The same sentence may contain obscure annotations on the symbolism of colors and practical recommendations on ways to fill a mortar or clean a container. These are difficult documents to date or study, not only because they were all copied by hand, each new copy offering a new account of the text, adding or omitting recipes, altering others, changing a product’s name or designating different products by the same name, but also because practical advice and methods continually appear side by side with allegorical or symbolic considerations. It was not until the century of the Enlightenment that in certain works-most often written by art theoreticians and not painters themselves-the chapter on blues would precede the one on reds and offer a greater number of suggestions.įor now, let us open those recipe collections from the end of the Middle Ages, called réceptaires by scholars. And the same is true for the collections of the medieval recipes intended for illuminators and in the treatises on painting printed in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That was already the case in Pliny’s Natural History, which had more to say on red than on any other color.

For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters. Moreover, painting treatises and manuals are not mistaken it is always with regard to red that they are most long-winded and offer the greatest number of recipes.

On walls, canvas, wood, or parchment, the música of reds was always more pregnant, more cadenced, and more resonant than others. In red, artists found a means to construct pictorial space, distinguish areas and planes, create accents, produce effects of rhythm and movement, and highlight one figure or another. Very early on, red’s palette came to offer a variety of shades and to favor more diverse and subtle chromatic play than any other color. ©FineArtImages/Leemage.įor the most part, painters have always loved red, from the Paleolithic period to the most contemporary. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

How to say blood in french