Pigments: Historical Warm Hues
Artists' Warm Colored Pigments Used Prior to the 18th Century
Aug 19, 2008
Many ancient pigments were very rare and expensive, and paintings done with them were highly valued because of the cost of the pigments as much as their artistic quality. This article looks at the warm historical pigments: the reds, the yellows and the oranges.
Red Historical Pigments
Possibly the most romantic name of any pigment is dragonsblood, given to the sap of the East Indian plant Dracoena draco. It was a deep, brownish, transparent, red resin used in painting, but was more commonly applied over metals to produce rich, reddish tones that so appealed to people of the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
Ancient legend said that dragonsblood was the mingling of the blood of the primordial dragon and elephant as they fought to the death. No modern color exactly matches dragonsblood.
Another famous historical red was genuine vermilion, an early synthetic version of cinnabar red. It could be produced either as "French vermilion," an almost orange red or "Chinese vermilion," a much cooler, purpler red, now commonly seen on Chinese temples.
Modern pigment manufacturers rarely produce vermilion, in theory, because it is a highly toxic mercury compound. This probably is no loss. Modern vermilions, unlike the very permanent historical vermilions, tend to turn black with age, demonstrating that science can forget as well as learn.
Other historical reds were genuine rose madder, produced from the sap of a plant and still available, brazil red (the name Brazil probably coming from the color made from native trees), and cochineal red, made from insects that die on a particular variety of Mexican cactus.
Yellow Historical Pigments
Orpiment and realgar were sulfides of arsenic, no longer used because of their toxicity and tendency to destroy colors they are mixed with. "Mosaic gold" was a common yellow used in place of gold.
Of the organic yellows, saffron (made from the saffron crocus still used for seasoning), buckthorn yellow (made from buckthorn berries), and weld yellow (made from the whole Reseda luteola plant) were common historical yellows. Weld yellows were used well into the twentieth century for dyeing silk fabrics.
Orange Historical Pigments
There were a few distinctly orange historical pigments such as minium (orange lead or red sulfide of mercury). However, people of earlier times tended to see orange as either a shade of red or of yellow, not so much as a distinct color itself. As a side note, our word miniature comes from the use of minium orange pigment in small paintings in books by miniators (users of minium) using minium to produce those miniature paintings.
Historical Earth Pigments
These really does not need a separate category since most of the same or very similar, natural earth colors used in historical periods are still used now.
Sources
- The Materials and Technique of Medieval Painting, by Daniel V. Thompson, Dover Publications, New York, 1956.
- The Practice of Tempera Painting, by Daniel V. Thompson, Dover Publications, New York, 1962.
- The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, by Ralph Mayer, Viking Press, 1982.
Also, read the related article, "Pigments: Historical Cool Hues."
