A quick post today showing another red-haired image of Jesus. This one by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577 - 1640). The hair isn't quite the striking orange-red we've seen in other paintings, more a mousey soft red or light brown.
(The Descent from the Cross)
(The Descent from the Cross - detail)
There are also other versions of the painting. In this following one the complexion is much more ginger, though the hair is less present, and the image itself much darker.
There's likewise this version, which is part of triptych in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, Belgium. The most famous version of the painting. In this one the hair is much less red, and would be better described as brown.
Italy is not famous for red hair, so today I will introduce you to two famous red-haired Italians of today, who, probably, many of you never heard of.
The first is professional tennis player Jannik Sinner (born 2001). If his name doesn’t sound very Italian is only because he was born in South Tyrol, a German-speaking region in northern Italy.
Sinner began playing in professional men's events at age 16 and became one of the few players to win multiple ATP Challenger Tour titles at age 17. In 2019, he broke into the top 100, winning the Next Generation ATP Finals and the ATP Newcomer of the Year award.
In 2021, he became the youngest ATP 500 champion at the 2021 Citi Open, was a Masters runner-up at the Miami Open, and became the first player born in the 2000s to enter the top 10 in rankings. After reaching his first major semifinal at the 2023 Wimbledon Championships, Sinner won his first Masters 1000 title at the 2023 Canadian Open. He finished the season by reaching the final of the ATP Finals and contributing to Italy lifting Davis Cup for the first time after 1976. In the 2024 Australian Open, Sinner defeated world No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the semifinals to reach his first major final. He then defeated Daniil Medvedev in a five-set final, coming back from two sets down to win his first Grand Slam title.
In a recent interview, he was asked: “Today when you stroll through Italy, are you ready to embrace the shift from anonymity to becoming a sports star? Can you envision a future where the ordinary act of walking alone is a rarity?”
To which he replied: “No, I guess it’s part of what I do, no? The only issue that I have red hair, so it’s easy to recognize me (laughter).” [a problem we redheads know very well! 😁]
A young Jannik with tennis legend Novak Djokovic
The second redhead is Lapo Elkann (born 1977). His name too doesn’t sound typically Italian, although he belong to a very important Italian family. He is the son of Margherita Agnelli, daughter of Gianni Agnelli, former controlling CEO and controlling shareholder of Fiat Automobiles. His father is Alain Elkann, a journalist and novelist of French-Italian origins (his father, Jean-Paul Elkann, was a French industrialist, chairman of Dior and the president of the Israelite Central Consistory of France. His mother, Carla Ovazza, is from the influential Turinese Ovazza banking family).
Lapo has an older brother, John, chairman of Ferrari and Stellantis and CEO of Exor, and a younger sister, Ginevra, film producer and director.
He is the chairman, founder, and majority shareholder of the Italia Independent Group. He is also the president and founder of Garage Italia Customs and Independent Ideas,as well as a member of the board of directors of Ferrari N.V. and responsible for the promotion of the Fiat Group brand.
He is sort of the black sheep of the family. In 2005 he was hospitalised in serious conditions in the intensive care unit of the Mauriziano Hospital in Turin due to an overdose of a mix of opiates and cocaine. Subsequently, he resigned from his positions in Fiat and moved to Arizona, where he began rehabilitation therapy. In 2019, he was involved in a car accident in Tel Aviv, where he was hospitalised. After recovering from a ten-day coma, he moved to a clinic in Switzerland, and was seen on a wheelchair for a while. The accident led him to a change of lifestyle and started working with the Laps Foundation, a non-profit organisation created in 2016 in support of children with dyslexia, learning disabilities and addictions (in his childhood, he suffered from dyslexia, hyperactivity and attention deficit).
In 2021, Lapo married the Portuguese former rally raid racer Joana Lemos.
His hair is now almost totally white, but as a young man he sported a beautiful red mane and we know where part of it comes from. Gianni Agnelli's mother was the red-haired and ill-fated Virginia Bourbon del Monte.
Today I came across a Dante Gabriel Rossetti image I wasn't aware of. I was casually skimming his Wikipedia page to find a different image and this one popped out.
It's a coloured chalk illustration titled Ligeia Siren, from 1873. It's a beautiful picture. The soft colouring of the hair very warm and rich.
It was quite fitting as I was also going to post today for another reason. I recently read the Shakespeare play Coriolanus. It contained the following line:
Third Citizen: We have been called so of many; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some abram, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured.
The term abram caught my eye. In the context of the sentence it suggests a hair colour other than brown or black. So red and blond are the obvious contenders. With Abram being a variant of the name Abraham, the biblical patriarch, it also brings to mind other biblical connections to red hair. Which we've noted on here numerous times before - ruddy Adam, hairy Esau, and so forth.
Having had a search online it seems to be the case that abram is a variant of auburn (also given as abron).
I came across editions of other Shakespeare plays where the term is discussed. In the following link you'll find a discussion about the line from Romeo and Juliet, "Young Abraham Cupid". Which in some editions is rendered as "Young Adam Cupid".
(Yes, variorum is a real word - I had to look it up. It's an edition of a text with notes by different people ..apparently. Don't say you don't learn anything here.)
An almost identical discussion can be found in this work. In fact, I'll quote from this one as it's a little more legible.
'Where is the eldest sonne of Pryam, That abraham-coloured Troion [Trojan] ? dead.'
In Middleton's Blurt, Master Constable, 1602,
'A goodlie, long, thicke, Abhram-colour'd beard.'
In relation to that line from Coriolanus it states there's "no reason to doubt that in these passages 'abraham' (or 'Abram') is a corruption of 'abron,' i.e. 'auburn.'"
(a snippet from the text)
Here, at the end, we also get a mention that in the play Two Gentlemen of Verona auburn is used to mean yellowish.
Again, it's difficult to separate red and yellow when we look back to these historical works. With the line from Coriolanus mentioning, "..some brown, some black, some abram," yellowish would make more sense. As brown could be said to entail auburn as we would think of it - i.e. chestnut. Though it wouldn't quite cover red as in a brighter orange or ginger. Colours which likewise tend towards blond. So blond and red seem to fall under the one umbrella to some extent.
In this post we're returning to the theme of pigmentation. Namely the relationship between eumelanin (black/brown pigment) and pheomelanin (red/yellow). Redheads tend to have higher pheomelanin relative to eumelanin. For non-redheads the ratio of eumelanin to pheomelanin is pretty similar, regardless of skin tone. So a light-skinned person will have low levels of both pigments, but in a ratio of 3:1. Likewise a darker skinned person will have higher levels of both pigments, but also in a similar ratio of 3:1. (Note: This is an over simplification, to help explain the broad concept, in reality the numbers aren't this simple.) However, for redheads the ratio of pheomelanin is higher.
So non-redheads might have 75% eumelanin and 25% pheomelanin,
Whereas for redheads it might be more like 60% eumelanin and 40% pheomelanin.
(Again, take these numbers with a pinch of salt. If you want a deeper understanding search some scientific papers on the topic.)
We've made the argument on here before that redheads are a product of 'melting pot' cultures that give rise to the conditions needed for this relatively higher pheomelanin. For example, a person may inherit lower eumelanin from their lighter-skinned ancestors, but the higher pheomelanin from their darker-skinned forebears. So, according to this theory, populations that are diverse, that have light-skinned and dark-skinned people in the gene pool, will throw up redheads due to this lottery of genetics.
Anyhow, the red pigment pheomelanin is also what makes other parts of the body red, like the lips, nipples and genitals. These parts of the body also tend to be very sensitive and have a lot of nerve endings. So given this it makes sense that redheads, people with higher pheomelanin in general, would also be more sensitive in general ..and this is often what's reported. That redheads are more sensitive to pain and temperature changes. That they need more anaesthetic at the dentist, and so forth.
It may also go some way in explaining the stereotype of redheads being more sexually sensitive.
Likewise, we also have the stereotype of redheaded males being viewed as more effeminate. With hair and skin colour it's often the case that fair hair is seen as feminine and dark hair as masculine - note the stereotype of the "tall, dark handsome" male and the "ditzy, blonde" female. So perhaps redheaded males get the double whammy effect. The fairness - low eumelanin - complete with the cultural perception attached to that, coupled with the heightened sensitivity caused by the higher pheomelanin. Essentially: fair + sensitive = very feminine.
Again, as noted above, things are never quite this simple in reality, and there may be factors we're not considering. However, overall, it does feel like all this ties together quite nicely, and makes sense in regard what you would expect if you turned up the genetic dial on redness.
Another experiment with AI. This time using PixVerse, which at the time of writing is free to use.
It's quite fun testing these various AI generators. Over the years red-haired art has been a recurring theme of this blog. The only problem is there's a bit of a dearth of it; the red-haired images being quite rare. So to be able to simply type "red hair" and, lo, red-haired artwork at the double is really quite something.
Of course, whether the generated clips and images can ever match artwork made by human hands is up for debate. Can such images ever have the same soul, beauty and interestingness? Or will they always just be derivative?
Personally, I feel some of the clips created by the PixVerse AI are very warm and beautiful. You could also argue that the human process of prompting the AI, then selecting out the good from the bad - the interesting from the boring - humanises and brings a soul and meaning to things. Like a very clever paintbrush that still requires human direction and response. I'm really not sure. I guess only time will tell if AI redheads can ever compete for our affections with the Pre-Raphaelite beauties we're already so fond of.
I'll share a few of the generated clips below:
For more such clips you also can check out the following video (or head to PixVerse and experiment making some of your own).
Another little experiment with AI art. This time using gencraft.com. Signing up for a free account gets you 10 free image prompts per day. It was fun playing around with it. All the images, along with the text prompts that inspired them, can be found over on our Twitter page. I'll share some of the more eye-catching ones below.
These two show a green eyed witch with a black cat/cats.
She looks a little bit like Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales.
On a similar theme we also gave an image prompt for a red-haired Queen Elizabeth.
Finally, this was the image that really had me laughing. The request was for thousands of red-haired elves having a party.
This one would make a great birthday card for redheads. I'm tempted to upgrade to a paid account and start make merchandise.
I know very little about AI, so it was very much a walk into the unknown. My friend recently started using the site for his own videos, and seeing how interesting it was I couldn't help but have a go myself (if you open an account you get some free credits to make clips, so it's pretty easy.)
You basically just upload an image and the AI does the work. You can also add some lines of text to guide the process. Likewise you can generate footage from text directions alone, sans image. In fact, the first clip, showing a woman dancing beneath a full moon, was created that way. I think I put something along the lines of, "Red-haired woman, dancing beneath a starry sky, with a big moon", to generate that one.
Anyway, the video below showcases all the clips I got for my free credit, along with the original paintings. Some of the clips are quite disturbing, in that AI kind of way. Others are rather nice and arty. Impressive even. I'm actually tempted to take out a monthly subscription to play around some more, though I think I'll wait until I have some specific purpose in mind.
Incidentally, while I'm here I'll add my brief thoughts on AI in general. I pretty much view it as incredible software or data processing, rather than as intelligence per se. I don't believe it is, or ever will be, intelligent in a consciousness sense. So I don't want to perpetuate the scarier hype that surrounds it. However, I do think it's a truly revolutionary technology, that will change things immeasurably. I actually think the biggest danger posed by AI is that world governments will bring in totalitarianism to suppress individuals that become too empowered by it. So I view it as dystopic in a slightly different sense to many other commentators.
..Sorry, I'm getting a bit off topic for a blog about red hair.
Back to the paintings.
Here are the paintings I used, listed in order (many, no doubt, you'll already know):
1) Queen Elizabeth I - Armada Portrait, circa 1588
2) Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
3) Roman Widow - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
4) The Penance of Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester - Edwin Austin Abbey
5) Poppies - George Henry
6) The Sorrow of Mary Magdalene - Jules Joseph Lefebvre
7) La Parisienne Japonaise - Alfred Stevens
8) Illustration from 'Dream Land' - Florence Harrison
(I really love this image, it has that Peter Pan type sense of wonderment. The generated images were fittingly storybookish.)
9) Beata Beatrix - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
As mentioned earlier, I didn't note the exact text instructions I added in an attempt to guide the AI, but with this one it was something like, "The woman is bathed in light, as God answers her prayers." So that might explain the weird supernatural, 2001 Space Odyssey type vibe.
9) Miss Lisa Minghetti - Philip de Laszlo
10) Portrait de femme aux cheveux roux - Jules Joseph Lefebvre
11) Zodiac Calendar for La Plume, 1897 - Alphonse Mucha
12) A Spray of Wild Hemlock - Jessie M. King
13) Helen of Troy - Frederick Sandys
14) Femme a la blouse - Moise Kisling
15) The Virgin in Prayer - Joos van Cleve
16) La Ghirlandata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
17) Regina Cordium - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
18) Woman Science - Eugene Grasset
19) An Orthodox-looking Saint Mary Magdalene (not sure of the provenance here)
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