Get ready to geek out here, because I am going to sing praises for the ways molecular chemical analysis is helping historians understand more clearly how people saw and created art in Medieval Europe. This first slide here is part of a cover page for a new paper published in _Scientific Advances_ which shows fabric dyed blue and purple with a plant known as Chrozophora tinctoria (see third slide). This “medieval blue” has only now been discovered — earlier researchers were unable to know for certain whether the color had included materials from lichens or other sources.
It took biologists, chemists, computational-model figuring-out people and of course Medieval historians to finally settle on the molecules making up Medieval blue in illuminated manuscripts. (See the sky painted in the second slide, which is the month of April in _Tres riches heurs du duc de Berry_.) Using a 12th-c manuscript called _Book of all color paints_, as well as other Medieval texts, the paper’s authors were able to know when to pick the berries and how to treat them. They then ran tests, figured out wavelengths of chromatic peaks, and ultimately figured out that C20H24O13N2 (500.41 g mol-1) was the elemental composition of the dye! And Yunz readers should check out the paper as cited in my notes, because the explanations are more than a wee bit better there.
600 years after the Italian Renaissance, studies like these show how important it remains to cultivate being a Renaissance person. And also how much smart people working together can accomplish.
Source(s): _Science Advances_ 18 April 2020, “A 1000-year-old mystery resolved: unlocking the molecular structure for the medieval blue from _Chrozophora tinctoria_, also known as folium,” P. Nabais st Al, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz7772. First slide photo credit: Paula Nabais, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/16/eaaz7772. Also Wikipedia for image of plant. MS _Tres riches heurs du duc de Berry_ Musee Condee MS 65 F4v.
