Just over 30 kilometers from Milan, Magenta is a typical town in Lombardy, in northern Italy.
It has 23 thousand inhabitants, low-rise buildings, a train line connected to the Italian railway network, a church that evokes a local saint — Santa Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962), canonized in 2004.
Throughout the streets of the center, plaques commemorate the Battle of Magenta, when, in June 4, 1859, French and Sardo-Piedmontese troops defeated the Austrian army there — an episode that became known as the second war of Italian independence.
Nothing seems to remind us that magenta is a bright shade of pink. One of the basic colors of the CMYK system (an acronym in English for cyan, magenta, yellow and black), which guides contemporary graphic arts.
“Using color as a marketing tool to value the municipality is something that has been studied”, says Luca Aloi, advisor to the city hall.
For now, the intense pink appears only in the margins of the municipal tourist information booklet. And on some posters for public events, such as the Festa Dello Sport, which took place on September 22nd. The municipal coat of arms is in yellow and black.
Two versions seek to explain why this fuchsia was named magenta. The first says that this was the tone of the clothes of the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Magenta.
In the uniforms displayed in the historical museum of Magenta, the Museo della Battaglia (battagliadimagenta.it), the color is much more like scarlet red than pink.
“There are those who say that the tone alludes to the blood spilled. This staircase became a sea of blood. It was such a bright color that, in people’s memories, it became associated with that tone”, says Aloi.
The mansion that houses the museum was the scene of part of the fighting, as is evident from the gunshot marks on the facade.
Professor at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo and author of the book “A Cor Como Informação”, journalist Luciano Guimarães prefers the explanation associated with blood.
“In dictionaries it is stated that the tone was named in 1859 by Edward Chambers Nicholson after the Battle of Magenta”, he states, citing the chemist and color scholar who lived between 1827 and 1890.
The color is full of curiosities. Technically, this is a tone defined as artificial. “There is no specific wavelength for it: our visible spectrum begins in violet, passes through blue, green, yellow, orange and ends in red; therefore, magenta doesn’t fit”, says the professor.
However, it cannot be said that color does not exist in nature, according to Guimarães. “When I want to give someone a natural reference, I say: cut and rub a beetroot on a white sheet of paper and you will get a good sample of magenta.”
If it was identified and “created” in the 19th century, it was consolidated in the following century. In 1936, the Belgian companies AGFA and North American Kodak developed color photographic film — and adopted the colors cyan, magenta and yellow as the basis of the process.
After World War II, the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German institution responsible for standardization) created definitions of these colors. “Magenta, in reference to the battle, and cyan because of the Greek term for the fantastic blue of the sea in Greece”, says Guimarães.
Since then, the CMYK system has been adopted throughout the graphic arts industry. (Sheet)
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