Ultramarine and lapis lazuli
Ground from a stone mined in Afghanistan, it was at times as pricey as gold. Painters saved it for the Virgin.
- Made from
- Lapis lazuli (the mineral lazurite)
- Mined in
- Badakhshan, Afghanistan
- Synthetic
- Guimet and Gmelin, late 1820s
Natural ultramarine is ground lapis lazuli, a deep blue stone mined for millennia in the Badakhshan mountains of Afghanistan. Its name means 'beyond the sea', for the long trade route that brought it to Italy through Venice. Simply grinding the stone gives a greyish powder; the brilliant blue comes from a slow extraction, kneading the powder in wax and resin and washing out the blue particles, described by the 13th-century writer al-Tifashi. Its deep, slightly violet blue sits between the app's cobalt and indigo.
Good ultramarine was at times as expensive as gold. The painter Cennino Cennini, around 1400, called it “a glorious, lovely and absolutely perfect pigment.” Contracts specified it, and painters often saved it for the robes of the Virgin Mary, using cheaper azurite underneath. The word azure, via Arabic, comes from the Persian name for the same stone (see heraldry).
Johannes Vermeer used it lavishly, even mixing it into shadows. The turban in Girl with a Pearl Earring is natural ultramarine with varying amounts of lead white, a darker blue laid over a lighter one, and the blue apron in The Milkmaid is ultramarine too.
Cheaper rivals had arrived, Prussian blue around 1706 and cobalt blue in 1802, but in 1824 a French society still offered 6,000 francs for a synthetic ultramarine. Jean-Baptiste Guimet in France and Christian Gmelin in Germany both found a way in the late 1820s, and cheap 'French ultramarine' filled the tubes of the Impressionists. In the 1950s Yves Klein suspended synthetic ultramarine in a matte binder to make International Klein Blue (see owning a color).
Swatches
- Natural ultramarine · the Virgin's robe (approx.)
- Azure · named for lapis
- Klein blue · synthetic ultramarine (approx.)
Colors
Sources
- Plesters, J. (1993). Ultramarine blue, natural and artificial. In Artists' Pigments, vol. 2. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
- Cennini, C. (c. 1400). Il libro dell'arte; trans. L. Broecke (2015). Archetype.
- National Gallery, London. Technical studies of Vermeer's ultramarine.
- Wikipedia, 'Ultramarine'.
- Delaney, J. K., Dooley, K. A., van Loon, A. & Vandivere, A. (2020). Mapping the pigment distribution of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Heritage Science 8: 4.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.