Cinnabar

Exhibitions Details

The exhibition presents the use of the expensive pigment cinnabar. It aims to give impetus to the study of the unwritten rules in the colour decoration of sacred and secular buildings documented in the territory of Bulgaria up to the 6th century.

The reading of the color codes and the change in their content is important, but it turns out that the pigment used is also of great importance. Its price, but also its qualities, suggest a duality of symbolism. On the one hand, it means sacred, power, divine, and on the other - scary, forbidden for certain social classes. 

Cinnabar is valuable and at the same time loaded with certain meanings and functions that only complex research can reveal more fully. Its qualities predetermine them. It has been known since antiquity that when heated to 100 degrees Celsius the red colour of cinnabar turns black, but after cooling it returns again.

From the data collected so far, it is clear that in tombs and burial temples the colour red marks the border spaces between worlds. Of course, the choice of pigment type depends not only on the artist's decision but also on the sponsor's financial resources. When the pigment is cinnabar, a colour that changes with light, the mediating functions of red are emphasized and it is obviously thought to enable travel between worlds.