Renaissance Pigments: Color Palette of the Great Masters

In manuals on various arts and crafts, from antiquity onward, colors always occupied a central place. Medieval and Renaissance authors described in great detail production processes, properties and suggested use of pigments that came from three principal sources: mineral, from stones and colored earths; artificial, produced by what a period treatise writer would have called “archimia” or alchemy; and organic, from the plant and animal world.

Mineral pigments were obtained directly from the earth or from crushed stones and required relatively little processing beyond grinding and washing. Extremely stable over time, earth colors such as yellow and red ochre, green earth, and raw umber were among the most stable and widely available pigments in any workshop. Rarer minerals commanded far higher prices: natural ultramarine blue, extracted from lapis lazuli through a laborious purification process, could cost more than its weight in gold, while azurite and malachite provided more affordable alternatives in blue and green.

Alchemical pigments were manufactured through chemical processes, often involving metals, acids, or heat. Lead white, vermilion, verdigris, and lead-tin yellow all belong to this category; their production required specialized knowledge passed down through workshop tradition and recorded in treatises and recipe books.

Organic pigments, derived from plants and insects, were typically converted into lake pigments by precipitating a dye onto an inert substrate. Madder root, kermes and cochineal insects, weld, and brazilwood all yielded translucent colors prized for glazing in egg tempera and oil painting.