Color: Sap Green Country: Ancient Rome
Sap green is a lake color that enjoyed popularity from medieval illumination all the way through the Romantic era of watercolor painting. It is a warm, yellowish green, transparent, tending toward olive in masstone and a brighter, livelier green in tints.
Originally made from the juice of unripe berries from a species of buckthorn plant, in medieval times the extracted colour was reduced to a heavy syrup and sold in pig bladders rather than as a dry pigment.
Buckthorn berries were used to dye textiles in Ancient Roman. The sticky purple juice pressed from the berries was mixed with lime or vinegar to make dyes that could range from brownish-yellow to green. There were various ways to adjust the colour: unripe buckthorn berries produced green shades, while ripe ones produced yellow.The yellow variety of Buckthorn lake was known later as Stil de Grain or Pink (before the 17th century the word ‘pink’ commonly referred to a yellow-brown instead of a pale red).
It is fugitive like most natural organic colors, which is why it fell from vogue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when modern synthetic greens that were more lightfast became widely available.
Menu
Cato’s Olive Relish
Columella’s Salad
Bread
Roast Lamb With Date Sauce
Alexandria Style Squash
Lentils with Coriander
Cato’s Cheesecake
Pear Patina