Seite - 243 - in Europäische Bild- und Buchkultur im 13. Jahrhundert

243 stElla panayotoVa Close-up: Illuminators’ Materials and Techniques* Introduction Most painting materials used by thirteenth-century illuminators are those found in manuscripts, polychrome sculpture, panel and wall painting throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe.1 They include gold and silver; lead white; carbon, bone and iron-gall blacks. The three main blues were ultramarine made of the semi-pre- cious lapis lazuli imported from the Middle East, the mineral azurite mined in Central Europe and indigo;2 Egyptian blue features in a few early medieval ex- amples;3 smalt, ground blue glass, is found in manuscripts from the early 1400s.4 Yellows were obtained from organics, earths, ochres, arsenic-based pigments (orpi- ment, realgar), and lead-tin yellow adopted from the glass and ceramics industries in painting and illumination in the 1300s. The standard green was the copper-based verdigris, followed by vergaut (a blue-yellow mixture of indigo and orpiment), sap green from plants, green earth and (from the 1300s) malachite. The favourite reds were red lead and vermilion, synthetic versions of the naturally occurring minium and cinnabar. Reds were also extracted from the madder plant grown in Europe or from Brazilwood imported from Asia before it was transplanted in the New World. Costly red dyes were made from insects: kermes from the Eastern European beetle; lac from the resin formed around tree insects in South-East Asia; and coch- ineal imported from the Americas after 1500. The Tyrian purple extracted from the Mediterranean Murex mollusc or the whelk living off the British shores have rarely * I thank the Zeno Karl Schindler Foundation and the AHRC for supporting the research presented here, and the following colleagues for welcoming the analyses of manuscripts in their care: Dr Nicolas Bell, Trinity College, Cambridge; Dr Mark Nicholls and Ka- thryn McKee, St John’s College, Cambridge; Dr Christopher de Hamel, Dr Alexander Devine and Dr Anne McLaughlin, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Dr Suzanne Paul, Jim Bloxam and Maciej Pawlikowski, Cambridge University Library; Dr Gi- les Mandelbrot and Fiona Johnston, Lambeth Palace Library, London; Dr Charlotte Denoël, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 1 Artists’ Pigments. A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, ed. by Robert Fel- ler / Ashok Roy / Elisabeth Fitzhugh, 3 vols., Washington, D. C. / London 2012. 2 Indigo and woad, obtained from the Indigofera and Isatis plants grown in India and Europe respectively, are chemically identical and used as synonyms. The more familiar term indigo is used here, although woad was a likelier source in European manuscripts. 3 For the most plentiful use in a Western manuscript found to date, with an overview of other occurrences, see Stella Panayotova / Paola Ricciardi: Painting the Trinity Hraba- nus. Materials, techniques and methods of production. In: Transactions of the Cambrid- ge Bibliographical Society 16/2 (2018), pp. 227‒261. 4 For the earliest European use of smalt as paint identified to date, see Stella Panayotova / Paola Ricciardi: Masters’ secrets. In: Colour. The Art and Science of Illuminated Manu- scripts, ed. by Stella Panayotova, London / Turnhout 2016, pp. 118‒161, here pp. 123, 287.