Lapis Lazuli (Artefact IV)
WUNDERKAMMER
Artefact No: 4
Description: Ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli
Location: Sare-e-Sang, Badakhshan, Afghanistan
Age: 6000BC to Present
Ben Timberlake August 6, 2024
Blue is the color of civilization. It is the color of heaven.
When the first prehistoric artists adorned the cave walls, they used the earth colors: reds, browns, yellows, blacks. There were no blues, for the earth very rarely produces the color. Early peoples had no word for blue: it doesn’t appear in ancient Chinese stories, Icelandic Sagas, the Koran, or Sumerian myths. In the Odyssey, an epic with no shortage of opportunities to use the word, there are plenty of blacks and whites, a dozen reds, and several greens. As for the sea - Homer describes it as “wine-dark”.
Philologist Lazarus Geiger analyzed a vast number of ancient texts and found that the words for colors show up in different languages in the same sequence: black and white, next red, then either yellow or green. Blue is always last, arriving with the first cities and the smelting of iron. Homer’s palette, at the end of the Bronze Age, sits neatly within this developmental scheme.
The Egyptians had a word for blue, for they also had the tools of civilization, long-distance trade, and technology, that allowed them to seek out and harness the color. 6000 years ago, the very first blue they used - the true blue - was ultramarine from Lapis Lazuli (the ‘Stone of Heaven’), found in the Sar-e-Sang mines in northern Afghanistan. It was this blue that adorned the mask of Tutankhamun, and that Cleopatra wore, powdered, as eye-shadow.
Lapis lazuli was so expensive that the Egyptians were driven to some of the earliest chemistry experiments - heating copper salts, sand and limestone - to create an ersatz turquoise that was the world’s first synthetic pigment. The technology and recipe spread throughout the ancient world. The Romans had many words for different varieties of blue and combined Egyptian Blue with indigo to use on their frescoes. But none of these chemical creations or combinations could match the Afghan lapis for the brilliance of its blues.
“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.” - Wassily Kandinsky
The Virgin in Prayer, Giovanni Battista Salvi da Saassoferrato, c.1645.
At the Council of Ephesus in 431AD, ultramarine received official blessing when it was decided that it was the color of Mary, to venerate her as the Queen of Heaven. Since then it has adorned her robes and that of the angels. Ultramarine was the rarest and most exotic color. Its name - meaning ‘beyond the sea’ - first appeared in the 14th century, given by Italian traders who brought it from across the Mediterranean. Lapis Blue was more expensive than gold and was reserved for only the finest pieces done by the most gifted artists.
It was the most expensive single cost in the whole of the Sistine Chapel and it is said that Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment unfinished in protest that his patron wouldn’t pay for ultramarine. Raphael reserved the color for the final coat, preferring to build the base layers of his blues from Azurite. Vermeer was a master of light but less good at economics: he spent so much on the ultramarine that he left his wife and 11 children in debt when he died.
Once again, mankind turned towards chemistry to search for a cheaper blue: in the early 1800s France’s Societé d’Encouragement offered a reward of 6000 Francs to a scientist who could create a synthetic ultramarine. The result was ‘French Ultramarine’ a hyper-rich color that is still with us to this day.
But 200 years later there is still a debate as to whether we have lost something. Alexander Theroux in his essays The Primary Colors wrote “Old-fashioned blue, which had a dash of yellow in it... now seems often incongruous against newer, staring, overly luminous eye killing shades”.
Anthropometry: Princess Helena, Yves Klein, 1960.
True ultramarine is perfect because of its flaws. It contains traces of calcite, pyrite, flecks of mica, that reflect and refract the light in a myriad of ways. Many artists have continued to prize it for its shifting hues, the heterogeneity of the brushstrokes it creates, the feelings it stirs in us. As Matisse said, ‘A certain blue penetrates the soul’.
Yves Klein worshiped the color and used the synthetic version but he owed his inspiration to the real thing. Klein was born in Nice and grew up under the azure blue Provencal skies. At the age of nineteen he lay on the beach with his friends - the artist Arman, and Claude Pascal, the composer - and they divided up their world: Arman chose earth, Pascal words, while Klein asked for the sky which he then signed with his fingers.
It was only when Klein later visited the Scrovegni Chapel and saw the ultramarine skies of Giotto’s paintings did he understand how to achieve his calling. Klein devoted his brief life to the color, he even patented International Klein Blue (IKB), a synthesis of his childhood skies and the stone of heaven itself.
Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.
