![]() The processes to make pigments and paints presented in the oldest Portuguese text on the colours of medieval illumination have been reconstructed and the knowledge obtained is presented as Additional file 1. These reconstructions become reference material to test new approaches for analytical characterisation, to study degradation mechanisms, and, finally, to test innovative methods to conserve the medieval illuminations. If from a molecular point of view, including morphology, the reproduced colour paint matches the original, it is considered a reconstruction and it is integrated in a database. The success of the validation depends on the depth of the molecular characterisation since the paints found in medieval illuminations are heterogeneous formulations which include pigments, binders, additives and varnishes. The reproduction is carried out with as much historical accuracy as possible, taking advantage of the shortcuts offered by today’s chemistry, and validated as a reference through comparison with the molecular characterisation of the original colours found in the illuminations. The rationalisation of the processes to make medieval pigments and paints are made through the chemical knowledge of the twenty first century. This research has been carried out within an interdisciplinary team which includes conservators, chemists, and art historians. The establishment of a dialogue between the medieval written sources and the multi-analytical molecular characterisation of the original colours has been our primary approach. ![]() We have been studying and reconstructing the medieval processes to make pigments and paints which were used to create medieval manuscript illuminations with the long-term goal of conserving them in the original artworks. In this paper, we will discuss the technical aspects relevant for the success of the making of the painting materials and of the experimentation of this remarkable text, copied in the fifteenth century. It also instructs on the binding media that should be used to produce the colour paints. This medieval treatise describes the main steps and ingredients for producing painting materials, such as mosaic gold, red lead, verdigris, brazilwood lake pigments, lac dye red, vermilion, parchment glue, among others. Its ultimate purpose was possibly to assist on the production of Hebrew Bibles, where the precision of the text would have been illuminated by the colours described in this ‘book of all colour paints’. Parma 1959 (Parma, Italy, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 1959, folios 1r–20r). This unique knowledge and know-how was carefully preserved in Portuguese language, in Hebrew characters, in a collection of texts now known as Ms. This illuminator was the carrier of a tradition on how to make colours with ‘which you can illuminate or paint or capitalize or write’ that dates back, at least, to the thirteenth century. The book on how to make all the colour paints for illuminating books invites readers to step inside the workshop of a fifteenth century illuminator in Portugal. ![]()
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