CANVASES, CARATS AND CURIOSITIES

The Etymology of Color: A Short History

Linguists, who study the development of language, have discovered that across every culture, words for colors largely emerge in the same order. First come black and white, vital symbols of the day-and-night cycle that continues to shape our worldview. Next is red, likely because of its association with elements essential to early human survival, such as blood and berries. It also happens to be a relatively accessible pigment, plausibly derived from fruits and clay. After this, yellow and green appear in no particular order.

But there is no mention of blue.

The Color Ancient Greeks Couldn't See: Blue

The Ancient Greek poet Homer describes the sea as “wine-dark,” a phrase that sounds curious to the modern ear. When the British statesman William Gladstone noticed this, he examined all of Homer’s works and found a total absence of blue in the poet’s descriptions of the Greek natural world. Gladstone theorized that the Greeks perceived color in terms of brightness rather than hue.

This makes sense when viewed through the lens of the natural world, where the sea can be deep, stormy and indeed, wine-dark. Gladstone later clarified that his findings did not suggest the Greeks were colorblind, only that they experienced color from a different perspective.

The absence of a distinct word for blue extends across much of the ancient world. Chinese, Hebrew, Old English and Sanskrit lack terms dedicated solely to the color, often grouping it with green, gray or black. The Sumerians defined colors through concrete references. The word for blue meant “lapis lazuli,” a luxurious mineral, while white was linked to light, black to storms, green-yellow to vegetation and orange-red to blood.

So why no blue? There are a few theories. Blue is rare in nature; bluish-appearing fruits are actually more purple or black. While the sky and sea are visibly blue, neither is a tangible resource. Even the blue on a butterfly’s wings isn’t true pigment but rather an illusion created by light refraction. Because natural blue pigments are scarce, many ancient civilizations simply didn’t use the color in art or design.

The Greeks and Romans even held a cultural disdain for blue, associating it with barbarism. The Celts may have painted their bodies blue with pigment likely made from the plant woad, a flowering plant native to the Mediterranean, so to many, the hue came to symbolize danger. In ancient Rome, blue garments were linked with mourning and grief.

Yet one civilization reveled in blue enough to name it: the ancient Egyptians.

The Sacred and Synthetic: Ancient Egypt

While ancient Egyptian society was remarkably advanced, they also enjoyed a unique advantage, a very tangible blue found in two beloved gemstones: lapis lazuli and turquoise. Exceptionally rare and highly prized, these stones held deep spiritual meaning. Lapis lazuli, in particular, was believed to guide the soul toward immortality and open the heart to love. It was also said to contain the very essence of the gods.

Perhaps for this reason, it adorned the funeral mask of Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BCE), and legend claims that Cleopatra herself used powdered lapis lazuli as eyeshadow. For the Egyptians, blue was a profoundly spiritual connection to the divine and to the life-giving floods of the Nile.

Both lapis lazuli and turquoise ranked among the most valuable stones in ancient Egypt, used in jewelry, vessels and funerary objects as early as the Predynastic Period (4400–3100 BCE). Acquiring these semi-precious stones was a costly and laborious process, inspiring the Egyptians to seek a more accessible substitute.

By heating a mixture of silica, lime, copper and an alkali, they invented the world’s first known synthetic pigment: Egyptian blue. This vivid color could be applied to stone, wood, plaster, papyrus and canvas, examples of which still survive today.

Egyptian blue first appeared around 3250 BCE. The earliest known use can be seen on an alabaster bowl now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The pigment continued to decorate tombs, wall paintings, furnishings, statues, cylinder seals, beads, scarabs, inlays and pottery through the Greco-Roman period, until the fourth century AD, when its secret recipe was lost.

The Blue Rush: The Lapis Lazuli Mines of Afghanistan

Despite the use of this early synthetic pigment, in the ancient world, lapis lazuli was more valuable than gold. While the Egyptians mined turquoise in the Sinai Peninsula as early as 3000 BCE, lapis lazuli had to be obtained through long-distance trade.

For centuries, the primary source of lapis lazuli has been Afghanistan. The earliest artifacts containing the stone were discovered at Bhirrana, the oldest site of the Indus Valley Civilization, dating back to around 7570 BCE. It was mined in the Sar-i Sang mines of Shortugai and other sites in Badakhshan Province as early as the 7th millennium BCE, and remarkably, those mines are still active today.

When Marco Polo visited the region, he wrote, “There is a mountain in that region where the finest azure [lapis lazuli] in the world is found. It appears in veins like silver streaks.”

As early as the Neolithic age, lapis lazuli was extracted from Afghan mines and exported along ancient trade routes to the Mediterranean world and South Asia. By the time of the Sumerians (circa 4500–1900 BCE), the material, though rare and costly, was already being crafted into seals, jewelry and sculpture.

The first recorded use of lapis lazuli as a naturally applied pigment appears in cave paintings from the 6th and 7th centuries CE in Afghanistan and in Buddhist temples near the Badakhshan mines.

Its reach extended even farther east. Lapis lazuli pigment appears in Chinese paintings from the 10th and 11th centuries and later in Japanese woodblock prints, where it continued to be used into the early 20th century.

So, despite the lack of a word for it, it seems the ancient world was fairly blue after all, and perhaps even more so than we once realized.

Rethinking the Paleolithic Palette: New Discoveries

Recently, a remarkable discovery has upended modern understanding of the Paleolithic palette, long thought to consist mainly of blacks and reds. For fifty years, a small stone believed to have served as an oil lamp sat quietly on display in a German museum. Excavated in the late 1970s from the Mühlheim-Dietesheim site, it was only recently found to bear traces of the earliest blue pigment ever found, dating to the Upper Paleolithic, between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago.

In 2024, researchers revealed that the stone contains microscopic residues of blue pigment dating to roughly 13,000 years ago and predating the earliest known use of blue in Europe by about 8,000 years. The team was so astonished by the hue that they initially joked it must be modern ink spilled onto the artifact.

However, with the help of geoscientists, they determined that the pigment contained copper and eventually identified it as azurite. Rocks near the archaeological site also contain azurite, a deep-blue copper mineral, and chemical analysis confirmed the pigment likely originated from the same region.

Interestingly, archaeologists have found evidence that people in this part of Germany were mining for other minerals, such as flint and the red pigment ochre, during the same period. While this discovery answers some questions, it raises many more about the colors of the ancient world. If azurite was used for activities that leave no archaeological trace, like body decoration or fabric dyeing, there may have been more blue in prehistory than we can ever prove.

Blue as the Heavens: Medieval and Renaissance Art

Perhaps the French Abbot Suger would agree. The friend and counselor to Kings Louis VI and Louis VII of France in the 12th century, Suger saw both the earthly and the divine as suffused with blue. He believed all colors held spiritual power, with blue, above all, reflecting divine light.

It was around this time that the Virgin Mary began to be depicted wearing blue, symbolizing her purity. In an age before printed books and widespread literacy, color and symbols helped identify figures in biblical art, and Mary’s blue robe became her visual signature. As devotion to the Virgin spread through the Middle Ages, so too did the popularity of the color in art and fashion.

In Early Modern Europe, blue dye for textiles was made from woad. During the Middle Ages, its cultivation in England, France and Germany brought extraordinary wealth to many regions. Because the dye was costly and prone to fading, it became a luxury reserved for the elite. While the working class wore browns and greens, the kings wore blue.

Artists of the period also turned to mineral pigments. Azurite was commonly used in painting, though it darkened with time. More prized, and far more costly, was lapis lazuli, imported from the historic Afghan mines during the Crusades. When ground into pigment, it became ultramarine. The process was demanding: if ground too finely, it turned gray, and it was not particularly lightfast.

Yet when prepared correctly, ultramarine was worth more than gold. Only the wealthiest patrons could afford it; Michelangelo reportedly left The Entombment unfinished because he could not afford ultramarine.

Ultramarine became one of the most enduring colors in Western art. By the 14th and 15th centuries, trade routes had expanded, especially through Venice, making the pigment more accessible to artists. During the Renaissance, as intellectualism flourished, painters used blue more subtly to express the spiritual, the celestial and the divine presence of God.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, indigo emerged as another important blue dye, imported along the Silk Road and used for clothing. However, it came at a steep human cost. The indigo trade fueled European colonial competition, the transatlantic slave trade and even partially financed the American Revolutionary War. In 1859, the “Indigo Revolt” erupted in Bengal when oppressed farmers rose against their plantation owners.

As centuries before in Egypt, scientists and chemists began to ask whether these rare and costly blues could be recreated synthetically.

The Chemical Revolution: 18th Century Breakthroughs

In 1703, the dye-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach was allegedly working on a cochineal red pigment when he overlooked that one of his materials, potash, had been contaminated with animal blood. Assuming that red mixed with red would simply yield more red, he proceeded, but the result was an unexpected vibrant blue. The animal blood triggered a chemical reaction that produced iron ferrocyanide, later known in German as Berliner Blau and in English as Prussian blue.

The earliest known use of Prussian blue in painting is found in The Entombment of Christ by Pieter van der Werff. By around 1710, painters at the Prussian court were already using the pigment, and soon after, it reached Paris, where artists embraced it in their works.

This discovery emerged at the height of the Age of Enlightenment. As knowledge flowed across Europe, so too did Prussian blue, its influence extending beyond painting and revealing the harmony between artistic experimentation and scientific discovery.

The English astronomer Sir John Herschel later discovered Prussian blue’s unique sensitivity to light, which could be harnessed to reproduce images. His technique proved useful to architects, who could now easily create multiple copies of their building plans, now iconically known as “blueprints.”

Cobalt blue, the modern synthetic pigment, was invented in 1803 as a rival to ultramarine. Produced through sintering cobalt(II) oxide with aluminum(III) oxide at high temperatures, it yielded a bright, stable blue. Long before this discovery, cobalt compounds had been used as colorants in glass and ceramics, including the cobalt oxide that gave Chinese blue-and-white porcelain its enduring beauty beginning in the late eighth or early ninth century.

Still, artists longed for ultramarine’s unmatched depth of color.

In 1824, France’s Société d’Encouragement offered a 6,000-franc prize to anyone who could create a synthetic version of the costly pigment. Within weeks of each other, a French chemist and a German professor both succeeded, sparking debate over who deserved the credit. Predictably, the French committee awarded the prize to their compatriot and christened the new pigment “French Ultramarine.” Vincent van Gogh later used both French ultramarine and cobalt blue to create the swirling sky in The Starry Night (1889).

Synthetic indigo followed in 1880, soon displacing the natural crop entirely by 1913. Durable cotton twill known as jean was first woven in 17th-century Genoa, Italy, and later imitated in the French city of Nîmes (de Nîmes, or “denim”). Dyed with indigo, the material proved strong, washable and ideal for workwear. In 1873, Levi Strauss revolutionized it by patenting metal rivets to reinforce the seams, giving birth to the modern blue jean.

The Modern Blues: 20th-21st Century

From 13,000 years ago to today, humanity’s love of blue has never faded. In the United States, it remains the most popular favorite color, no longer reserved for kings.

Between 1901 and 1904, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso became engrossed in his famed Blue Period, using shades of Prussian blue to convey grief, isolation and introspection. Around the same time, Marc Chagall infused his dreamlike scenes with symbolic washes of blue, a color he called “the color of love.”

Innovation continues even in the modern age. In 2009, Mas Subramanian and his team at Oregon State University accidentally discovered a new pigment while experimenting with materials for electronics. When a sample containing yttrium, indium and manganese was heated, it turned an unexpectedly vivid color now known as YInMn Blue. Non-toxic, lightfast and incredibly stable, it’s the first new blue pigment discovered in over two centuries.

YInMn Blue was finally released to consumers in 2021, offering a brilliant new way to capture the iconic hue. And perhaps, just beyond the horizon, veiled in atmospheric perspective, more blues still await.

Once reserved for pharaohs, emperors and the divine, blue has traveled from ancient luxury to everyday essential. Explore this enduring hue and more extraordinary pigments at M.S. Rau.