‘Colour’

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colourLast Tuesday, a gaggle of CMT members were treated to a guided tour of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Colour’ exhibition by the curator, Stella Panayotova. Entering the dimly-lit space and seeing the greens, reds and blues that surround the meeting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden would be a sublime experience in anyone’s book. But this exhibition is really about the meeting of art and science, and in particular the use of modern non-invasive methods to work out which pigments were used in each image. Part of the reason why this image was heading up the show was that it turned out to be concealing instructions for its own colouring. Like a painting-by-numbers, particular areas had written instructions for the colours to be employed in them. And while the manuscript is Parisian, the instructions were in Dutch, which tells you something about flows of expertise around the time of the illumination in 1414.

Such migrations of artists and materials are at the heart of the exhibition. Precious substances travelled thousands of miles along the silk road to be ground up and used in pigments; techniques such as the application of egg yolk to lend sheen to a surface migrated (perhaps) from panel painting to manuscript illumination; identifying particular rare materials in a manuscript can be used to solve mysteries about a manuscript’s provenance, to place or displace it. (The presence of smalt from ground glass in a manuscript by the ‘Murano Master’ appears to confirm that he did indeed work in that centre of glass production, however much the stylistic evidence might tell against this).

Part of the point of the exhibition is to show that a vast amount of medieval painting, particularly from northern Europe, survives between the covers of books. But this overlap between the bookish and the visual has had unfortunate consequences, since over the years many manuscripts have been broken up and mounted as wall-paintings, for display in frames. ‘Colour’ reunites a number of these scattered fragments to see what can be learnt from them, and pulls together the work of researchers at a number of institutes devoted to exploring the chemistry of manuscripts. It’s a wonderful example of what can be achieved by crossing borders, and a tribute to Stella’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject.

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