For centuries, the bluest blue was worth more than gold.
True ultramarine was ground from lapis lazuli mined in the mountains of Afghanistan and shipped across the world. Renaissance painters sometimes used it only for the Virgin Mary's robes, and patrons wrote it into their contracts. Blue meant money long before it meant calm.
The name ultramarine comes from the Latin ultramarinus, 'beyond the sea', because the stone it was made from came from far away. For centuries, the finest lapis lazuli came from mines in the Sar-i Sang valley in the Badakhshan region of what is now Afghanistan, which have been worked for thousands of years.
Turning the stone into paint was laborious. Simply grinding lapis gives a greyish powder. Medieval artisans developed a process in which the ground stone was mixed into a dough of wax, resin and oil and kneaded in a mild lye solution, which drew out the pure blue particles and left impurities behind. The first extraction gave the richest, most expensive pigment.
In Renaissance Italy, ultramarine could cost as much as gold, or more. Commissions sometimes specified how much ultramarine a painter must use, and it was often reserved for the most important figures, especially the robes of the Virgin Mary. Some artists were said to have strained their budgets on it; Johannes Vermeer used natural ultramarine lavishly, even in the shadows of his paintings.
The price only collapsed in the 19th century. In 1824, a French society offered a prize for a synthetic version, and in 1828 the chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet produced one, known as French ultramarine. Suddenly the colour of heaven was cheap. Perhaps that is part of why blue now feels everyday rather than precious.
Source: Wikipedia — Ultramarine · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
