Each color is paired with the closest historical name we can find, drawn from pigment catalogues, dye records, and naturalist guides—sources like Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821), the Winsor & Newton pigment archive, and earlier texts like Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte. These names are matched by proximity, not prescription: they reflect how a color might have been described historically, not the exact material an artist used.

This resource is less a fixed system than a way of seeing. Colors that feel contemporary often have long histories, and combinations that seem intuitive tend to repeat. The library is open source and ongoing—we add to it as the collection grows, and the full dataset is freely available.