The deep red color you see here decorated the wall of an Ancient Roman aristocratic villa in the first century BCE. The color was known as vermilion, and it was made of the mineral cinnabar, precious to Ancient and Medieval peoples. They loved the hue they could get by mixing it with various bases. But cinnabar is highly toxic — and that’s because it is made up of mercury.
Because of mercury’s physical properties — it can appear as a hybrid of a solid and a liquid — it – and the cinnabar from which it was extracted — became highly coveted by alchemists throughout the centuries. My favorite description of cinnabar comes from the _Alphabet of Galen_ (mainly written in the centuries before that famed Ancient Roman physician of the second and third centuries CE, and so not actually by Galen):.
“Cinnabar is not dragon’s blood, as some think, but is made from a stone which is said to be a sand containing silver-ore, the best of which is found in Spain, for it sparkles the most and is the richest in color, the color of blood or scarlet. It can be used as a gentle astringent (!), and for this reason is added to eye-salves . . . “.
Got that? No dragons were harmed in the production of cinnabar, as per author of _The Alphabet of Galen_. Eyes, however, are another story. (Ancient dragon on second picture added for effect.)
Source(s): _The Alphabet of Galen_, Ed and trans from the Latin by Nicholas Everett, Univ of Toronto Press, 2012. @metmuseum.org “The story of Cinnabar and Vermilion (HgS) at the Met,” Feb 28, 2018, Ellen Spindler
