Chromatlas

Tradition

Heraldry's tinctures

Heraldry has its own color words, gules, azure, vert and sable, and one rule that still makes signs readable.

Metals
Or, argent
Colors
Gules, azure, vert, purpure, sable
Hatching code
Petra Sancta, 1638

Knights in armor needed to be recognized from far off, so shields carried bold designs in a small set of colors called tinctures. There are two metals, or (gold, often painted yellow) and argent (silver, usually painted white), and five main colors: gules (red), azure (blue), vert (green), purpure (purple) and sable (black). Furs like ermine make a third group.

The words are a history lesson. Azure comes through Arabic from the Persian name for lapis lazuli, the stone ground into ultramarine. Sable is the dark fur of the sable, a kind of marten; it may be the costly fur lining Giovanni Arnolfini's robe in The Arnolfini Portrait. Gules is disputed: it may come from strips of fur worn at the throat, and the popular link to a Persian word for rose has no firm evidence.

The rule of tincture says never put metal on metal or color on color: a red lion goes on gold or silver, not on blue. The point is contrast, so a shield reads at a distance, the same logic behind legible signs and flags today (see value). The most famous exception, the arms of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, sets gold crosses on silver, traditionally explained as a place too holy for ordinary rules.

How do you show color in a black-and-white engraving? In 1638 the Jesuit Silvester Petra Sancta published a hatching code that stuck: vertical lines for red, horizontal for blue, diagonals for green and purple, dots for gold, blank for silver, crosshatching for black. Compare the color codes of the church year and of racing nations.

Swatches

Colors

Sources

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Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.