A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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sienna
Sienna is an earth pigment colored by iron oxide with a little manganese, giving a yellow-brown that is duller and cooler than yellow ochre. Heated, it darkens and warms into burnt sienna, a rich red-brown. It is transparent when thinned, which made it valuable for glazing, and it has been in continuous use since the Renaissance.
Etymology
The pigment is named for Siena in Tuscany, where the best earth was dug. Naming a pigment for its source is standard practice and the color chart is a gazetteer: umber is from Umbria, magenta from a battlefield in Lombardy, gamboge from Cambodia, and Prussian blue, Naples yellow, and Venetian red all say where they came from.
Notes
Sienna and its relatives are the same substance as ochre, on this site, differing only in the balance of iron minerals and the presence of manganese, and all of them change on heating. The Tuscan deposits were worked out in the twentieth century and most sienna sold now comes from elsewhere and is adjusted to match, which is a common fate for pigments named after places.