Analysis of seventeenth-century church interiors using the Munsell system Elza Tantcheva, Vien Cheung † and Stephen Westland † Department of History of Art, School of Humanities, University of Sussex (UK) † School of Design, University of Leeds (UK) E-mail: etan711@talktalk.net Introduction The aim of this research was to record and compare the colours used in works of art in a form which would provide an unambiguous record but which would also be more familiar to the scholar working in the art historical field. In the latter context, importance is placed on visually perceived colour rather than on colorimetric notation. The investigation is grounded in the case-study of four post-Byzantine churches in Arbanassi, Bulgaria. The town of Arbanassi, situated in the middle of Bulgaria, contains seven churches built in the seventeenth century. The interiors of four of these are completely covered with frescoes which were executed between 1612 and 1681 and have been shown by scholars to be preserved in their original state [1]. During the late 1970s and the 1980s the frescoes of all of the examined churches were cleaned. Images of two of the frescoes are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Figure1 (left): Church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Arbanassi, Bulgaria: Nave. Figure 2 (right): Church of the Nativity of Christ, Arbanassi, Bulgaria: Depiction of the tree of Jesse painted in the seventeenth century. From an art historical point of view, the use of colour is of considerable interest because colour is one of the main elements in the construction of any decorative composition. There is a relatively high frequency of the use of reds in the iconographic tradition of the Eastern Church from very early days up to the seventeenth century [2-4]. According to some authors the colour red has particular symbolic meaning within a conventionally accepted