Pigment Use in Manuscript Painting

Although the earUest surviving manuscripts from the Roman and Byzantine empires date to around the fifth cenmry CE, the vast majority are from the tenth century onward until manuscript production died out with the invention of the printing press. For the most part, illuminated manuscripts, that is, those that contained painted illustrations, were of a religious nature and the product of monasteries. It was actually the continuous production of these manuscripts that preserved the language, culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. 

The pigments used in these manuscripts were produced from mineral and plant sources and applied to prepared sheets of parchment or vellum using a binder such as egg yolk mixed with other substances such as wax or even urine. There is a body of literature on pigment analysis of Armenian and Byzantine manuscripts [39-42] that indicates that the Armenian palette relied heavily on mineral pigments, whereas the Byzantine palette was found to consist primarily of organic pigments. Other important observations were  

Additional data for Persian, Turkish, Indian and Iranian manuscripts for purposes of comparison can be found in Ref. [43]. This information has been valuable to the art historian for understanding more about the artistic process itself and for tracing lines of influence from one culture to the next. 

Analysis has also uncovered at least one forgery. The date of fabrication of Ms 972 from the University of Chicago Special Collections, familiarly known as the Archaic Mark, had been tentatively attributed to the twelfth century. Analysis showed that an iron blue [42] was ubiquitous in this manuscript, raising doubts about its authenticity. The iron blues are the first of the artificial pigments with a known history and an estabhshed date of first preparation. The color was made by the Berlin color makers Johann Jacob Diesbach and Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734) in or around 1706 [44,45]. Moreover, according to Gettens and Stout [31, 32], the material is so complex in composition and mediod of manufacture that there is practically no possibility that it was invented in other times and places. This fact, in addition to other evidence [46]—radiocarbon dating of the parchment 

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