How to define the meaning of color in medieval & renaissance. – Louvre Abu Dhabi

#LouvreAbuDhabi #ultramarineblue #gold
How to define the meaning of color in medieval & renaissance. – Louvre Abu Dhabi

In the Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance, painters were in the same guild as pharmacists because they both ground things up and mixed them together. The things that were local were the least expensive things, and the things that needed to be imported from a distance were, of course, the most expensive things, and the most expensive thing of all was ultramarine blue, which was created by grinding up a lapis lazuli. The reason why it's even called ultramarine blue is that it comes from very far away from a quarry that is in modern-day Afghanistan. In Italian, it was called 'ultramarina' meaning from over the seas. Since people recognized that certain colors were more visually dazzling or more expensive to make, those colors would only be used for the most important parts of the painting. Partly for economic reasons, but also for symbolic ones. So, for instance, that ultramarine blue, that very rich, deep, almost purple-y blue, was only reserved for the most important figures or the most important parts of the painting. Usually in a religious painting, for the dress of the Virgin Mary.

This is a painting of Saint Andrew by Simone Martini. It's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this is a really great example of talk about how gold was used frequently up until the early Renaissance, specifically or most widely in religious images, to give them a kind of otherworldly quality to make them seem more spectacular and spiritual. This is real gold in the background. The figure is painted with egg tempera in the manner that we discussed before, so if you look carefully you can see the hatching technique that we talked about, but in the background we see gold, and that is, in fact, real gold. It's gold leaf and the way that someone in the artist's workshop would prepare that is, by pounding gold very, very, very thin.

They used a very sticky, red clay to attach the gold to the surface of the painting. This actually served a couple of purposes. One thing is that it was sticky, so it helped the gold to stay where it was supposed to go, but the other thing was that it was important it was red because the gold was pounded so thin. It's essentially a little bit transparent, and the red clay underneath helps give the gold a very, very warm glowing tone, rather than the colder yellow that it would otherwise have. I can actually see that, especially on the left side of the painting. That's exactly why this is a great example to use to talk about gold leaf because you can see the red clay coming through a little bit since the painting is about 700 years old and the surface has degraded a little.

Why would this degrade is? It could be from over-cleaning, probably. In fact, that's an important reason to think about why they used gold, because the churches and the small chapels that these kinds of paintings were displayed in were, of course, not lit with electrical lights. But were primarily lit by candlelight burning in front of these objects, and so that gold, especially with the red clay behind it, would create an incredibly reflective, glowing surface that really contributed, again, to the other worldly quality of the represented subject. It must have been beautiful because you have the flickering flames, actually, and it would sort of dance against the surface. that was largely the point of religious paintings up until the early 1400s

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