The Quality of Blue

Pliny The Elder of ancient Rome wondered why blue had not been listed as an elemental color by the Greeks…only black( from soot and burned resin), red ( vermilion, the red that even Monet and Turner would rely upon and act as a standard for red until 1910 until the introduction of cadmium red but), red brown( (Sinope), and yellow.  But, Pliny did not have access to all of Aristotle or he would have seen that Aristotle described seven basic colors.  In Aristotle things get tricky because, the history and meaning of “blue” is slippery.  For Greeks the sea was not blue as it is iconically coded for us.  Remember that for the Greeks and Romans there were four basic elements which had four corresponding elemental colors, yellow for the color of the Earth ( a brownish yellow because there was no chrome or cadmium yellow then) , red for fire, green for water ( not blue as we now code our maps for water but, their green was probably a blue-green because, according to ancient Greek writers the sea could be black, inky dark green, and a variety of other colors often with green as a base), the air, sky or cosmos was a deep dark blue for them, a sensation we get when studying the night sky.  The sky of the cosmos was considered the try sky color because, it was not affected by Apollo’s light ( the sun) and because, the night sky held the hierarchy of all the gods in their various locations.  These four primary color/element pairings would last as iconic color references for Western cultures through our present day.

If you were to speak Italian you would notice that the word for blue corresponds more directly with the ancient Greek understanding of blue than that of the average contemporary Chicagoan or St. Louisan. Blue in Italian is deep and navy-like.  The lighter colors for blue are celeste for the day-time clear sky or azure for the more twilight blue ( between celeste and blue). Apart from the reference to the deep dark blue/black of the night sky, the home of the gods, ancient Romans and Greeks saw that anyone robed in a dark blue must have an association with divinity, or divine authority and infinity.  Consequently, the Byzantine Empress Theodora would be depicted in dark blue as symbolic of her maternal, divine, infinite authority.  Christian artists of the mediaeval  period would persist in this notion of clothing the divine female,  Mary the Madonna, ( see examples 1 and 2) in deep ultramarine blue.   The name “ultramarine” refers to transporting the precious lapis lazuli mineral across the sea from Afghanistan to Rome where it would be ground into pigment. It does not refer to the color of the sea as you might first think.  Romans were familiar with the color but, because of its expense they tended to use indigo as a base for their blue.  Synthetic ultramarine blue (an inexpensive substitute for the ground lapis lazuli) would not be available until  the early mid-19th century. There were other blues available to artists in other parts of the globe such as  ancient Egyptian blue. If you were working in the time of Rembrandt in Amsterdam in the mid 1600s you would have been able to use the ancient color azurite, a copper based blue( see turquoise), or smalt ( a ground blue glass), or woad ( like indigo a plant) or even black thinned with white on a white ground appears blue tinted especially when juxtaposed to iron oxide colors. The ubiquitous Prussian blue would come into service in the early 1700s ( about 1710) and would arrive under various names ( Antwerp blue and others). Cobalt blue ( favored by Turner as was Prussian blue earlier in his career; see examples 3 and 4. # 3 is a watercolor with Prussian blue and #4 is an oil using cobalt blue)  would wait to become a painter’s pigment until about 1810. Now, I want to show you how blue may affect your  perception of space and atmospheric perspective. Da Vinci observed that the distance in nature shifted toward blue. In my first example of the skyline of NYC you notice that the foreground is not only darker it is redder.   The painting fades in value and acquires more whitening( it becomes a tint) and shifts to become a greener blue in the distance.  In my two examples of Pemaquid Point, the watercolor is first.   The combination is again ultramarine and azurite blue.  The gum arabic effect on the pigment is different than that of the oil paint’s base of poppy, linseed, or walnut oil and gives a less red note in watercolor with the same pigment than in oil.  Ultramarine blue is redder than Cobalt which is less green than Cerulean.  The greener blues include Manganese, Phthalo blue and Cerulean along with the cobalt blue which favored by the Impressionists.( see last example of Monet using Cobalt blue).