THE rich colours and ornate style of the 15th-century Gutenberg bibles, the first books to be printed with movable type, have led most art historians to assume they were created with some of the rarest, most expensive pigments of the time. But the pigments came from very common minerals, a new analysis of the books reveals.
Tracey Chaplin from University College London and her colleagues used a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which involves analysing the spectrum of reflected laser light, to examine the artwork in the bibles and the pigment debris that had fallen into the inner margins of the…
