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There was a time, and not so long ago, when men spoke not of the Middles Ages but of the Dark Ages. We have learned that their apparent darkness is the darkness of our own understanding. When we contemplate the history of medieval art, and summon up remembrance of what its works were in their day, and see the part played in them by metal gold, we may well wonder whether we should not do wisely to call them not the Middles Ages but the Golden Age.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson

Cornelius Jansen, in the seventeenth century, summed up the character of orpiment bluntly: "Orpiment will ly faire on any culler, except verdigres, but no culler will ly faire on him, he kills them all."

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson

One of the most important services required of [yellow pigments] was to imitate the appearance of gold. Another of their chief functions was to modify the qualities of greens and, to a less extend, of reds. Of all their uses, perhaps the least important was to represent yellow things.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson

... "the dragon wraps his tail around the legs of the elephant, and the elephant lets himself sink upon the dragon, and the blood of the dragon turns the ground red; and all the ground that the blood touches becomes cinnabar, and Avicenna calls this dragonsblood." I am sometimes not at all sure that we do not pay too dearly for our scientific knowledge.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson

...it is perhaps worth while to noite that miniare meant to work with minium (this is, either orange lead or red sulphide of mercury), and that a person who worked with minium was called a miniator, and the things that he was to miniate were called miniatura. So miniatrues were originally the paragraph signs and versals and capitals and headings, and so on, which were to be put in red in manuscripts. The men who put these in sometimes did illustrative and decorative drawings and paintings besides, and these came to be called miniatures too. And, finally, because they were only incidental, and therefore usually rather small, the word miniature came to mean "diminutive."

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson