Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum

The Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum ('Book of Colours according to master Bernard') is a medieval treatise on miniature painting and book illumination. Written in a Medieval Latin interspersed with several expressions in the Italian Lombard dialect it stems from 13th century Northern Italy. The eponymous magister Bernardus (or 'master Bernard') was most likely a cleric working in a scriptorium to whom later collections also attribute further artisanal instructions not related to book painting. It is contained within four manuscripts:
 * Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan, Italy), ms. D 437 inf. (16th century)
 * Bodleian Library (Oxford, England), ms. Canonici Misc. 128 (16th century)
 * Biblioteca Estense (Modena, Italy), ms. T.7.3 (15th/16th century)
 * Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (New Haven, United States), MS 986 Insegnamento per pictori ed doratori: artist's manual (ca. 1440)

Content
The original corpus ascribed to 'master Bernard' himself amounts to 56 recipes. These treat:
 * the gilding of parchment
 * reds from Indian Redwood
 * green earths and copper Greens
 * lac (resin) and cinnabar reds
 * azurite blues
 * blues from woad (Isatis tinctoria)
 * pinks
 * orpiment
 * minium reds
 * whites from lime and lead white
 * 'silverblue' (misnamed due to the high content of copper in medieval silver)
 * blends for skin colours and clothes
 * mosaic gold (‘purpurina’ or 'porporina'), one of the earliest European descriptions predating Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'arte from the 1420ties

Editions and translations
The Liber colorum was first published, based on three manuscripts, with a translation into Italian and a commentary by the Milanese conservationist Paola Travaglio in 2008, followed by a 2016 re-edition after the discovery of a fourth textual witness. 2023 Travaglio and Thomas Reiser published a German version with an expanded [[Commentary (philology)|commentary].


 * Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum quomodo debent distemperari et temperari et confici, Un inedito trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Quaderni dell’Abbazia, Fondazione Abbatia Sancte Marie de Morimundo e Museo 15 (2008), pp. 2–41.
 * Paola Travaglio, Il Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum, Un trattato duecentesco di miniatura, in: Studi di Memofonte 16 (2016), pp. 149-195.
 * Paola Travaglio and Thomas Reiser, Der ‚Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum’, Ein Maltraktat des 13. Jahrhunderts, Neuedition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, Marktredwitz 2023, 64 pages. ISBN 979-8-85-9925766