Imagine the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua on a winter morning, when the slanting light cuts through the stained glass like a blade. The walls, covered in Giotto’s frescoes, suddenly come alive. And there, at the center of the celestial vault, Christ on the cross stands out, his livid skin streaked with
By Artedusa
••11 min read
The sacred red: when paint bleeds light
Imagine the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua on a winter morning, when the slanting light cuts through the stained glass like a blade. The walls, covered in Giotto’s frescoes, suddenly come alive. And there, at the center of the celestial vault, Christ on the cross stands out, his livid skin streaked with scarlet threads that seem to flow down the dark wood. What you see is not blood—it is light transformed into matter, an alchemy where red ochre, ground for millennia, becomes the vehicle for an emotion so intense it transcends time. Eight centuries later, these traces of pigment still grip you by the throat, as if the painter had captured the very essence of divine suffering in a handful of mineral dust.
Red, in religious art, has never been just a color. It is a confession, a cry, an offering. From the Neolithic burials of Çatalhöyük, where the dead were coated in red ochre to be reborn, to Rothko’s monochrome canvases, where the viewer immerses themselves in crimson abysses, this pigment has served as a bridge between the visible and the invisible. It has dyed the robes of cardinals and the shrouds of martyrs, illuminated cathedral stained glass and the nights of mystics. But how did a simple mixture of earth and dried blood come to embody both the Passion of Christ, the wrath of Yahweh, and the ecstasy of saints? And why, despite centuries and aesthetic revolutions, does it still haunt us like a wound that never heals?
The ochre of origins: when earth became divine
Long before man built temples, he buried his dead in red powder. At Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, archaeologists discovered skeletons covered in hematite, the mineral that gives earth its blood-like hue. Why this choice? Perhaps because red, the color of life escaping, was also that of rebirth. The Egyptians, later, coated their mummies in resin tinted with ochre, as if offering them a final spark of vitality before their journey to the afterlife. In the Book of the Dead, the god Ra is described as "he whose body is of gold, whose hair is of lapis lazuli, and whose bones are of silver"—but it is red, the color of the rising sun, that symbolizes his regenerative power.
This original duality—red as a sign of both life and death—would traverse the centuries. The Greeks associated it with Ares, god of war, whose bloody sacrifices stained the altars. The Romans, for their part, reserved Tyrian purple, extracted from the glands of Mediterranean mollusks, for emperors and senators, making this hue a symbol of both political and sacred power. But it was with Christianity that red would reach its true apotheosis. When the first Christian artists sought to represent the unspeakable—the suffering of Christ, the martyrdom of saints, divine wrath—they turned to this pigment, as if the material itself already bore the trace of the sacred.
The blood of martyrs: when the Church invented its own chromatic liturgy
In the fourth century, as Christianity became the state religion, the Church understood the power of images. But how to represent the invisible? How to show grace, damnation, transcendence? The answer lay in colors, and particularly in red. In the mosaics of Ravenna, saints wear scarlet robes that seem to absorb the light of candles, while golden backgrounds reflect divine radiance. Here, red is not realistic—it is supernatural. It draws the eye, captivates it, forces it to contemplate the horror of martyrdom or the glory of paradise.
Take the Bible of Saint Louis, that illuminated manuscript from the thirteenth century where every capital letter is an explosion of color. The red initials, traced in cinnabar ink, mark the sacred names—those of God, Christ, the prophets. Red thus becomes a divine punctuation, a way to emphasize the importance of a word as one would a relic. Later, when Pope Innocent IV instituted the red robes of cardinals in 1245, he was merely codifying an already ancient symbolism: red was the blood these princes of the Church were prepared to shed for their faith. But it was also, more prosaically, a way to remind the faithful who held power.
This chromatic liturgy reached its peak in Gothic stained glass. At the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the thirteenth-century windows transform light into a mystical spectacle. Red, obtained by adding copper oxide to the glass, plays a central role. It represents the blood of Christ, of course, but also that of martyrs, and even the presence of the Holy Spirit in the form of tongues of fire. When the sun passes through these panels, the entire cathedral seems to bleed light. The faithful, bathed in this crimson glow, were meant to physically feel the presence of the divine. Here, red is no longer a color—it is a sensory experience, almost a mystical drug.
Rubens and cochineal red: when the New World tinted the Old
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a new pigment arrived in Europe, bringing with it a revolution in artists’ palettes. Cochineal, a tiny parasitic insect of Mexican cacti, produced a red so intense it would eclipse all others. Before its discovery, painters had to make do with ochre, cinnabar (toxic and expensive), or madder (less vibrant). But cochineal, imported by the conquistadors, offered unmatched saturation. It was so precious that the Spanish made it a royal monopoly, and its value sometimes exceeded that of gold.
Peter Paul Rubens, that giant of Baroque painting, would be one of the first to fully exploit this new pigment. In The Descent from the Cross, painted for Antwerp Cathedral between 1612 and 1614, cochineal red is everywhere: in the Virgin’s robe, in Christ’s wounds, in the soldiers’ cloaks. But what strikes is how Rubens uses this color. He does not merely apply it in flat areas—he works it in layers, in glazes, creating effects of transparency that make it seem as if light passes through the material. The Virgin’s mantle, for example, appears to vibrate from within, as if the pigment itself were alive.
This technical mastery is accompanied by a theological intention. Rubens, trained in the Counter-Reformation tradition, knew that art must move to convert. Red, in his painting, is not there to decorate—it is there to strike, to provoke a visceral reaction. When you look at The Descent from the Cross, you do not merely see a dead Christ; you physically feel the weight of his body, the warmth of his blood, the pain of those carrying him. Cochineal red, with its almost aggressive brilliance, thus becomes a tool of religious propaganda, a way to remind the faithful of the tangible reality of the Passion.
Matisse and the scandal of red: when color becomes prayer
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as art gradually detached itself from representation to embrace abstraction, red would undergo a new metamorphosis. Henri Matisse, that master of pure color, would make it the very heart of his spiritual quest. In 1911, he painted The Red Studio, a canvas where an entire space is swallowed by a sea of scarlet. The objects—a chair, a table, paintings hanging on the wall—are no longer defined by their form, but by their absence of color. They exist as white silhouettes in a red ocean, like ghosts in a mystical vision.
For Matisse, this red is not just one color among others—it is an experience. He himself said: "I do not paint things, I paint the difference between things." In The Red Studio, that difference is abolished. Everything is red, and yet everything is distinct. The painter seeks to create a space where color itself becomes a form of transcendence. Some critics have seen in this canvas a reference to Orthodox icons, where the golden background symbolizes divine light. In Matisse’s work, it is red that plays this role—a light that does not come from outside, but emanates from the canvas itself.
This approach would scandalize his contemporaries. For the academicians, a painting had to represent something. For Matisse, it had to make one feel. Red, in his work, was no longer a religious symbol—it was a religious experience in itself. When Mark Rothko, a few decades later, created his vast monochrome canvases, he would acknowledge his debt to Matisse. "I am not an abstractionist," he would say. "I am interested in the fundamental expressions of human emotion—the tragedy, the ecstasy, the doom." And to express these emotions, he would choose red, again and again, as if he knew that this color contained within it the entire history of suffering and redemption.
The profaned red: when contemporary art defies the sacred
If red has long been the preserve of the sacred, contemporary artists have seized it to subvert, question, or even blaspheme. In 1987, Andres Serrano submerged a crucifix in a jar of urine and photographed the result. Piss Christ, as he titled the work, provoked a global outcry. American conservatives cried sacrilege, Congress threatened to cut funding for artists, and religious militants vandalized the canvas during an exhibition in Australia. Yet Serrano was not merely seeking to shock. He wanted to interrogate how contemporary society perceives the sacred. By plunging the ultimate symbol of redemptive suffering into an impure liquid, he forced viewers to ask: where does the sacred truly lie? In the object itself, or in the gaze we bring to it?
This question is at the heart of many contemporary works that use red. Take Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, that feminist installation where the plates of famous women are decorated with vulvar motifs in red. Here, red is no longer the blood of Christ, but that of women—of menstruation, of life transmitted. Chicago thus reclaims a religious symbol to redirect it toward a new form of spirituality, feminist and pagan.
Even in abstract art, red continues to carry this symbolic charge. Anish Kapoor, with his red wax sculptures that seem to bleed, or his pure pigments that engulf space, plays with the idea of color as living matter. His works, often titled My Red Homeland or Shooting into the Corner, evoke both violence and transcendence. As if red, after millennia of religious symbolism, had retained its power to disturb, fascinate, haunt.
Red today: between nostalgia and reinvention
Today, as churches empty and grand religious narratives lose their grip, what remains of sacred red? A great deal, in fact. Contemporary artists continue to seize it, but with a new distance. Kehinde Wiley, for example, adopts the poses of Baroque saints to depict young Black men in streetwear. In his paintings, the red of traditional golden backgrounds becomes a symbol of power and resistance. It no longer represents the blood of Christ, but that of modern martyrs—those who fall to police bullets, those who fight for their dignity.
In religious architecture, too, red is experiencing a revival. At the Cathedral of Los Angeles, designed by Rafael Moneo, modern stained glass plays with shades of red and orange to create an atmosphere that is both mystical and contemporary. Here, red is no longer the symbol of past suffering, but of a living spirituality in dialogue with the present world.
Even in fashion, religious red inspires. Valentino, in its 2012 haute couture collection, presented dresses directly inspired by cardinals’ chasubles. Maria Grazia Chiuri, the house’s creative director, explained: "Red is passion, power, life. It’s a color that leaves no one indifferent." By dressing her models in scarlet robes embroidered with gold, she was not merely creating garments—she was reactivating an entire sacred imaginary, that of a color which, since time immemorial, has served to represent the unspeakable.
Epilogue: red as an open wound
Perhaps this, in the end, is the true power of red in religious art: its ability to remain an open wound. A color that does not heal, that continues to bleed across the centuries, from Giotto to Serrano, from cochineal to Kapoor’s wax. Red is not a color you look at—it is a color that looks at you, that passes through you, that forces you to feel.
The next time you encounter a religious painting dominated by red, do not merely admire it. Let it seize you. Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine the painter’s hand grinding ochre in a mortar, mixing the powder with linseed oil, spreading this paste on the canvas as one would an offering. This red you see is the same that dyed the bandages of Egyptian mummies, that illuminated cathedral stained glass, that scandalized the well-meaning of the twentieth century. It is a color that carries within it the entire history of faith, suffering, and the search for meaning.
And if, in the end, red were not just a color, but a question? The question humanity has asked since it buried its dead in red earth: how to transform suffering into beauty, death into rebirth, blood into light? Perhaps the answer lies there, before our eyes, in those traces of pigment that continue to bleed on the masters’ canvases. Perhaps all it takes is to look—really look—to understand that the sacred has never ceased to be there, vibrant, scarlet, alive.
The sacred red: When paint bleeds light | Art History
