Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum explained

The Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum ('Book of Colours according to master Bernard') is a medieval treatise on miniature painting and book illumination. Written in a Medieval Latin interspersed with several expressions in the Italian Lombard dialect it stems from 13th century Northern Italy. The eponymous magister Bernardus (or 'master Bernard') was most likely a cleric working in a scriptorium to whom later collections also attribute further artisanal instructions not related to book painting. It is contained within four manuscripts:^[1]

• Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan, Italy), ms. D 437 inf. (16th century)
• Bodleian Library (Oxford, England), ms. Canonici Misc. 128 (16th century)
• Biblioteca Estense (Modena, Italy), ms. T.7.3 (15th/16th century)
• Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (New Haven, United States), MS 986 Insegnamento per pictori ed doratori: artist's manual (ca. 1440)

Content

The original corpus ascribed to 'master Bernard' himself amounts to 56 recipes. These treat:

• the gilding of parchment
• reds from Indian Redwood
• green earths and copper Greens
• lac (resin) and cinnabar reds
• azurite blues
• blues from woad (Isatis tinctoria)^[2]
• pinks
• orpiment
• minium reds
• whites from lime and lead white
• 'silverblue' (misnamed due to the high content of copper in medieval silver)^[3]
• blends for skin colours and clothes
• mosaic gold (‘purpurina’ or 'porporina'), one of the earliest European descriptions predating Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte from the 1420ties^[4]

Editions and translations

The Liber colorum was first published, based on three manuscripts, with a translation into Italian and a commentary by the Milanese conservationist Paola Travaglio in 2008, followed by a 2016 re-edition after the discovery of a fourth textual witness. 2023 Travaglio and Thomas Reiser published a German version with an expanded commentary.

• Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum quomodo debent distemperari et temperari et confici, Un inedito trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Quaderni dell’Abbazia, Fondazione Abbatia Sancte Marie de Morimundo e Museo 15 (2008), pp. 2–41.
• Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum, Un trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Studi di Memofonte 16 (2016), pp. 149-195.
• Paola Travaglio and Thomas Reiser, Der ‚Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum’, Ein Maltraktat des 13. Jahrhunderts, Neuedition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, Marktredwitz 2023, 64 pages. ISBN 979-8-85-9925766

Notes and References

1. Cf. Travaglio 2008, pp. 2-5, 13-17; Travaglio 2016, pp. 149-153, 164-167; Travaglio/Reiser 2023, pp. 7-11.
2. Cf. Travaglio/Reiser 2023. p. 34f.
3. Cf. Mary Virginia Orna, Manfred J. D. Low, Maureen M. Julian, Synthetic Blue Pigments, Ninth to Sixteenth Centuries, II. ‘Silver Blue’, in: Studies in Conservation 30/4 (1985), pp. 155-160; ad loc. Travaglio 2016, p. 161; Travaglio/Reiser 2023, p. 40.
4. Cf. Travaglio 2016, pp. 179 and 185; Travaglio/Reiser 2023. p. 43; section 172 in most editions of Cennini.