File:Sadi, Gulistan, f.1 detail, (278 x 185 mm), mid 17th century, Alexander Turnbull Library, MSR-37. (6215381647).jpg

English: Detail of the illuminated opening page of the Persian manuscript, Gulistan, by the thirteenth-century poet, Sadi, one of Persia’s great literary masters. Gulistan means ‘rose-garden’, and the manuscript is made up of stories each representing a flower of the poetic garden. This manuscript was copied in 1649 (1059 A.H.).

In addition to gold, the colours appearing on the illuminated opening page include white, red, orange, blue, yellow, black and green. These colours were identified through Raman spectroscopy as the pigments: white lead, red lead, vermilion, lazurite, orpiment, and carbon black. The green pigment is currently unidentified. All were in use in the Renaissance. Some of these natural pigments were highly toxic. Both red lead and orpiment (yellow) fall into this category. Orpiment, which is arsenic sulfide, was replaced by the non-toxic cadmium yellow in the first half of the nineteenth century and red lead is also no longer in general use.

Lazurite was the finest and most expensive blue known in the Renaissance. At times it was more expensive than gold. Lazurite was obtained from the precious stone lapis lazuli mined in what is now Afghanistan. Europeans called the powdered pigment ultramarine, which literally means over the sea. The colour was often reserved for the cloaks of Christ and the Virgin. Since the nineteenth century, ultramarine has been manufactured artificially.