Usuario discusión:Snifferdogx

Escarlata (color)

Hello, Snifferdogx. (New to Wikipedia? If so, welcome!)
This is about your editions to the article Escarlata (color). I appreciate greatly any contribution to the articles on color and pigments, but in this particular case, I don't think a new source for the scarlet swatch is needed, unless it supersedes the existing one. And it may not be the case.
It happens that the original color swatch on the header of the article came from a specialized book (Guía de coloraciones, by Rosa Gallego and Carlos Sanz), and was meant to match the color of the ancient wool dye called “Escarlata de Holanda” (‘Dutch scarlet’). This is where today's “scarlet” comes from.
On the other hand, the “scarlet” swatch and values found on websites like Colorcombos.com, Colors.findthebest.com and others are completely unsourced, that is, these websites never state where they got their colors from, and their reliability or authority on the field of color is also unknown... which makes the original source preferable.
I'm reverting the article again to its original state. Please feel free to comment on my discussion page if you need to. Thanks! -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 17:31 30 jun 2014 (UTC)

==

Hi, yes, I'm very new to Wikipedia, so I'm fumbling my way through, and big apologies for being so clumsy with it all.

And I apologise for not knowing any Spanish.

The Wikipedia verified references on the English article quote this book, and I've got a soft copy of it if you want it, because it talks about the evolution of the "scarlet" colour and how it finally settled down on the bright red with the orange tint. It most notably talks about the reds that were a deeper more purple hued were known as "crimson" and the bright brilliant reds as "scarlet".

• Amy Butler Greenfield (2007), A Perfect Red, pp: 35-40; 46-47; 64-87; and 168-169.

There is another Wikipedia verified reference is as below, and it also confirms the bright red with orange tint:

• Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930--McGraw Hill Page 204; Color Sample of Scarlet: Page 25 Plate 1 Color Sample L12
• Maerz, A.; Paul, M. Rea (1930). A Dictionary of Color. New York: McGraw Hill. p. page 195; Color Sample of Flame: Page 25 Plate 1 Color Sample D12

I don't have a copy of the Maerz book, but it has obviously been verified by Wikipedia, and confirmed that the bright red with orange tint is the "standard" scarlet, which in HTML coding and artists colours has the Hex values #FF2400

Please let me know if you want a copy of the Amy Greenfield book and I'll send it to you.

Oh, actually it's possible to see Maerz & Paul's colors online. John C. Foster, of the Texas Precancel Club, has digitized the color swatches of the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Colo(u)r Names (1955), which includes Maerz & Paul's colors (the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Color Names was an attempt to organize and normalize previous color dictionaries and inventories). I believe many of the color swatches used on the English Wikipedia have been taken from that list. You can see scarlet swatches from the ISCC-NBS Dictionary on this page. The capital letters beside the names of the colors are shorthand for the names of the dictionaries they were published in. (M stands for Maerz & Paul).

However, note that Maerz & Paul's scarlet isn't orangish, while Ridgway's (R) and Plochère's (P) is. Maerz & Paul's scarlet is more like carmine.

Moreover, color definitions sometimes change according to linguistic or cultural factors. If you go to the DRAE (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, which is the main reference for the meaning of words in Spanish language), and look up the entry for “escarlata”, it says “Color carmesí fino, menos subido que el de la grana.” (‘A fine crimson color, less intense than that of carmine.’) A less intense or vivid carmine does not take us near orange; it stays red.

But again, the DRAE isn't a specialized dictionary of color. So I looked up “escarlata” on Diccionario Akal del color, by Rosa Gallego and Juan Carlos Sanz, which is as specialized on the subject as can be found in Spanish, and these are the first three definitions it gives (in order of importance, as the authors state on the foreword of the book):

1. Coloración intermedia entre “cinabrio” y “bermellón” y “carmín”. (“A color halfway between ‘cinnabar’ and ‘vermilion’, and ‘carmine’”.)

2. Carmesí. (“Crimson”.)

3. Coloración específica semioscura, roja y viva, cuya sugerencia origen corresponde a la característica del escarlata de Holanda. (“A specific color, semi-dark, red and vivid, whose original suggestion is the typical appearance of Dutch scarlet”).

And it even goes on to describe the hues found in the ISCC-NBS Dictionary as definitions of “scarlet” in English. (I own a hard copy of this book, but you can see the page in question here.)

So. What do we have in conclusion? Scarlet is a color between vermilion and carmine. Dictionaries don't give a single and definitive swatch for that color, but “a color between vermilion and carmine” is a good definition that even quite agrees what the English Wiki says.

When I first edited the Spanish Wiki article “escarlata”, I threw in a swatch of the ancient Dutch scarlet because I had a trusted reference for it, but now I look at the dictionary definition #1 (“A color halfway between ‘cinnabar’ and ‘vermilion’, and ‘carmine’”), I think I should have stated that first. So maybe a correction is in order.

Regarding the “many scarlets” found in the ISCC-NBS Dictionary, they don't seem to be relevant in Spanish, but they could be mentioned nevertheless as definitions for the color scarlet in English. This has been done before on the Spanish Wiki (see, for example, “ante”) and, conversely, on the English Wiki (see [Spanish crimson]).

What do you think? -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 04:05 2 jul 2014 (UTC)

---

Oh my goodness, you really have done your homework, haven't you!

I do appreciate that there are historical inconsistencies with what is termed "scarlet". I did actually come across the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Colo(u)r Names (1955) page (http://tx4.us/nbs/nbs-s.htm), but I wasn't really sure that what I was looking at was the genuine swatches of colours. Also, I don't think this page is the Maerz and Paul's book, but rather the National Bureau of Standards that issued the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Colo(u)r Names (1955), and it is does not appear to have been based on Maerz & Paul's book.

To add to my reluctance to accept the online version of ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Colo(u)r Names (1955) swatches is that the page gives about 8-9 different shades, some of which are quite dark, purpley and murky, and scarlet has traditionally been known to be a bright vivid red.

Also the English Wikipedia references states this about the Maerz' & Paul's book:

"Maerz and Paul A Dictionary of Color New York:1930--McGraw Hill Color Sample of Scarlet: Page 25 Plate 1 Color Sample L12 (Scarlet is shown as being one of the colors on the right and bottom of the plate representing the most highly saturated colors between red and orange at a position one-fourth of the way between red and orange.)."

If this is the case when what we're seeing on the http://tx4.us/nbs/nbs-s.htm website may not all be accurate.

I have found something on Google books that looks like is a copy of Maerz' and Paul's book, but cannot for the life of me find out how to download it. It has no price tag on it, just the book and some blurb about the bibliography. I will try to find out more, and if I can get the book I'll pass it on to you.

Also, I have found a book called "A Lexicon of the Language of colours - A Dictionary of Colour" by Ian Paterson, which describes scarlet as follows:

"A bright orange-red; the colour of the clothing of people of importance in the Bible, for example, Saul (II Samuel, i: 24) and hence an indication of royalty or pre-eminence. Scarlet, it is thought, was originally the name of a type of rich cloth – many colours originate from the name of the cloth normally bearing that colour"

With computer graphics a lot of colours appear to have been standardised, with Scarlet set at the RGB 255, 36, 0 which creates the bright red with the orange tint, which also incidentally "scarlet" is the term for the color of the robes of Catholic cardinals and this red with a hint of orange does fit in with the description on the English page.

Thank you for your patience in all this and your effort.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 11:51 3 jul 2014 (UTC)

At this point I so wish there was a “quote” button here! (as if it were a discussion forum).

Anyway... A couple of years ago I revised and edited quite heavily many of the Spanish Wiki's articles about colors, that's why I have most pertinent references still at hand.

Back then I noticed there seemed to be no copies of Maerz & Paul's dictionary online. As you've pointed out, Google Books lists this book but gives no access to its contents (which is frustrating! maybe they haven't scanned it yet).

Maerz & Paul's book was one of the first efforts in collecting and standardizing colors in order to prevent confusion. (There is an older inventory though: Robert Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, from 1912).

By 1955, Kelly & Judd made a new breakthrough with their own method of designating colors, and also collected all previous standards in a new dictionary (the ISCC-NBS Dictionary of Colo(u)r Names). So this work is also highly authoritative. They devised a system where standard named colors would fall into areas called centroids. Maerz & Paul's scarlet fell into centroid #11, with the “vivid reds”. However, successive editions of Maerz & Paul's book, and time itself, have modified the original colors on the swatches, so there's quite a lot of room for mistakes here. Kelly & Judd, in fact, acknowledged that they had used the first edition of Maerz & Paul's because the reproduction of the colors in the second was not faithful enough!

And Foster, from the Texas Precancel Club, faced a similar problem (see here).

However, if Kelly & Judd give vivid red samples of scarlet but also pinkish, murky or too orangey ones, it's because (in my understanding) these are all mere standards. Standard colors can deviate from the specific color of the thing they claim to represent. That's why I've decided not to try to make sense of them, but just accept them as established standards, like Gallego & Sanz's dictionary does (they describe those various “scarlets” as possible definitions of scarlet in English):

«(T. d. l. e. ing. “scarlet”.) Denominación común de las coloraciones roja viva, naranja rojiza viva, naranja rojiza fuerte, rosa profunda, roja fuerte y roja moderada.»

“(Translated from the English term ‘scarlet’.) Common denomination for the colors vivid red, vivid reddish orange, strongly saturated reddish orange, deep pink, strong red and moderately saturated red.”

And this was also another reason why I decided to go with a sample of the old Dutch scarlet tint from Gallego & Sanz's dictionary: because it is the specific color of the thing.

Now, regarding how to actually get to see Maerz & Paul's scarlet, aside from Foster's website... I'm clueless. Unless it is possible to locate the editor of the English Wiki who owns a copy of the book. There seems to be at least one, as he/she could even say where was the scarlet swatch on a plate of the book: “...is shown as being one of the colors on the right and bottom of the plate representing the most highly saturated colors between red and orange at a position one-fourth of the way between red and orange.”

I still think the Spanish definition of scarlet does not involve orange, as the sources in Spanish don't mention it, but if the definition of scarlet in English does, it belongs in the article, since it's a notable difference. -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 23:17 3 jul 2014 (UTC)

=

You're not going to believe this, but the State Library in my city, Melbourne, has a copy of the Maerz Paul book. I've got library card there, and I'm going to take pics of the plates where the colours are supposed to be!

And yes, a lot of inconsistency with the shades, with the common themes being a deep crimsony red, or a bright red with orange hints.

I'll let you know how I go!

Snifferdogx (discusión) 08:56 4 jul 2014 (UTC)

Wow. Lucky you!

In any case, remember that good lighting matters when taking a picture of a color chart. Sunlight, the camera's white balance or a white card placed near the subject may help.

Also, I wonder if Maerz & Paul's book actually says something about the colors, the way a dictionary of encyclopedia would. I know the book contains color charts, but I know very little about its written content. -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 04:09 5 jul 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I've made an online reservation and am picking it up this Friday - that is, if I've done it all properly!

I'll take photos of any texts about the "definition" of Scarlet and will do colourplates in sunlight and indoor light to see how it varies.

I have actually seen the book on eBay, and it's a ridiculous price of AUD $145, here's the link to it. No way on Earth I'm buying that!

Snifferdogx (discusión) 07:04 5 jul 2014 (UTC)

PS: in the English article for Scarlet there is a reference to Amy Butler Greenfield "A Perfect Red", and I'm reading the book now. Interestingly, on page 37 it says this "The exact colour associated with each word over time, but crimson is meant a red that tended towards purple, while scarlet suggested a somewhat brighter hue."

Snifferdogx (discusión) 07:10 5 jul 2014 (UTC)

=

Ok, I've got the good news and I've got the bad news:

I've had a look at the Maerz & Paul book, but because it's the State Library I couldn't take the book out of the library. Grrrr!

However, I did make colour photocopies on A3 paper of the colour plates, but the colours didn't come out quite true - the colours appeared more pinkish on the photocopies. And, I took photos of the plates close to a window, and the library had those "warm white" lights inside that looked closer to sunlight. Even though the colours in the pictures came up a bit paler than what was on the plates, it showed the Scarlet as being a distinctly orangey-red, and it was on the far corner of the bottom row of the plate.

Now, how do I attach JPEGs to this discussion?

PS: Just found that you can access quite a few books via Google if you type in the search words "Color Standards and Color Nomenclature"

Snifferdogx (discusión) 08:20 11 jul 2014 (UTC)

PPS: Found something else: the Maerz & Paul book references this book: Color Standards & Color Nomenclature; Robert Ridgeway 1912

You can view the full ebook here, including the colour plates: https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002026018

On the first colour plate, referenced as plate 1, it shows Scarlet and Scarlet-Red, with Scarlet being the bright red with the orange tinge, but the Scarlet-Red almost a dark red. However, there is a "Flame-Scarlet" on the next colourplate that is actually closer to the standardised "scarlet" you see in the English-speaking world; it's even brighter and more orange than the "Scarlet" swatch.

Now, because I can't find a single way of uploading the pics I took, if you have an email address, I'm more than happy to send through the colour swatch and the article written on scarlet from the Maerz & Paul book.

Hope you're doing well, and I've thoroughly enjoyed doing all this investigation with you!

Ilijas

Snifferdogx (discusión) 08:40 12 jul 2014 (UTC)

Well, if this is your first time on Wikipedia as an editor, I must say you've probably got what it takes to be a good Wikipedist. Thanks for all the time and effort you've put into this research!

Regarding how to display pictures here, I think the best way to go is probably to upload them anywhere else and place an external link on this page, just for the sake of anyone else who might read this discussion in the future... although if it is easier for you, you may e-mail them to me (to gruellan[at]netverk.com.ar).

On the subject of color and photocopies: indeed, color copiers, even well kept and calibrated ones, are a bit moody with colors. Ideally, colors should be measured with a colorimeter (but since I don't own one, I've sometimes resorted to taking pictures in good lighting conditions with the aid of a white card for reference, or tried to match the color in question to another color from a chart or catalog).

Now on to the main subject!

I see you've found Ridgway's book online. Great! (and it's even been scanned together with a color card, to ensure that the color swatches are faithful to the original!)

Yes, it makes sense that Maerz & Paul mention Ridgway's work, since it is older (M&P first published their inventory of color standards in 1930, and Ridgway's Color Standards & Color Nomenclature dates back from 1912). All these were attempts to “collect” and document colors that were in use at the time, in order to standardize them. Further color dictionaries and inventories have built upon, and expanded, these early works.

Like all standards, however, these are valid for a given environment — in this case, the English-speaking world.

In the meanwhile, I've been trying to look into the color of historic scarlet. Of course, scarlet has gone a long way: first it was an expensive cloth of no particular color, then it became an expensive kermes-dyed red cloth, then a an expensive cochineal-dyed red cloth, and finally just a hue of red.

I've found a description of historic scarlets in the book L' Art de la teinture des laines et des étoffes de laine, en grand et petit teint, which was published in 1750 by a very accomplished French dyer, Jean Hellot. Hellot mentions a “Venetian scarlet” made from kermes, and then goes on to describe the then fashionable Dutch scarlet, a dye made from cochineal. He makes a very clear distinction between the colors of these two dyes: Venetian scarlet was “the color of ox-blood” (i.e., a somewhat dark or even slightly purplish red) and easy on the eyes, while Dutch scarlet was a red so intense that it was hard to keep one's eyes on it. Hellot calls this hue a “fire-red scarlet” (Écarlatte couleur de feu), and gives the name “Gobelins scarlet” as a synonym for it, since the French were making a fine version of the Dutch dye in the Gobelins Manufactory.

This fire-red, Dutch or Gobelins scarlet is the original reference for our color term “scarlet” (which may or may not be identical to today's standard scarlets).

This is Hellot's own description:

“Aujourd'hui, on les veut orangées, pleines de feu, & que l'oeil ait peine à en soutenir l'éclat.”

“Today, we want them [scarlet dyes] orangish, full of fire, & such that the eye finds their brightness hard to stand.”

Was this color orangish compared with the ox-blood Venetian scarlet, or orangish compared to a medium red? That is the question. But it's good to know that it was even described as “orangish” by a person who knew everything about the original dye.

I've also found an oil painting of the dyers' workshop at the Gobelins, and it surely features some scarlet cloth, of which the Kingdom of France was proud. This is simply delightful to see (at least for me, but then... I love colors!): http://expositions.bnf.fr/lumieres/grand/165.htm

...and, indeed, the color of the freshly dyed scarlet cloth looks like a fire-red, orangish if compared to a more conservative red. In a corner there is a heap of pink cloth, which according to Hellot could be made with dilluted, washed-out scarlet dye.

At this point I'm not liking much the Dutch scarlet swatch on the Spanish Wiki article. I'd replace it with this painting if there was a copy available on Wikimedia Commons. (Maybe the BNF allows the uploading of their images to Commons? I could eventually ask them.)

Back to Ridgway's book, I've tried to download it, but the server was sluggish, so I'll give it another try later.

Another thing I found was that Google Books seems to have pulled their online (and half-readable) copy of John Gage's Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, which I wanted to re-read to see which was Gage's opinion on scarlet. Oh well.

I have to go slow anyway, since I've got work to do... so I'm closing my report on scarlet for now!

Have a nice weekend! (Down here it's dull and rainy!) -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 20:50 12 jul 2014 (UTC)

Allo there!

What a fascinating history this has turned out to be!

I've emailed you the pics with the swatches, and also the description, which i had to break up into three photos. Had I known beforehand, I could have scanned the whole lot of them into PDF. Only found this out in the photocopy room *after* I had run out of credit on my copy card and the librarian comes in and tells me I could do a scan.

Anyway, the pics are actually very close in colour to what I saw in the book - they are much more faithful reproductions of the colour than the photocopy was.

Anyway, the Maerz book mentions in its definition that the colour produced by Kermes, which I understand to be the vivid red with orange undertones, to be the definitive "scarlet" colour.

Lordie, what an exhaustive research.

Let me know once you've gotten the emails.

Ilijas

Snifferdogx (discusión) 00:10 13 jul 2014 (UTC)

Ok, the emails kept bouncing so I have done created a Wordpress blog and uploaded the files in there.

The address is: https://historyofthecolourred.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2&action=edit&message=6&postpost=v2

Snifferdogx (discusión) 00:53 13 jul 2014 (UTC)

Thanks again! Finally I was able to download Ridgway's book. I compared the swatches in the PDF file to those given by Foster, and considering there's ample room for inaccuracies (due to the age of the book, the quality of the scans, different digital color spaces used, etc.), they look reasonably similar. (Ridgway himself makes an unsettling statement about color inaccuracies in a former book of his, on page 13!)

And I've been looking at Maerz & Paul's considerations on scarlet. This is, in short, what they say:

• Scarlet contains orange, while crimson contains blue — fine
• Kermes red is the scarlet dye of ancient times — other sources agree; I could expand the Spanish Wiki article mentioning this
• Cochineal red supplanted the kermes dye and appropiated the name “scarlet”; Kermes dye became known as Venetian scarlet — Hellot agrees
• Other names for cochineal scarlet were Dutch–, fire–, and Gob[e]lin scarlet – Hellot agrees
• “Scarlet varies within a very small range.” — good to know! (and logical: we know a vivid red scarlet was the most sought-after, but it's likely that the color was not always the same)
• “It can hardly be rigidly confined to a specific hue, though a central tone may perhaps be chosen.” — so they tried to choose a tone halfway between kermes scarlet extremes (right?)
• SCCA's “scarlet” is not sufficiently orange — agreed: Foster has a swatch of it, and it's not orange at all
• Ridgway's “scarlet” is too orange — indeed it looks quite orange
• Ridgway's “scarlet-red” is meant to be a color halfway between scarlet and red — M&P's own interpretation or speculation, it seems; anyway, that scarlet-red is not relevant here
• The scarlet made with cochineal was slightly more orange than that made with kermes — Hellot agrees
• Scarlet should be standardized as the color of kermes scarlet, which was the original one — I assume this is what they tried to represent on Plate 1 L 12, which is labeled “Scarlet”: a medium kermes scarlet, between its extremes. It still looks a bit too orange to me, but what the authors say is what matters!

Very good info, and more than enough to start a revision of the article. =) -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 04:18 14 jul 2014 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, was it the 1930 edition of Maerz & Paul's book that you photographed? Just to know how to cite it. -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 04:34 14 jul 2014 (UTC)

Allo, it was the 1930 edition of Maerz & Paul that I had. The English Wikipedia article on Scarlet states, "Scarlet is a quarter of the way between red and orange on the traditional colour wheel," but I think that's an interpretation of the placement of Scarlet as L12 on the colour plate on M&P's book.

07:23 14 jul 2014 (UTC)

==

Hello there. Just saw your update on the Escarlata page.

I can see that you've put in the possible range of colours that could be labelled as "Scarlet", and I think it's very useful historical info.

However, in the French, Italian and English articles they do point towards to orange-ish bright red (with the hex FF2400, and RGB 255, 36, 0) so maybe an inclusion of what's referred to internationally as "scarlet" may not be a bad idea, as the shade itself has been sort of "standardised" within graphics and paintings circles and settled on that bright red orangey shade.

Just an idea that may help readers, given that there's vermilion and crimson on there, it might be a bit confusing as to where Scarlet actually sits between the two, as the name is understood nowadays.

Well done on all the hard work you've put into it too.

Let me know what you think.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 10:09 25 jul 2014 (UTC)

PS: Have you had a look at the Catalan article on Scarlet? It's quite detailed, and has the orangey red there as well. https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escarlata

Snifferdogx (discusión) 10:26 25 jul 2014 (UTC)

Hi again!

Actually, I'm still editing the article (I'm currently finishing the “Venice scarlet” section). I'm making a very slow progress due to having other work to do and to the fact that I'm trying to put together the information found in about 8 books and papers. At the same time I'm reading Amy Greenfield's A Perfect Red and picking data from there too. =)

The color swatches will probably wind up at the bottom of the article, in the section about scarlet «as a color». But I still haven't decided how to lay out the contents of that section. (This sort of situations normally kind of resolve themselves once I start to re-read the sources, put the facts together and write them down). So the vermilion and carmine swatches at the lead will probably be swapped for an historic illustration related to scarlet cloth (I'm thinking a portrait of a king in scarlet, or such — there must be tons of paintings like that on Wikimedia Commons!).

Re the scarlet color shown in other Wikis (French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, etc.), the fact that it's always the same hue and it's always unreferenced suggests that the editors have just copied and pasted the swatch from one wiki to another. That doesn't mean that those languages don't have a standard or preferred hue for scarlet, of course (but where are they? That is the question!)

The Catalan article looks quite good. Thanks for pointing it out! =) -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 03:14 26 jul 2014 (UTC)

Allo there,

Yes, that's a really good point about the referencing. It does actually look like they've all copied each other, but that can also mean that the colour has sort of been "standardised" because everywhere I look, no matter which website, it seems to have Scarlet as RGB 255, 36, 0, and virtually none of them cite where they got it from. And it's annoying and frustrating, because it makes me think, "Well, ok, the colour is getting a sort of standardisation, especially with regards to internet colours, but who started the whole thing?" No matter where I go to look up web colours I get the same RGB values, so it seems to have somehow spread throughout the IT world and settled upon that formula. A bit like HTML started off like a complete hodge-podge of coding, and then became standardised by various symposia and international collaborations. Or something, lol, I'm possibly talking a whole load of garbage here.

And I don't envy your work, you're doing a tremendous job there: very in-depth historical analysis, it's marvellous to read, in spite of Google Translate massacring some of the sentences, I still get the gist of what you're saying.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 04:28 26 jul 2014 (UTC)

3

Hello there. How goes it? I see you've been doing loads of work on the page.

Need me to find any more info? Would be more than happy to do that. :)

Snifferdogx (discusión) 07:36 3 ago 2014 (UTC)

Hello again! Thanks for offering your help. Like we say over here, “¡qué buena onda!” (‘what a good vibe!’). =)

I'm still editing the article and still I can't say I'm already “scraping the bottom of the pot” in regards to information about scarlet. I'm sure there must be more out there about ancient scarlets, and I still have to add something about how the scarlet tint ceased to be used (or not: somewhere on Earth some protocol procedure might still call for authentic scarlet-dyed garments!).

Meanwhile, I've found that a curious thing happened when Western scarlet woolens reached China and Japan. These peoples did not have a first-hand knowledge of kermes or cochineal insects; their animal-based red dye or pigment was shellac. The bright red they could see on imported textile goods was thought to be the blood of a mythical animal, the hsing-hsing (in Mandarin Chinese) or shôjô (in Japanese). This is a fascinating story, but good references are quite hard to find. I did find a mention though, on the MOMA's (Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York) website... though not quite as detailed as I'd wished it to be. And another usable cite came from the amazing book The Golden Peaches of Samarkand by Edward Schafer.

Now, The color of the blood of the shôjô seems to be a traditional Japanese color that later became standardized by the JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards). It's been published on several Japanese books, and can be seen on several webpages, but giving a good bibliographical cite for it... that's another story. This blogger gives a lot of details on the subject.

Another tough task is explaining what is understood for “scarlet” in Chinese and Japanese. I've given up on this one.

Regarding Western standard scarlets, I've decided to keep the two swatches available: that of the “specific Dutch scarlet” by Gallego & Sanz, and the “standard scarlet” one by Maerz & Paul. None of them seem very fortunate to me (the Dutch scarlet looks too red and the standard “anglo” scarlet looks too orange), but as a Wikipedia editor I have to be faithful to the sources and not incur in original research, so let it be as they say. In any case the reader will know what to expect: that “scarlet” in Spanish will be considered a redder hue than “scarlet” in English, which will tend towards orange.

By the way, I have to thank you again... because one of your photographs proved the best source for the M&P scarlet swatch.

Back to the subject of standard colors across the Wikipedias, what I think happened is that back in the day when articles about individual colors were still primitive stubs, there was much copying across languages. Only until recently some articles on colors have started to diverge, thanks to some editors who have decided to take the task of expanding the articles. (One of these people is the editor who has expanded the English Wikipedia's articles on colors, the one that presents the facts by means of image galleries, as can be seen in the article about red, for example.)

Also, there may have been a kind of circular feedback between Wikipedia colors and swatches of unreferenced colors displayed on other websites.

And HTML colors, as you've pointed out, are just everywhere these days. They are slowly replacing traditional color wheel colors, it seems. By the way, who chose the HTML color palette, and according to which standards (if any) is still a mystery! -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 23:26 3 ago 2014 (UTC)

Hey hey, I didn't know all that about the sharing of colours that was taking place in Wikipedia. I'm going to have a good look at that.

One thing I'm a bit confused by is the swatch that you put for the Standard Scarlet on the page. The actual colour on the Maerz & Paul plate was very bright, vibrant and clear, and was redder than how it appeared in the photo, and much brighter than what you've put on the Standard Scarlet swatch. In fact, what you've got as Vermilion is pretty much exactly the colour that was on that plate, except that the colour on the plate was brighter, ie. more vibrant red-orange, perhaps with the R value cranked up to 255 and 70 as the G value.

The Maerz & Paul plate version is distinctly more orange than the Ridgway plate color, which is redder, but equally bright. The Maerz book however, has a red-orange swatch, but talks about the colour being the red of Kermes, which when you look at examples of Kermes red was a very bright, rich vivid red, which does then come full circle to the RGB of 255, 36, 0.

I think with both of the books "Scarlet" was shown in the swatches as a bright and vivid colour, without blue/purple undertones, and perhaps with a tinge of orange, although Maenz emphasises the orange, whereas Ridgeway emphasises the redness in the Scarlet and Flame Scarlet swatches.

Now, I don't know how Vermilion is known in Spanish, but in English it's more of an orangey-red with brownish undertones, which actually matches very closely as to what you've entered as the Standard Scarlet. The English article on the Vermilion colour references Maerz & Paul, and gives an RGB of 227, 66, 52, and when you compare it to Cinnabar, which is what the Vermilion colour is based on.

Hope this is of some use to you.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 09:31 4 ago 2014 (UTC)

PS: Don't know if I've mentioned this, but in English the Catholic Cardinal's robes are nearly always described as "scarlet" because it is the shade of red of blood, and symbolises that they are willing to give their lives to their faith. How are the robes described in Spanish?

Snifferdogx (discusión) 11:13 4 ago 2014 (UTC)

OK, now I think I've got M&P's scarlet swatch right, after some brightness compensation, blue-yellow balance, etc. Or at least that's as good as it gets by now.

I've found that the red-to-yellow Maerz & Paul colors were published by Dorothy Nickerson in her book Interrelation of Color Specifications (1947), where she gave Munsell values for all of them. Sscarlet should be covered, but... I couldn't find those Munsell values anywhere on the Web. Which is a shame, because I'm able to translate Munsell values into accurate RGB values. =(

Anyway, later I'll possibly add more standard scarlets from Ridgway and others. For the swatches I think I'll be relying on Foster's colors, since in the PDF version of Ridgway's book the scarlet range is way too dark.

Re “vermilion” and “cinnabar” in Spanish (bermellón and cinabrio, respectively), the only specialized source that I know of, which are Gallego & Sanz's books, give specific color swatches for them. That is, their vermilion is the true color of the vermilion pigment, and their cinnabar is the most usual color of the mineral of that name (which they give as a dark orange, close to the color of rust). In the written description, however, they say that cinnabar may mean vermilion and vice versa, which makes sense considering that, historically, sometimes vermilion pigment was made by grinding cinnabar rocks.

About the color of the robes of Catholic cardinals... I still have to work on that. The symbolism given usually is the one you mention (i.e. that the bright red symbolises that they are willing to give their lives to their faith), but the color is usually called púrpura cardenalicia (‘cardinal's purple’)! This is because of the swapping of Tyrian purple robes for scarlet ones that happened after the fall of Constantinople. It's not impossible however that the púrpura cardenalicia is termed escarlata sometimes; I'll have to look that up. -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 20:44 4 ago 2014 (UTC)

Oh my god, "Cardinal purple"!!!! I had a funny feeling that something like that would be the case!

Your Scarlet Standard now looks perfect to me. That's how I've understood the colour to be too: bright red, with that lovely soft tinge of the orange, as per the description in M&P.

Now, the Scarlet in Ridgway's book does look dark. But there's a swatch on the next page that he refers to as "Flame Scarlet", which - if going by the adage that "scarlet is the red of fire and blood" - it actually looks remarkably close to your Standard Scarlet, and also the overall appearance of Scarlet that we keep on finding throughout the web.

Vermilion/Cinnabar is the same rusty colour in English too, it has a distinct rusty tone and tends to refer to the raw mineral ore, rather than the ground form used as pigment, which is apparently much much redder and less rusty than the ore itself.

Oh, lordie, who would've thought this would become so complicated. <shaking my head>

Snifferdogx (discusión) 03:42 5 ago 2014 (UTC)

New stuff

Hey there, hope you're doing good.

Just found a Google book that's referenced in the English Wikipedia article for "Mordant", and refers to page 34.

It talks about "Dutch Scarlet", its shade and the mordant used.

It's in the metmuseum dot org site, and is called "Cochineal_Red_the_art_history_of_a_color".

I remember you having something on Dutch Scarlet.

Anyway, I've bored you with enough here, lol.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 02:09 1 sep 2014 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! (And don't worry, it's impossible to bore me with colors, pigments et al. =).

Right now I'm hard at work trying to meet a deadline (gasp!), but eventually I'll look into this. The Escarlata article is still in the works! -- GRuellan  ^¿Hmm? 14:41 2 sep 2014 (UTC)

Oh, good, lol, I was afraid I was becoming a serial pest.

Snifferdogx (discusión) 07:51 6 sep 2014 (UTC)