Guado: the story of a natural color

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Woad is the natural pigment obtained from Isatis tinctoria, historically used in Europe to dye fabrics and yarns.

For six thousand years man has used plants for dyeing. Only a little over a century ago, after the discovery of artificial colour, was this magical practice lost. Among all the natural colors now forgotten due to the daily choice of artificial colours, woad has a particular history, which leads us to reflect on the recovery of ancient traditions and presents various elements such as a strong symbolism, the history of agriculture, art and customs.

 

Guado Urbino is located in the area where woad has been cultivated and harvested for four hundred years.

In the Duchy of Urbino, precisely in the Apennine area, the woad plant has been intensively cultivated for centuries. Important traces of cultivation and processing are given by the presence of many ford millstones scattered throughout the area. Numerous documents tell of the control over cultivation, they tell of how the Duchy was a very important cultivation district until 1600.

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The color of death and the enemy

Isatis tinctoria, known by the term "woad", is a plant of the brassicacee family, is of Asian origin and was almost certainly introduced into the European area as early as the Neolithic. Among the dye plants, woad was the only one useful for dyeing fabrics blue. The Greeks and Romans did not like blue: they associated it with the color of death and identified it with barbarian populations...

The color of the divine and nobility

From 1200 in Europe woad blue - applied to fabrics - became the color of the "celestial divinity", of prestige, of nobility. The paintings and portraits that illustrate (between 1200 and 1600) noble characters and religious figures who wore woad blue clothes, cloaks and accessories tell us about the use and preciousness of this color in clothing. Painters depicted people dressed in woad-dyed fabrics, but using mineral pigments that imitated the hue of the naturally dyed fabric as closely as possible: they used lapis lazuli and azurite, for example.

The ford disappears

In 1600, indigo was imported into Europe from the East: it is a useful plant for blue dyeing, particularly convenient in terms of yield and costs. The cultivation of woad abruptly ceases, supplanted by the importation of indigo: it is the first globalization that destroys the native economy and tradition.

Henry William Perkin definitively changed the history of color

In 1856 Perkin discovered the first synthetic color. For just 164 years, natural dyes were no longer used in the production of fabrics, but only industrial chemical dyes. Isn't it strange that such an overwhelming yet so recent innovation has made us forget how important nature has been?