Valentino. Red

Red is the color of the threshold: the blood flowing just beneath the skin, the fire that transforms matter, the ultimate boundary between eros and martyrdom. To speak of red in art is to trace a genealogy of desire and its inevitable consumption, beginning with that modern epiphany known as Valentino Red. That precise blend of carmine, purple, and cadmium was never merely a chromatic choice, but an ontological statement—an attempt to capture the absolute within a fold of silk. With Valentino Garavani’s departure, we witness a kind of chromatic death: a disappearance that philosophically marks the end of an era in which color functioned as an aristocratic armor against greyness. The greyness of life, of a feminine essence too often muted rather than exalted. Without that focal point, the fashion world would have lost a unique degree of chromatic intensity, leaving us to question what red means for a pure idea of beauty.

At a time when the sacred still walked upon the earth, and the boundary between the visible and the invisible was thin, there existed a place suspended between the geography of the possible and chromatic abstraction. An island defined by a single, obsessive saturation: red. They called it Erytheia, drawing from the Greek term erythrós, which does not merely indicate a color—red—but a state of matter itself. Ancient poets, from Hesiod to Stesichorus, custodians of a memory predating History, placed it at the furthest edges of the known world, where the river Ocean receives the chariot of the sun. They believed that at that precise point, sunset chose to set the waters ablaze, transforming the horizon into a perpetual wound of light.

Within this monochrome and violent landscape moved Geryon, an anomaly of form that challenged the unity of being. A single body in which three torsos, three heads, and six arms converged, as if nature had multiplied life to resist the solitude of the boundary. Everything in and around him obeyed the law of purple. Red were his magnificent cattle, living reflections of the land they trod; red was the herdsman Eurytion, guardian of that blood-bound wealth; and red was Orthrus, the two-headed dog, a sentinel programmed to hear the breath of thieves in the silence of myth.

Then came the sudden incursion of destiny, in the guise of Heracles (Hercules in the Latin tradition). The hero arrived on the island to complete his tenth labor, carrying with him the brutal, transformative force of civilization. There was no room for negotiation, only for the definitive act that marks the end of an era. Heracles struck down the dog, the herdsman, and finally the giant Geryon, who bent his neck with a resigned grace, like a poppy that, as it starts to fade, loses its blood-colored petals. With the fall of the giant, the red of Erytheia ceased to be an oceanic secret: Heracles drove the purple cattle toward Greece, delivering them to King Eurystheus and thus transforming a fragment of the absolute into a trophy of human history. And now, with the passing of Valentino Garavani, we witness the final chapter of a millennia-long story in which red has oscillated between the glory of the spirit and the brutality of flesh—where art and painting across the centuries have contributed to the creation of a red so intense, so charged with force and grace.

In Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, red is divine energy: a flame that does not burn but elevates, propelling the body upward in an explosion of light. Here color triumphs; it is divinity becoming pigment to be understood by the human eye. However, it is enough to enter Caravaggio’s shadow—before the scarlet drapery hovering over The Death of the Virgin, her garment, or the jet of blood tearing through Holofernes’ neck—and red becomes biological, violent truth. In these works, color ceases to be light and becomes substance, marking the definitive passage from life to non-existence, reminding us that every beauty carries within it the seed of its own destruction. In the last century, this dialectic between form and matter pushed toward metaphysical abstraction, where red ceased to describe an object and became the very subject of thought. In Mark Rothko’s canvases, layers of deep crimson and brown are not surfaces but thresholds: color vibrates at a frequency that touches primordial pain, becoming a mirror of the soul where silence is deafening. It is a red that does not ask to be looked at, but to be inhabited.

The eclipse of that specific chromatic gradation—an alchemy distilled by a couturier who chose Rome as his spiritual and creative workshop—forces us to confront a truth less abstract than it may seem: the identity between Valentino and his Red was not a whim, but a reality. His trajectory suggests that colors may not belong to physics, but to biology. They follow an organic path: they emerge as intuitions, impose their hegemony on the taste of an era, and finally withdraw from current events to take refuge within the untouchable perimeter of myth. Ultimately, Valentino was red—but red, as an archetype, survives its own disappearance. It remains the color of pure presence, the echo of a passion that refuses to be extinguished.

From the red gold of ancient icons to the scarlet lips of Pop Art, this hue continues to remind us of our human condition: a precarious and beautiful balance between the aspiration for eternity and the sense of life’s transience, of eros. Even when a shade fades, and its creator disappears, red continues to burn in memory, bearing witness to the fact that existence itself is, at heart, an act of chromatic resistance against the void. Valentino Red inhabited the bodies of beautiful women, and the master’s disappearance can only mark the end of an era—but not the end of the color.

Immagine di apertura: Valentino Garavani. Courtesy Fondazione VGGG