About Pigmentoria
It started with a search that went nowhere.
I was looking for the colors of the Baroque. Not a mood board. Not a Pinterest grid tagged “vintage vibes.” I wanted to know what Caravaggio actually had on his palette — the pigments, the limits, the chemistry that shaped how an entire era painted. I wanted to understand why Vermeer’s blue looks the way it does, and what it cost him — literally — to use it.
I found shallow lists. Hex codes with no context. Palettes with everything interesting stripped away.
So I built what I was looking for.
Pigmentoria is a chromatic atlas of art history. Every palette here was put together by studying actual pigments, real techniques, and the way artists worked in their time. From the iron oxides of cave painting to the cadmium yellows the Impressionists squeezed straight from the tube. From the tinted frames of silent cinema to the cyanotype blues of early photography. From Persian miniatures to Maya blue.
This is not a color generator. There’s no algorithm behind it. Each palette was built by hand — reading, cross-referencing, and looking at a lot of paintings.
The result: hundreds of color palettes across painting, cinema, photography, and world traditions. 49 eras. 101 artists and processes. 600+ colors, each one with a name and a reason.
Every color carries its story. Where it came from. Who used it. Why it mattered. Because a color without context is just a hex code. And a hex code without a story is just a number.
Pigmentoria is for anyone who thinks that knowing where a color comes from changes how you use it — on canvas, on screen, or anywhere in between.
How the palettes are made
Every palette in the atlas is an interpretation, not a measurement. Each colour is a digital reading of the materials an artist or process is known to have used and of how the surviving work looks today: a name, a HEX value, the historical material behind it, and a short note on why it was chosen.
Unless a colour says otherwise, it was not sampled from a single painting or photograph. Pigments shift with age, varnish and light, and screens differ, so treat each swatch as a considered starting point rather than a reproduction.
Links between colours and pigments are set by hand, not inferred from the wording. 'Documented' means the colour's note names the pigment as the material used; 'possibly' marks a note that names it as one of two candidates; 'evoked' marks a colour that recalls a pigment without claiming its use; and 'modern stand-in' marks a pigment that postdates the work or replaces a historical material.