Heavy Arbor Cardinal

Old English hefig, weighty — cognate with heave. Used as a color modifier since at least the seventeenth century to indicate weight in saturation as much as value: heavy with pigment, heavy-bodied. In the engine's adjective grid, heavy sits alongside deep and plush in the dark-and-saturated quadrant. Closer to a fabric description than a pure value word.

Latin arbor, tree-or-trunk. As a color modifier, arbor implies a Latin-tree-and-vine-arbor quality, the visual register of Pliny-Natural-History-and-Roman-villa-arbor hand-Latin-tree-and-vine-arbor Pliny-Natural-History-and-Roman-villa-arbor-and-pergola arbor-and-Latin-tree-and-vine-arbor surfaces under Pliny-Natural-History-and-Roman-villa-arbor-and-pergola Pompeii-and-Tuscan-pergola-and-grape-arbor leafy-shade-light. Sits at the modifier-and-Latin end of the grid, parallel to via and domus in usage.

Named for the scarlet robes of Roman Catholic cardinals, dyed since the thirteenth century with kermes and later cochineal. The color carries the institutional weight of its source — a saturated red-orange that reads as authority rather than romance. Also the bird (Cardinalis cardinalis) of the American east, whose plumage takes its red from carotenoid pigments in the seeds it eats.