DRAGONSBLOOD

One other important vegetable source or red is an East Indian shrub known as pterocarpus draco, or dradacoena draco. The sap of this shrub dries into a deep brownish-red gum resin which is known now as it was in the Middle Ages, as dragonsblood. In classical times it was called Indian cinnabar by Greeks writers, but Pliny (whose word was law in the Middle Ages) professed that it was a product of a battle between the dragon and the elephant which ended in the mingling of the blood of each. A great use of this red resin in the Middle Ages was to color metal (note: as it was not a chemical reaction that would alter the metal colors, was it more of a glaze and therefor impermanent?), improving the color of gold, and for glazing other metals to imitate gold. It was used as a pigment chiefly by book painters. Though not a lake pigment, it resembled them in transparency, but was passed out of favor by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though not completely abandoned. Texts have been found with recipes for making it artificially with brazil wood as the chief coloring component. It is more likely that its value as a transparent warm red became less urgent as the manufacture of transparent yellow lakes developed, in and after the fourteenth century.

DUTCH PINK

The same as brown pink, which has a description listed.