Getting Blue

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Where would painting be without the color blue? It is so easy to obtain artist paints of any hue these days that we forget that in the time of both Michelangelo and Titian, a pure, vibrant blue pigment could only be made by laboriously cooking and hand-grinding a stone of lapis lazuli into a fine powder, and then adding oils and binders to make it into a suitable paint. Called “oltramarino”, it was made from surpar, the very finest lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. It was the most expensive paint material in the world, and so not always readily available. In those days, it was not uncommon that a commissioned painting would have to remain incomplete until the expensive surpar could be furnished by the wealthy patron.

It was not until another blue was discovered that artists had any other choice. This new pigment, nearly as valuable to artists as oltramarino, originally came from Persia, now Iran, and in English was called “cobalt“, a corruption of the German “kobald“, or gremlin. Discover…