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Green TV Page 04

In the Middle Ages the color of clothing often showed a person's social rank and profession. Red was worn by the nobility, brown and gray by peasants, and green by merchants, bankers and the gentry and their families. The Mona Lisa wears green in her portrait, as does the bride in the Arnolfini portrait by Jan Van Eyck.

Unfortunately for those who wanted or were required to wear green, there were no good vegetal green dyes which resisted washing and sunlight. 

Green dyes were made out of the fern, plantain, buckthorn berries, the juice of nettles and of leeks, the digitalis plant, the broom plant, the leaves of the framings, or ash tree, and the bark of the alder tree, but they rapidly faded or changed color. Only in the 16th century was a good green dye produced, by first dyeing the cloth blue with wood, and then yellow with Reseda Luella, also known as yellow-weed.

The pigments available to painters were more varied; monks in monasteries used use of verdigris, made by soaking copper in fermenting wine, to color medieval manuscripts. They also used finely-ground malachite, which made a luminous green. They used green earth colors for backgrounds.

During the early Renaissance, painters such as Ducal of Buoninsegna learned to paint faces first with a green undercoat, then with pink, which gave the faces a more realistic hue. Over the centuries the pink has faded, making some of the faces look green.