I've noticed that most of the paintings showing armies of full-plate men-at-arms have everyone fully armoured in dark black plate.
I know they also used to blacken their mailles with oils of some sort.
Japaneses were also famous for applying painting (lacquer?) to their lamellar armour.

The colouring protects against rust and the weather, so it makes sense for everyone to have coloured armour instead of bare, oiled silver steel.

But pretty much every piece of medieval armour in museums are clean, silver steel.

Do they simply remove the colour in restoration cleaning, or does the colour simply fades out after time, or did they simply... just didn't colour their armour in medieval Europe?

And if they did, what were the common colours? Or did everyone just wear black plate?

Sorry if this has been discussed around here before.

There was a lot of variation according to time, place and style of armor. You could see anything from blackened to polished, painted or fabric covered. Sometimes they even concealed the armor under other garments! Another thing to consider is that silver, the actual precious metal, was sometimes used in silver paint. They say that before the Industrial Revolution there wasn't enough sulfur in the atmosphere for silver to tarnish on its own but it certainly does now so many times things can appear black in ancient art when in fact they were meant to be silver.

I like to cook on cast iron so I really dig the concept of baked on vegetable oil finishes for swords, armor and other things. I've found "seasoning" to be a much better finish that gives more protection than simply oiling a surface. If you're careful and lucky you can actually use heat to form colorful oxides on the surface of a piece of steel and then seal them with a relatively thin, mostly transparent film of baked on soybean oil.

There is one reason armour may have been painted, is that it's a fast and cheap to personalize armour,
even just a simple paten or a few basic shapes do the job.

Later the paint can be scrubbed off and you can have nice shiny armour in time for your victory parade.

The Mack bible has examples of blackened maille, the Trinity Apocalypse has coloured maille in it.

Could be oil, paint or artistic licence.

But not the blue or the red maille?

I had not heard previously that the black maille is tarnished silver. Very interesting!

Here is an old thread about the blackened mail, there is some slight evidence listed, but not really conclusive.
http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=188...mp;start=0