(23-05-2020, 04:22 PM)R. Sale wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What about red painted lips on various nymphs? Where does that fit into the spectrum?
I've always assumed those were a true red but last night when I zoomed in close, I discovered this is an illusion. The smaller areas tend to look redder for perceptual reasons. So in my summation in Post #4, I ended up with no true red, only a few of the brick reds that were closer to true red than the others.
It also depends which colors are nearby. The brick red with a lot of light color around it appears redder, and faces are lighter than pools and plants.
There is, however, a huge variety of brick colors, all the way from almost-red to brown. What I can't tell is if this is a natural variation in the pigment or if it has been very carefully mixed into many shades. The green has obviously been mixed, but the brick color is perhaps selected from natural variations. I'm more familiar with modern pigments, I haven't studied the chemistry of medieval pigments, so I can't make any technical guesses about how they got so many shades of brick. It's possible it's a pigment that's easily varied by adding solvents but that is only a guess and only one out of several possibillities.