It was very soon when the painters all over the world made a disappointing finding. They could not find a blue color. While the other colors were obtained after processing natural sources such as flowers, the blue color existed only in two elements in nature: the sky and the sea.  The solution was given by active traders. Along with the solution, they also gave them a reason to fear for their own lives.

Until the Middle Ages, the only people who had found a source to receive the blue color were the ancient Egyptians. To create the shade, in 2200 BC the Egyptians combined limestone and sand with copper containing copper (azurite or malachite), heating the solution. The end result was an opaque blue glass, which could be crushed and combined with materials such as egg whites or adhesives, to make a long lasting dye or ceramic glaze.

When Europeans met the blue

It is sometimes called “real blue” and was made of the precious gemstone lapis lazuli, which for centuries could only be found in a mountain range in Afghanistan. Egyptian merchants began to import the stone 6,000 years ago, using it to adorn jewelry.

However, they had never been able to make a dye from it.

Because of its composition, lapis lazuli is a material that can react in an unpredictable way when cutting it. Once cut, however, it is easily polished.

The Lapis stone first appeared as a “true blue” pigment in the 6th century, with Buddhist frescoes in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan. About 700 years later, the pigment traveled to Venice and soon became the most sought-after color in medieval Europe, and for centuries its cost had competed with the gold price.

Historians believe the link between humans and lapis lazuli stretches back more than 6,500 years. The gem was treasured by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. They valued it for its vivid, exquisite color, and prized it as much as they prized other blue gems like sapphire and turquoise.

At the end of the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli began to be exported to Europe, where it was ground into powder and made into ultramarine, the finest and most expensive of all blue pigments. It was used by some of the most important artists of Renaissance and Baroque, including Masaccio, Perugino, Titian and Vermeer, and was often reserved for the clothing of the central figures of their paintings, especially Virgin Mary.

The Blue and the Virgin Mary

The great journey of the rocks to reach Europe and the difficulty in processing it to give the true blue, made it a very expensive commodity. Something the Catholic Church could not fail to identify.
Its difficult journey from the rocky and barren plateaus of today’s Afghanistan to the harbors of Europe and especially Venice skyrocketed its price.
From now on and throughout the Middle Ages, the Vatican handled the lapis lazuli and thus the blue color. Indeed, its price had grown to be greater than that of gold.
Most of the icons were donor offers or rich vouchers, on which their wealth and economic power had to be demonstrated. And since the value of color determined the value of the subject, Virgin Mary began to be depicted in dark blue dresses

So the Catholic Church instructed artists not to use blue paintings in their paintings unless they were to paint the Virgin Mary’s mantle.

Till then, Virgin Mary had only changed two colors in her costume. In older paintings she was dressed in black as a sign of mourning for her murdered son.

The first “real” color the painters put on her figure was that of purple.

Purple is a pigment produced by the processing of the shell haustellum brandaris and which gives an indelible deep reddish color.

After the Middle Ages, the artists began to use the celestial blue for the mantle: the blue of the cobalt – the color used by the Chinese in their high white-blue ceramics, at least from the Tang and Ming dynasties. El Greco portraits the Virgin Mary with a cobalt blue mantle in 1595. Virgin Mary, as a protector and mother of the earth, wore the blue, the color of the sky, the color that surrounds us and still symbolizes tranquility and peace.

When blue was used enough, the expensive painting of gold – which usually spread over yellow of cadmium – came back and strengthened, because “theosis” could be better defined with the brightness of the clothing. Dyeing with gold leaves always gave magnificence to the icons, especially when they were labeled reflecting the light of candles

Impressionist blue

The term Impressionism may have come from the work of Clont Monet Impression Sunrise. The main feature of Impressionism in painting is the vibrant colors (mainly with the use of basic colors), outdoor compositions, often at unusual angles and the emphasis on the representation of light. Impressionist painters wanted to capture the direct impression (impression) of an object or a daily image.

The impressionist walked out of the studios where they were only making portraits and still life, and they used a lot of blue color in order to impress the sky, the sea, the river of Seine.

Their first group exhibition was a scandal for the society of Paris, but it was not a long time since then when they established their style.

Impressionism’s influence spread throughout Europe and eventually the United States. Its originators were artists who rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions, or salons, and were consequently shunned by powerful academic art institutions. The impressionists aimed to capture the momentary, sensory effect of a scene – the impression of objects made on the eye in a fleeting instant. To achieve this effect, many Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the streets and countryside, painting en plein air. Impressionism records the effects of the massive mid-nineteenth-century renovation of Paris led by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city’s newly constructed railway stations; wide, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded streets; and large, deluxe apartment buildings. The works that focused on scenes of public leisure – especially scenes of cafés and cabarets – conveyed the new sense of alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first modern metropolis.

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