Cornflower blue references

Bachelor buttons, blue bottle, corn flowers, cornflower, corne flower, corn-floure, the flowers that grow among the corn...  We have a plethora of evidence that medieval pigment producers used Centaurea cyanus to make their own lovely, if fugitive, blue. Lets find some translated sources!

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Cornflower appears in some early herbals including Gerard's (733-4) and Culpepper's (26-7). Mappae Clavicula, a little key to the world of medieval techniques, was an early collection of color recipes, beginning to show up in collections around the 9th century and grown to the nice size we have today and have a translation of in the 12th century surviving copy which was translated into English and annotated by Smith and Hawthorne and published in 1974. 

Then we have Massoul the colorman's late eighteenth century book, with a title and publishing note I greatly admire, A Treatise on the Art of Painting, and the Composition of Colours, Containing Instructions for All the Various Processes of Painting: Together with Observations upon the Qualities and Ingredients of Colours. London: Published and Sold by the Author of the Original, and His Manufactory, No. 136, New Bond-Street. Where Ladies and Gentlemen May Be Furnished with Every Article Necessary for Painting and Drawing, 1797. How cute is that?! Anyway, the list goes on...

Merrifield's Original Treatises (ccxiv, 298, 312, 406), Neven's The Strasbourg Manuscript: A Medieval Tradition of Artists' Recipe Collections (1400-1570) (96-7, 98-9, 142-3, 146-7, 173-5, 209-212), Clarke's Mediaeval Painters' Materials and Techniques: The Montpellier Liber Diversarum Arcium (117), researcher Wallert's Getty publication Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice: Preprints of a Symposium, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, 26-29 June 1995 (42) and a previous symposium article "Natural Organic Colorants on Mediaeval Parchment : Anthocyanins." (1993).

There's more about the science of the color in Handbook of Natural Colorants as edited by Thomas Bechtold and Rita Mussak.

Not to mention the one I missed at first, William Phillip's translation of a book with another fun if wordy title: A Booke of Secrets: Shewing Diuers Waies to Make and Prepare All Sorts of Inke, and Colours: as Blacke, White, Blew, Greene, Red, Yellow, and Other Colours. Also to Write with Gold and Siluer, or Any Kind of Mettall out of the Pen: with Many Other Profitable Secrets, as to Colour Quils and Parchment of Any Colour: and to Graue with Strong Water in Steele and Iron. ... Translated out of Dutch into English, by W.P. Hereunto Is Annexed a Little Treatise, Intituled, Instructions for Ordering of Wines: Shewing How to Make Wine, That It May Continue Good and Faint Not ... Written First in Italian, and Now Newly Translated into English, by W.P. Printed by Adam Islip for Edward White, and Are to Be Sold at His Shop at the Little North Dore of Pouls, at the Signe of the Gun, 1596.

Cornflowers also show up in more recent books and articles that I adore, Sylvie Neven's Strasbourg Manuscripts, Clarke's Mediaeval Painters' Materials and Techniques: The Montpellier Liber Diversarum Arcium as well as Arie Wallert's papers, one furnished to me by both international libraries that I sent inquiries to (Bibliothek Münstergasse at Universität Bern and Biblioteca OPD) and a lovely publication of a conference by the Getty Conservation Institute.

• Gerard's Herbal (733-734)
• Culpepper's Herbal (26-27)
• Smith and Hawthorne (26)
• Massoul's treatise (186-7)
• Merrifield's Original Treatises  (ccxiv, 298, 312, 406)
•  Booke of Secrets
• Neven's Strasbourg Manuscripts (96-7, 98-9, 142-3, 146-7, 173-5, 209-212)
• Clarke's The Montpellier Liber Diversarum Arcium (117)
• Wallert 1993
• Wallert 1996 (42)

For now I'll leave you with the resources I found. I will be back to tell you the way I made blue with C. cyanus I grew and the ways I will in the future. In the meantime, it is nearly summer in Malagentia (Maine, USA), go, plant seeds, watch them grow, make blue! A bientot! 

A little painted out here.