PigmentHistory-CaliforniaStateUniversity,Northridge.docVIP

Pigment History Europe Recipes for blue pigments were mentioned extensively in medieval artists manuals The recipes varied from some rather straightforward methods of making copper acetate to more mysterious silver blue recipes for which, as Cyril Stanley Smith has said, the chemistry escapes us. The proliferation of these recipes is understandable in light of the fact that the only two blue pigments available to the medieval artist (between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries) were the very expensive azurite and ultramarine (3). Recipes for making artificial blue colors are very old. They are embedded in the literature of a technical tradition dating from the 3rd century CE that managed to survive five centuries of dark ages to reemerge in the late 8th or early 9th century in two Latin manuscripts, which contain recipes for making blue pigments from both copper and silver. Other blues with intriguing crystalline forms are still unidentified, including a beautiful blue with a morphology resembling rosettes (Fig. 4). Could it be that the medieval artist was such a good synthetic chemist that, to this day, we have failed to synthesize and characterize compounds produced many centuries ago? The mystery surrounding the blue pigments remains unsolved. an iron, or Prussian, blue (Fig. 5). The iron blues are the first of the artificial pigments with a known history and an established date of first preparation. The color was made by the Berlin colormaker Diesbach in or around 1704. Moreover, the material is so complex in composition and method of manufacture that there is practically no possibility that it was synthesized independently in other times or places. ** all paints have three types of components: Pigments, consisting of small particles of colored compounds Media, serving to suspend the pigments and bind them to the surface of the object painted Diluents, allowing the painter to thin the paint to the best consistency for the work. Pigment, b