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Sometimes, it seems that earth pigments and dyes were superimposed over one another: for example, the canoe on folio 63r, seems to have been painted with the light brown dye and then the dark shade on its bottom was probably added with an earth pigment.

Blue

All blue areas of the Codex Mendoza (measured on all selected pages) were painted with Maya blue, the well-known organic-inorganic hybrid pigment that was obtained by heating a mixture of indigo and palygorskite, whose presence has been detected by both FTIR and UV-Vis reflectance. The different degrees of darkness observable in the manuscript’s blue areas did not result in different instrumental readings. These variations in darkness must have been obtained by means of different dilutions and/or the repeated overlaying of the color, which nevertheless always shows a dense, covering aspect.

It seems that Maya blue was not explicitly mentioned in historical sources. However, it has recently been convincingly proposed that the term texotli could precisely refer to hybrid organic-inorganic blue pigments, including the one we call Maya blue (Dupey García 2010, 83–85; 2015, 155; 2016; Magaloni Kerpel 2012, 71).