Weekend reading: The Armenian Gospels of Gladzor: The Life of Christ Illuminated, this will download as a PDF. A Getty publication. Years ago I saw this on exhibit at the Getty Museum. At the time, I did not realize what I was seeing.
I happened to run across it again in The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St Clair, c. 2016. "Minium," page 107. Minium is a pigment.
The dumbest thing in America is when women take the name of their husbands. Perhaps more on this later. But I digress.
From the book:
The pigment used was minium. The person who worked with it was called a miniator, and his work, an eye-catching symbol or heading in a manuscript, was called a miniatura. This is the origin of the word "miniature," which in its original sense did not mean small at all.
Minium was used extensively in manuscript illumination during the Middle Ages, and use of it only gradually died out as vermilion became more readily available from the eleventh century.
Minium, lead tetroxide, can be found in naturally occurring deposits, but it is more commonly manufactured.
Minium was often used as a cheap alternative to vermilion and cinnabar; in fact, the three pigments were often confused, even though minium is generally much yellow than either. Pliny the Elder described it as "flame colored."
Perhaps the confusion was in part due to wishful thinking; although it is cheap, bright, and easy to make, minium is far from an ideal pigment.Even though, like its near relation lead white, it was used as a cosmetic in ancient Greece and China, it is just as poisonous.
Another major problem: it does not mix well with others.
Reminds me of an episode of Colombo.
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