So. Pigments. I have written a lot of notes about the VMS pigments and I was thinking of turning them into a blog post (I'd need to commit to an actual website and that's a whole other problem), but I can share some of them here.
Things I think people should know about medieval pigments.
- If the paints have been made correctly then it is very hard to identify their base-pigments with absolute certainty just by using your eyes. If something went wrong when they were making the pigment then that can make it easier to identify by eye because some of the pigment-problems are quite distinctive.
- Using modern techniques likes spectroscopy allows you to identify the mineral pigments with absolute certainty, but most of the plant-based pigments can't be identified using spectroscopic techniques (although the information that the colour you are interested in is made from organic rather than inorganic material is sometimes enough to identify it by process of elimination).
(27-05-2020, 10:18 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know how many of the "orange" colors in early-medieval manuscripts are faded reds and how many of them were intended to be orange.
The oranges that you see in European early medieval manuscripts (let's say pre-1100) are almost entirely faded reds. The favourite red for pre-1100 Europe is red lead (PB
3O
4) which produces a slightly orange-toned red even when prepared perfectly, and when prepared badly it becomes increasingly neon orange. Over time, even the well-prepared red lead pigments fade to a slightly orange-y colour. Red lead was known as "minium" in Latin and it's where we get the term manuscript miniature from as a type of illustration popular in the late-Roman world was always done with minium and the term for the red illustrations came to be used for manuscript illustrations more generally. Post-1100, the favourite European red is vermillion (mercury sulphide) which is a more blue-toned red.
I think it's interesting that the red colour in the VMS is an ochre. The ochre pigments were popular throughout the middle ages (pre- and post- 1100) as they produce a range of yellows, oranges, reds and browns, but the ochres are basically ... mud. Ochres are very cheap pigments - they lack brightness and clarity, but they're stable, easy to find compared to most pigments, and easy to prepare.
I can't tell what the green is in the VMS. The popular greens are derived from malachite, verdigris (the You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. is pretty good for this), and terre verte (clay coloured by iron oxide, magnesium, aluminium silicate, or potassium). There are other ways to make green, but those three were the most popular. If I had to guess at all I would suggest that it's probably not a verdigris-derived green in the VMS because the paint is quite thick in some places and verdigris tends to oxidize and/or eat through the parchment when it is painted on as thick as the green has been in the VMS, but all of the popular greens have a lot of variation and can all produce the slightly cloudy-grey-green of the VMS, so even verdigris is not impossible.
I have no idea about the yellow (candidates: orpiment; lead-tin-yellow; tin(IV) sulphide; a ferric-oxide ochre) except to say that whoever prepared the paint did not do a very good job.
I agree with all of you that the pigments used in the VMS are cheap. The pigments that have been scientifically identified are all among the cheapest options for producing that colour. The preparation of the pigments into paints is not of the best quality either as the colours in the VMS are sometimes streaky, inconsistent and a little bit dull and muddy. The application of the paint is not the best either. I think the VMS artist(s) was careful and drew things deliberately and with purpose, but, to me, the quality of the line work and the paint application seems much closer to amateur than professional.