Colour in the seventeenth-century miniatures of Spanish choir books

Choir books, which have been essential instruments for the Catholic festive mass up to the nineteenth century, are highly endangered by loss and damage, because of their large size and also because they are - wrongly - often estimated as being of low artistic value. There are two places where they are collected and preserved, i.e. the choir book museum in Caceres (Southern Spain) and in the Escorial. The aim of the study presented was to analyse the colours used for making choir books. Pigments to be expected were compiled from medieval recipes, and then those colours that could be separated from fragments and off-set from choir books of the seventeenth were submitted to several radio-chemical analyses. The results are presented in secveral groups: red, vermilion, white, blue, green and black, and their chemical composition is discussed.