(01-02-2017, 02:02 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The range avoided in the botanical imagery is, as I've been saying for some time,the range pink-mauve-purple-black with the naturally pink or reddish -mauve painted red, and the others blue.
I'm not sure why this might seem better expressed more generally as "darker" but doing so does tend to slide over the critical issues:
1. that a reasonable explanation has to be found for such avoidance.
2. that the explanation cannot argue an inadequate range of pigments: most people knew how to mix colours, and any survey of fifteenth century Latin manuscripts shows it is not a Latin European tabu.
...
So many possibilities...
I've already commented that the blue might be a "You are not allowed to view links.
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I've also mentioned color blindness and pigment availability as possible reasons for the You are not allowed to view links.
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A more likely reason...
Modern pigments are made to mix well, but medieval pigments were frequently made from regional plants and minerals, and they don't always play happily with each other. The lack of purple shades might be a color preference (a personal or symbolic choice) but another possibility is that the blue pigment may not have mixed readily with some of the others. As mentioned in a different post, some pigments are chemically incompatible... rather than creating purple, natural pigments of red and blue sometimes create mud, depending on whether the ingredients fight each other.