I Tile types and patterns · Plate 029
Manganese purple tile
Manganese oxide gives tones from purple to dark brown. It is used for outlines and shading and, on some tiles, is the main colour of the design.
Manganese is one of the metal oxides that make up the tile palette. Portuguese sources list it for brown and black, beside cobalt for blue, copper for green, iron for yellow and tin for white. In majolica the five colour scales are cobalt blue, copper-bronze green, manganese brown, antimony yellow and iron red. Manganese also had a structural use: in corda seca, the cord that kept enamels apart was soaked in linseed oil and manganese oxide, which is why the dividing line is dark.
Purple is the other tone people associate with manganese. The V&A, in its account of tin-glazed tiles, names 'manganese purple' among the colours of an English chinoiserie landscape tile of the 1760s, with blue, red, green and yellow. Portuguese sources report that Rococo tiles revived polychromy in yellow, green and violet and later gave central scenes in violet only; they do not say which oxide gave that violet, so the link to manganese is the reader's inference.
Source: pt.wikipedia.org, vam.ac.uk
AI-generated illustration in the manner of the tradition, not a photograph of a specific object.
