A global symbol of power, wealth, mystery, and sexuality, red has seduced viewers and inspired artists for millennia. Painters and other artists engaged in a quest for the source of the perfect red that conveyed the luxury, spirit, and substance of living. In the 1520s, Spanish explorers found it in the grand Aztec markets--in a dye derived from the cochineal insect. The ensuing global spread of American cochineal changed art, culture, science, and trade for centuries. A Red Like No Other follows the precious bug juice from Mexico to Europe and beyond as it insinuated itself into all forms of art, politics, and commerce to color the world in vivid red hues. The images show how the colorant touched cultures and artists worldwide, including pre-Columbian weavers, painters of Spain's Golden Age, Middle Eastern rug makers, and Navajo weavers. El Greco, Tintoretto, VelAzquez, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and van Gogh used it, as did Spanish fashion icon Mariano Fortuny. Today contemporary artists and designers continue to embrace the colorant for its beauty and meaning. An international team of more than forty scholars and experts brings a wide spectrum of original research on the symbolic meaning of red, the material meaning of cochineal in art and trade, and the history of the artists driven to find the perfect red

• Three reds : cochineal, hematite, and cinnabar in the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world / Claudia Brittenham
• Mary Miller
• Diana Magaloni Kerpel
• Ellen Pearlstein [and four others]
• Carlos Marichal
• Cristin McKnight Sethi
• Marianna Shreve Simpson
• Monica Bethe, Yoshiko Sasaki
• Emily Lynn Osborn
• Alex van Dam [and three others]
• Ana Roquero
• Rocio Bruquetas
• Estrella Sanz Rodriguez
• Elena Phipps
• Alejandro de Avila B.
• Dominique Cardon Red at court : did the Maya at Bonampak know cochineal? / The politics of Nocheztli : the Florentine codex and the Nahua world of New Spain / Tradition and innovation : cochineal and Andean keros / The cochineal commodity chain : Mexican cochineal and the rise of global trade / To dye for : the many reds of Asia / Five barrels of cochineal : a gift from King Philip III of Spain to Shah Abbas I of Iran / Reds in the land of the rising sun : cochineal and traditional red dyes in Japan / Red echoes of enslavement : cochineal red, West Africa, and the slave trade / Point of origin : genetic diversity and the biogeography of the cochineal insect / Crimson to scarlet : from American tradition to European experimentation / Finer than the cochineal of New Spain : painting of the natural, civil, and geographic history of the kingdom of Peru / Proof positive : the science of finding cochineal / Shades of red : color and culture in Andean textiles / Bleeding threads : cochineal in Mexican textiles / Not only red : cochineal in the eighteenth-century European woolen cloth industry /

• Dressing red : cochineal red in eighteenth-century garments from the Museo del Traje / Elena Vazquez Garcia, Irene Seco Serra
• Ann Lane Hedlund
• Marsha C. Bol
• Michael A. Brown
• Jo Kirby
• Rocio Bruquetas, Marisa Gomez
• Anna Naruta-Moya
• Gabriela Siracusano, Marta Maier
• Barbara Anderson
• Gustavo Curiel
• Robin Farwell Gavin, Josie Caruso
• Cordelia Thomas Snow
• Elvira Gonzalez Asenjo, Lucina Llorente Llorente
• Nicolasa Chavez
• Nicolasa Chavez
• Carmella Padilla Recycled reds : raveled insect-dyed yarns in blankets of the American Southwest / Wrapped in strouding : trade cloth and the American Indians of the Plains / The color of power : red in the portraiture of the Spanish and British Empires / "One of the most beautiful reds" : cochineal in European painting / Carmine of the Indies : cochineal in Spanish painting and sculpture (1550-1670) / Interweaving Europe and Central Asia : connections in ethnobotany, folklore, and Polish cochineal / "More reddish than grain" : cochineal in colonial Andean painting / Painting in New Spain : conveying meaning through cochineal / Nocheztli
• blood of the prickly pear : cochineal in domestic furnishings in New Spain and Mexico / Looking for red in all the wrong places : cochineal in Spanish colonial New Mexico / Reconsidering cochineal in Spanish colonial New Mexico : questions for the future / New colors, old tints : uncovering fortuny and cochineal / Carmine and earthly delights : cochineal in cosmetics, contemporary craft, fashion, and the strawberry frappuccino / Romantic revival : cochineal in contemporary New Mexican Hispano art / Red collection : Orlando Dugi's cochineal-inspired fashion design /