The Ultramarine Blue Blues
These are the show notes that accompany episode 91 of the show.
Lady with a Lapis Lazuli Bowlby Guido Reni – 1638-1639
For thousands of years man has desired a true blue for art. The problem was  it was very rare. The only place to get vibrant blue was to extract it from a rare rock called Lapiz Lazuli. I When I say rare, I mean rare.  Lapiz Lazuli  could only be found in a single cave in Afghanistan. The church controlled the use of blue only for specific things because of it’s value and scarcity. But blue fever made artists rebel and the rest is history.

Lapiz Lazuli this is the  Rare source for ultramarine blue.
Ultramarine is one of the oldest of the artists’ pigments that we still  use to this day. It is a brilliant blue that has  been used in paints for at least fifteen hundred years.  For thousands of  years it was extracted from the natural gemstone lapis lazuli which is a type of limestone containing a blue mineral named lazurite.
ultramarine blue has an intensity that varies depending on the type of paint  it is used for.
 
lapiz lazuli processed pigment
There is no source of lapis lazuli in Europe. It  had to be imported into the West and once  there,  had to go through 50 separate stages  to separate from it for a 10% yield of the pigment. Ultramarine as a result became the most expensive of artists’ color.  It’s value was more than  that of gold.  So it was used very sparingly.  It was so valuable that the Church stepped in to control it. The Vatican  decreed that the  highest quality ultramarine was  only  for painting the robes of Mary and the infant Christ.
 
Ultramarine was replaced by the cheaper copper carbonate mineral azurite for a while but  was back in favor by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  In most situations the patron bought the pigment separately for any picture he had commissioned. This resulted in a little cheat where cheap ass  azurite was  used for “underpainting” the ultramarine so less would be used to produce the brilliant blue color. This of course killed the brilliance of ultramarine.
 
Giotto and the heavenly blue Arena Chapel
Giotto’s Arena Chapel 1305 Here Blue represented Heaven.
 
 
Ambrogio di Bondone AKA Giotto painted every square inch of the interior of  the Scrovegni family’s Chapel between 1303-6 in Padua.
This was considered the most beautiful chapel ever painted until the Sistine. Giotto had his work cut out for him. He needed to figure out  how to organize, design, and paint a series of stories about Christ and the Virgin Mary and  give an aesthetic and clearly legible story to a large sacred space.  In just under three years he presented the chapel as an illuminated manuscript through which the viewer could follow the dramatic story and simultaneously admire his gorgeous illustrations .
The betrayal of Jesus with a Kiss from Judas.
 
His repeated uses of blue showed just how “holy” and “rich” his patron’s little chapel was. This is one of the most important rooms in Western Art. The entire ceiling was painted blue,