Show me Orange

[isabelladangelo]

That one would definitely look smashing in a rich orange shade!

Whatever you settle for, I think you should avoid the worst orange-orange colours. Go for reddish orange, golden orange or "lion coloured" (lionata). These are richer shades which both looks and (from what I can tell) are more period.

Oh, they had safety cone orange:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jubileel/4534780883/   The photo is of a 14th c illumination.  You can't really make out the images but you can see the orange swirls along the frame of the page.   They are BRIGHT orange.   

[Gwen aka Punstergal]

According to random sources, the original word for the color was  "?eolur?ad" (yellow-red). The word "orange" was the fruit before it was the color, and was first used to name the color in 1512 (in a will, of all places).

Now, I KNOW they had butternuts in historic Europe, and I KNOW that if you boil the outer hulls of butternuts you get a wonderful orange dye, so I would hazard to guess that somebody probably did ... perhaps that would be a good historic-sounding name for the color as well?

More frequently used than butternut hulls, of course, is SAFFRON. Which is what I bet they made most of the orange dyes with back in the day... it's one of the most commonly used dyes in the world.

[operafantomet]

That one would definitely look smashing in a rich orange shade!

Whatever you settle for, I think you should avoid the worst orange-orange colours. Go for reddish orange, golden orange or "lion coloured" (lionata). These are richer shades which both looks and (from what I can tell) are more period.

Oh, they had safety cone orange:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jubileel/4534780883/   The photo is of a 14th c illumination.  You can't really make out the images but you can see the orange swirls along the frame of the page.   They are BRIGHT orange.   

I don't disagree about bright orange existing. But in this case I think there's a difference to what they HAD, and what was common. There aren't too many 16th century depictions of "safety cone orange" clothes.

But yes, the colour did definitely exist, and would not be wrong to use.

[DonaCatalina]

They had gold too...but it certainly wasn't common.  The way you worded that made me smile although I agree with you completely. Orange would likely not be found in peasant garb, but for upper middle class and nobility clothes, orange would be more probable.
SMU has an extensive collection of 14th century manuscripts from Italy and France. And while perhaps a quarter of those had some illumination in safety cone orange, most do not. This leads me to believe that the color was difficult to obtain, or perhaps even not as popular.
There is an illumination at the Morgan of Count Gaston III of Foix wearing an orange houpelande lined with fur.
http://www.themorgan.org/collections/swf/exhibOnline.asp?id=802