Liber colorum secundum Magistrum Bernardum
The Liber colorum secundum Magistrum Bernardum ('Book of Colours according to Master Bernard') is a medieval treatise on miniature painting and book illumination. Written in a Medieval Latin interspersed with several expressions in the Italian Lombard dialect it stems from 13th century Northern Italy. The eponymous Magister Bernardus (or 'Master Bernard') was most likely a cleric working in a scriptorium to whom later collections also attribute further artisanal instructions not related to book painting. It is contained within four manuscripts:[1]
- Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan, Italy), ms. D 437 inf. (16th century)
- Bodleian Library (Oxford, England), ms. Canonici Misc. 128 (16th century)
- Biblioteca Estense (Modena, Italy), ms. T.7.3 (15th/16th century)
- Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (New Haven, United States), ms. 986 (15th century)
Content[edit]
The original corpus ascribed to 'Master Bernard' himself amounts to 56 recipes. These treat:
- the gilding of parchment
- reds from Indian Redwood
- green earths and copper Greens
- lac (resin) and cinnabar reds
- azurite blues
- blues from woad (Isatis tinctoria)
- pinks
- orpiment
- minium reds
- whites from lime and lead white
- 'silverblue' (misnamed due to the high content of copper in medieval silver)[2]
- blends for skin colours and clothes
- mosaic gold (‘purpurina’ or 'porporina'), one of the earliest European descriptions predating Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte from the 1420ties[3]
Editions and translations[edit]
The Liber colorum was first published, based on three manuscripts, with a translation into Italian and a commentary by the Milanese conservationist Paola Travaglio in 2008, followed by a 2016 re-edition after the discovery of a fourth textual witness.
- Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum Magistrum Bernardum quomodo debent distemperari et temperari et confici, Un inedito trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Quaderni dell’Abbazia, Fondazione Abbatia Sancte Marie de Morimundo e Museo 15 (2008), pp. 2–41.
- Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum, Un trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Studi di Memofonte 16 (2016), pp. 149-195.
References[edit]
- ^ Cf. Travaglio 2008, pp. 2-5, 13-17; Travaglio 2016, pp. 149-153, 164-167.
- ^ Cf. Mary Virginia Orna, Manfred J. D. Low, Maureen M. Julian, Synthetic Blue Pigments, Ninth to Sixteenth Centuries, II. ‘Silver Blue’, in: Studies in Conservation 30/4 (1985), pp. 155-160; ad loc. Travaglio 2016, p. 161.
- ^ Cf. Travaglio 2016, pp. 179 and 185; section 172 in most editions of Cennini.