SC - Not eating cute furry animals

[Tara Sersen]

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise wrote:
>  > Bear has covered the cucumber facts already.
>  > How can pink NOT be period, when natural red dyes fade so easily?  *SIGH*
>
>Apparently, according to someone on either the Universitas list or 
>SCA-Arts, someone way
>back when rocks were soft and (insert corny peer reference here), 
>before AS 10, someone
>trudged round the museums in one major metro area, making records of 
>the colors she saw
>on clothes in paintings of the period. Then she made a list of 
>these, which became a
>pamphlet. Because she didn't find any depictions of pink, others 
>took her work to
>indicate that no-one wore pink in period. *sigh*

There are several problems here.

1. I've seen plenty of period paintings with people dressed in pink. 
They're rather common in illuminated manuscripts.

2. Just because a color exists in a painting is not evidence of its 
existence as a dye color. The palettes are dissimilar because paint 
pigments and dyestuffs come from very different sources except in a 
very few cases (such as lac).

For example, ultramarine blue from ground lapis is a desirable 
pigment and especially common in the Renaissance. However, there is 
no dye that color. Woad and later indigo are fairly common blue dyes 
but produce a very different blue. If one wears garments in 
ultramarine blue in the SCA, one is wearing garments that are not a 
period garment color, despite the fact that there are garments 
painted this color.

Red red is not all that common in early period paintings (you either 
have vermilion which is rather orange or purpley reds like lac), 
although with the development of oil paints it becomes more common in 
late period and relatively common in the 16th century. However, 
through much of SCA period red is a luxury dye and the wealthy would 
likely be wearing a fair amount of red.

3. Painters, even if their palettes matched available dye colors, 
were not painting from real life in much of SCA period. In fact, even 
a late period painter's manual instructs new painters to color things 
like clothing with whatever paint colors they like or have handy. It 
says nothing about trying to paint clothing in colors that people 
actually wore. So the use of a color on a garment in a painting is 
not evidence that at the time the picture was painted, people wore 
clothing that color.

In the late Renaissance there are fairly naturalistic portraits of 
people, and we tend to assume by this time that what they're wearing 
in the painting is clothing they wore in real life. But even this 
cannot be counted on. For example, there's a fairly well known 
portrait of Eleonara de Toledo in a white gown with huge black and 
(ugh, i'm forgetting, i think) beige or gold motifs. We generally 
assume that this is an actual gown show wore. But some other 
portraits have been discovered with the same fabric and even a swatch 
of this fabric has been found - we know the fabric existed, but it 
begins to appear that the painted painted the face and pose from 
life, then added the fabric pattern into the painting back in his 
studio using the swatch as a basis.

There are many portraits of Queen Elizabeth. She posed for almost 
none of them. There were a couple officially sanctioned facial 
portrayals which painter were expected to use, so few of her 
portraits actually show what she looked like.

Paintings are useful for costume documentation, but cannot be assumed 
to be 100 per cent reliable.

4. Just because a color can be achieved with period dyes does not 
mean that the color was used or desirable in period. As far as i can 
tell, pastels were not desirable in most of Europe until the 16th 
century. Prior to that, pastels were for people who couldn't afford 
cloth dyed in a saturated dye bath. Pale colors are generally 
achieved in nearly spent dye baths, so they're cheaper.

5. Different mordants produce different colors with the same dye. 
Certain mordants were not used in period, such as chrome, so the 
colors achieved with them did not exist in period. And i don't just 
mean a lighter or brighter variation of a color. One dye with 
different mordants can produce a yellow, a green, and a brown.

Chris Stanifer wrote:
>  Like I always say...absence of evidence is not
>  evidence of absence.  Particularly when it comes to
>  fabric colors.  There are a few obvious exceptions,
>  mind you, but for the most part we can assume that
>  most of the colors we have today were available in
>  period.  Perhaps not in as bright a hue, or patterned
>quite the same, but they were all pretty much
>  accounted for.

This is quite untrue. There are very many colors that were not 
possible until the invention of coal tar and aniline dyes in the 19th 
century. The color most of us think of a "purple", that common 
chemical blue-violet, did not exist until the 19th century. "Purple" 
in period meant a different color than we tend to think of today.

Or take day-glo UV sensitive dyes. Not period. Or glow-in-the-dark 
fabric. Didn't even exist when i was a child. Fairly common today.

Anahita