its current exhibit.

This show also delves into the human stories of the people who interacted with the books: the men and women who created these volumes or later used them, the deadly chemicals accumulating in their bodies invisibly and gradually.
A wall text accompanying the exhibit notes that “books were made to be touched and handled”, and the owners’ interaction with sacred texts in particular could be intense.
For example, a Gospel book from 15th-century Turkey is opened to a page showing an illustration of Jesus Christ beset by his enemies – Roman centurions and the disciples who betrayed him.
As was customary at the time, indignant readers expressed their anger at Christ’s assailants by using their fingernails to scratch off the heads and faces in the illustrations. As they did, they unknowingly rubbed cinnabar, an extremely toxic mineral with a high mercury content, onto their hands.
In addition, a Flemish 15th-century prayer book shows signs that the mercury-laced reddish paint meant to depict Christ’s wounds on the cross has worn away after the page was kissed repeatedly by its devout owner.












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Perhaps even more at risk were the monks and nuns who created these beautiful illuminated manuscripts. It was work that required long hours at a workbench, heads bent over wet pages, giving new meaning to the phrase “burying their heads in a book”.
Making matters worse, it was not unusual for illustrators to use their lips and tongues to shape the ends of the ink-stained brushes into the sharp points that gave these paintings their elaborate details.
“People were exposed to dangers that they weren’t even aware of,” Ortiz Miranda said.
The Walters exhibit does not contain evidence of any fatalities that can be conclusively attributed to the use of poisonous chemicals – including the museum staff members who put this show together.
“No curators, conservators or art handlers were harmed in the making of this exhibition,” the wall text says.
But a study published in the August 2008 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science that analysed the bones of medieval monks buried in six cemeteries in Denmark found high concentrations of mercury, concluding that they likely came from the red ink used to write script in the incunabula, or religious books printed in Europe between 1450 and 1501.
Ortiz Miranda’s favourite manuscripts on view in the exhibit, the confession books created by deaf children in the 19th century, are almost unbearably poignant. Because these youngsters could not confess their sins verbally and be absolved, they painted pictures of their youthful misdeeds and showed them to their priests.
One 19th-century drawing by a preteen Flemish boy named Carel shows him sitting under a broken and dying tree, beset by a winged skeleton thrusting two arrows at his chest. Two grown men stand nearby, and one is pointing directly at the youth. The illustration is titled Mors, or “death”.

The exhibit curators wrote that the image was possibly intended to encourage Carel to behave by reminding him of his mortality. But death might have been hovering even closer than the boy could have guessed. The tree, the boy’s coat and the coat worn by the pointing man are all painted a deadly Paris green.
“He could not have known,” the wall text concludes, “that he was taking his life in his hands.”


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How lethal toxic pigments used in books for millennia created images to die for

19th century drawing by a preteen Flemish boy named Carel shows him sitting under a broken and dying tree, beset by a winged skeleton thrusting two arrows at his chest. Two grown men stand nearby, and one is pointing directly at the youth. The illustration is titled “Mors” or “death.” (Handout/The Walters Art Museum/TNS)

The Archangel Michael features in an illustration containing a toxic pigment in a book that forms part of an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in the US. The exhibit looks at toxic pigments used for millennia to illustrate and bind books. Photo: The Walters Art Museum/TNS

If Books Could Kill is an exhibit that looks at toxic pigments used for millennia to illustrate and bind books. Photo: The Walters Art Museum/TNS

A page from a book in the exhibit. Photo: Instagram/thewaltersartmuseum

“Treatise on Elephants”, an illustration containing a toxic pigment, forms part of the exhibit. Photo: TNS

The drawing by Carel. The tree, the boy’s coat and the coat worn by the pointing man were all painted with deadly Paris green. Photo: The Walters Art Museum/TNS

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An artwork by Yip Yan-chuen depicting Hennessy Road in Hong Kong. A series of landscape sketches at the “Canton Modern” exhibition chronicle Yip’s life as a wartime refugee. Photo: M+

A visitor takes a photo of artworks on display as part of the exhibition at M+. Photo: Dickson Lee

Mother and Son in the Rain (1932), by Fang Rending. Photo: M+

Flying in the Rain (1932), by Gao Jianfu. Photo: M+

Alan Yeung and Tina Pang are the curators of the exhibition. Photo: M+

And Thus Is This Land is a participatory performance by Dai Guangyu at the exhibition that invites professional artists and art students to collaborate on a recreation of This Land So Rich in Beauty (1959), by Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyu. Photo: Dickson Lee

Artists take part in the And Thus Is This Land participatory performance at the exhibition. Photo: Dickson Lee

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An exhibit at a US museum looks at how mercury, arsenic, lead and ‘orpiment’ created visuals both incredibly seductive and highly dangerous


An exhibit at a US museum looks at how mercury, arsenic, lead and ‘orpiment’ created visuals both incredibly seductive and highly dangerous.


Vincent van Gogh

How lethal toxic pigments used in books for millennia created images to die for

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}An exhibit at a US museum looks at how mercury, arsenic, lead and ‘orpiment’ created visuals both incredibly seductive and highly dangerous

An exhibit at a US museum looks at how mercury, arsenic, lead and ‘orpiment’ created visuals both incredibly seductive and highly dangerous