Perhaps no other relic of the European Middle Ages captures our imagination more than illuminated medieval manuscripts, or those documents decorated with images and colored pigments. Serving as windows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and culture, they communicate complex visual and textual narratives of Europe’s collective cultural heritage and patrimony. In this fashion, illuminated manuscripts are dynamic messages from our communal past that are still relevant today in fields like graphic design and typography. In this seven-week course, students will explore the material creation, content, and historical context of illuminated medieval European manuscripts. Students will acquire an introductory knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics, their cataloguing and periodization (when they were created), the methods utilized to produce them, and their historical context and value. Student achievement will be assessed using not only traditional multiple-choice quizzes, but more importantly will be evaluated based on individual student projects. In their final projects students will either (1) produce a board of commented images about medieval manuscripts or (2) prepare a physical manuscript using medieval methods. The best of these peer-evaluated projects will be posted on the Deciphering Secrets website, which is our collective citizen scholarship web presence that encourages and supports our global citizen scholars appreciation and contributions to transcription of medieval manuscripts. Finally, we wish to highlight that this course is an exciting international collaboration between the University of Colorado (USA) and Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain).
3.4. Colors (Part 2)
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來自 University of Colorado System 的課程
Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe
61 個評分
University of Colorado System
61 個評分
從本節課中
MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN KINGDOMS (PART 2) AND THE WRITING CASE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CODEX
WEEK #3
與講師見面
Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-DávilaAssociate Professor
History
Ana B. Sanchez-PrietoDr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
Historiographical Sciences and Techniques
With the information that
we gain from the study of recipe collections that we have met in the previous video,
we come to know in this one,
the nature of the pigments and colorants utilized in
the medieval manuscripts as well as their preparation methods,
and then the actual presence of a substance in
any given manuscript can be confirmed by laboratory analysis.
Pigments and colorants used in manuscript illumination are
basically the same ones that we can find in any other pictorial art.
The only difference is that because manuscript supports
are far more flexible than a wall or a wooden board,
the pigments must be more finely ground,
lest they fall off the parchment or paper.
In this sense, organic colorants offer some advantage over mineral pigments.
Colorants are basically plants juices that can be gained
very easily by cooking the plant parts in some liquid medium,
water most of the time,
but that could also be beer, wine, vinegar,
or even urine if pH alteration was considered desirable since most colorants are very
sensitive to pH changes and produce
a different color if the medium is alkaline or acid.
But organic colorants also have
the huge disadvantage that their covering power is very limited,
and therefore, illuminators use them in the shape of lake pigment.
That is, the coloring substance was fixed in some inorganic material, and in this way,
it became non-soluble, acquired more consistency,
and then it could be applied just like a pigment.
The mineral utilized to prepare these lake pigments was
usually alum together with some type of carbonate.
In the next video,
we have included our short demonstration of how to turn
an organic colorant into a lake pigment by following these simple steps.
The process to convert a mineral into paint was a very straightforward.
One only needed to grind the minerals to the required degree of fineness and
then the powder was mixed with an agglutinating substance that usually was gum Arabic,
egg white, or yolk.
In the following minutes,
we will enumerate the substances that were most
commonly used in the manuscript illumination during the middle ages.
But, before that, a warning in case you
want to reproduce our medieval paint or ink at home.
If we tried to buy some of the products that will be mentioned here,
the retailer could ask for some kind of identification,
since potentially they are dangerous for human health.
As you see, manuscript illumination could nowadays fall among
the risky activities but the Middle Ages
didn't know the concept of safety in the workplace.
Anyhow, other products are perfectly safe to use,
and you can make your own paint with no risk at all although
it might result in staining the kitchen table.
Let's start with the red,
since red is the color that we will find most often,
apart from black, if just for the titles on rubrics.
For red, medieval copyists and illuminators could use the mineral pigments,
cinnabar and minium, and the organic colorants kermes,
madder, and Brazil wood.
Cinnabar is a mercury sulfur found in nature in mercury mines,
but it also can be manufactured just by putting together mercury and
sulfur in a glazed clay pot and heating the mixture until the smoke turns red.
Please do not, I repeat, do not try this at home.
Minium as well could be manufactured by roasting
ceruse or lead white until it turned into a red color.
We shall see how to make ceruse in a few minutes.
Again, do not try this at home.
Kermes was extracted from the carcass of the insect coccus ilicis.
It produced a very intense red that could be
turned into purple when urine was added to the concoction.
It was very expensive.
Other red colorants were extracted from madder and Brazil wood.
Brazil wood was imported from South East Asia.
And when the Portuguese arrived in America,
they found so much of this plant that they called those lands after the name of
the plant and that explains how present-day Brazil earned it's name.
Finally, some reddish modern red,
color could be gained from iron oxide-rich minerals.
The green pigment most common in the recipe collections is verdigris.
Verdigris is a copper acetate that was
achieved by exposing copper sheets to vinegar vapors.
There were several varieties,
depending on differences in the preparation.
This is fairly safe to make at home.
Basically, you only need a glass pot something made of copper or bronze,
and wine vinegar, and a lot of time.
The main problem with verdigris is that it can be quite
corrosive and it is incompatible with some other pigments.
Malachite, is a green colored basic copper carbonate of natural origin.
Nowadays, malachite is considered as a semi-precious stone,
and was utilized as green pigment in many manuscripts.
And it was also possible to extract green colorants from several sorts of plants,
such as the iridaceae family,
cabgages, leeks, or unripe buckthorn berries.
For blue, we have many recipes.
The most beautiful blue pigment,
but also the most expensive,
was made of lapis lazuli or lazurite.
Besides the fact that it had to be brought from Afghanistan,
it required a long and complicated processing to be converted into
this sublime blue color that we can admire in
the most luxurious manuscripts from the late Middle Ages.
Another possibility was azurite.
As malachite, azurite is a basic copper carbonate.
The problem with azurite is that in contact with air,
it can turn greenish,
and it couldn't be ground to a very fine powder because it's color loses intensity.
Blue colorants are indigo and woad.
Indigo was imported from the East as its name suggests.
Woad, on the contrary,
grows in Europe and was extensively cultivated.
The problems with woad are that it exhausted the flow very quickly,
and the processing of woad leaves to extract the blue color is difficult and lengthy.
First, the leaves were turned into a sort of paste that was left to dry in balls.
Then the blue pigment was extracted from these balls.
Practically, the only source for white was ceruse or white lead.
It was easy to prepare by exposing
lead sheets to vinegar or urine vapors in pots semi-buried in tank.
Do not try this at home either,
but not because of the tank,
since you could get the same effect with yeast,
but because lead can be quite toxic,
at least in the long term.
Another sort of white could be made,
burning and grinding seashells or bones,
but this white was very doughy and rendered not very good results.
The most intense yellow came from orpiment.
This mineral occurs in natural form,
but it is a compound of arsenic and therefore extremely toxic and besides,
it was incompatible with many other pigments.
That is why vegetable colorants were often preferred,
especially saffron, weld, and celandine.
A very characteristic yellow was also extracted from the blackthorn berries.
Of course, two or more pigments could be mixed
in order to change the hue of the main one.
For instance, to make shadows and lights,
or to make a different color but the latter was less frequent.
With mixtures, one should be careful because some pigments reacted when coming
in contact, yielding undesired colors.
Finally, we come to the metallic inks of gold, silver, and imitations.
The process to make gold ink was exactly the same as any other pigments.
That is, gold was ground into a powder,
and then the agglutinating was added.
The main difference was that the gold was previously beaten into thin sheets,
then ground in a mortar made of a hard material.
Because gold is quite soft by itself,
when beaten it tends to form lumps.
To prevent these lumps from forming, another substance,
such as salt, honey, nitro or mercury was added.
When the texture was ground to a satisfactory gold powder,
it was washed and stored.
And only when one wished to write or paint with it,
was the agglutinating medium added because the mixture was made in a shell,
this liquid gold was also called shell gold.
In the medieval recipe collections,
we also find instructions to prepare gold alloys in order
to diminish the costs or to modify some characteristics.
We also find gold imitations that include ingredients such as saffron or bile.
As you see in manuscripts,
as everywhere else, all that glitters is not gold.
