PURPLE COLORHISTORICAL APPROACH

ROYAL PURPLE = IMPERIAL PURPLE = TYRIAN RED

It is a secretion produced by one or more species of predatory sea snails in the family Muricidae, rock snails originally known by the name Murex.

Tyrian purple may first have been used by the ancient Phoenicians as early as 1570 BC. The dye was greatly prized in antiquity because the color did not easily fade, but instead became brighter with weathering and sunlight. Its significance is such that the name Phoenicia means 'land of purple.” It came in various shades, the most prized being that of "blackish clotted blood".

• The Phoenicians also made an indigo dye, sometimes referred to as royal blue or hyacinth purple, which was made from a closely related species of marine snail.

The Phoenicians established an ancillary production facility on the Iles Purpuraires at Mogador, in Morocco. The sea snail harvested at this western Moroccan dye production facility was Hexaplex runculus (mentioned above) also known by the older name Murex trunculus (Linnaeus, 1758).

This second species of dye murex is found today on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa (Spain and Portugal, Morocco, and the Canary Islands

Cuneiform tablet, dated 600-500 BC, with instructions for dyeing wool

purple and blue

Painting of a man wearing an all-purple toga picta, from an Etruscan tomb (about 350 BC)

Roman men wearing togae praetextae with reddish-purple

stripes during a religious procession (1st century BC).

The colour-fast (non-fading) dye was an item of luxury trade, prized by Romans, who used it to colour ceremonial robes

 Vitruvius mentions the production of Tyrian purple from shellfish. In his History of Animals. 

Aristotle described the shellfish from which Tyrian purple was obtained and the process of extracting the tissue that produced the dye. 

Pliny the Elder described the production of Tyrian purple in his Natural History

Byzantine Emperor Justinian I clad in Tyrian purple, 6th-century mosaic at Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

The Empress Theodora, the wife of the Emperor Justinian, dressed in

Tyrian purple. (6th century).

A medieval depiction of the coronation of the Emperor

Charlemagne in 800. The bishops and cardinals wear Tyrian purple,

and the Pope wears white.

A fragment of the shroud in which the Emperor Charlemagne was buried in 814. It was made of gold and Tyrian

purple from Constantinople.

Heracles and the Discovery of the Secret of Purple by Peter Paul Rubens (1636), Musée Bonnat