Michelangelo could have used a cheaper blue mineral8 called azurite to finish his painting if he had wanted to: indeed, he did use it to paint Mary Magdalene’s strange brown dress. Azurite was sometimes called “citramarino,” indicating that it came from this side of the seas, and Michelangelo would probably have got his from Germany. But azurite is a byproduct of copper mines, and it is the sister stone to malachite. So it naturally tends toward the green side of the spectrum, whereas ultramarine veers toward violet. The difference can be summed up in how artists used the two paints: ultramarine to give height to the skies, and azurite to give depth to the seas. The cheaper pigment was also much less stable: Mary Magdalene’s robe in The Entombment9 was never intended to be that unfetching shade of olive; it had just faded that way— from the color of the sea to the color of seaweed.
It seems stupid in retrospect, but I was surprised, seeing my first piece of raw lapis, to find how very blue it was. Until then I had seen only polished stones, and not the best, and they had always seemed rather dull. The other surprise was the stars. All lapis lazuli contains speckles of iron pyrite—fool’s gold—and it makes the best stones look like the firmament. No wonder some people think it is holy: it is a rock picture of the universe. And looking at it, I was reminded not of Michelangelo’s painting, but of another more startling canvas hanging in the room next door.
It is Bacchus and Ariadne, painted by the Venetian artist Titian in 1523. I love it partly for its colors, which seem to come from a jewelry box not a paintbox, but mostly because it is the embodiment of pure lust, so always makes me smile. It shows the god Bacchus coming back from India with a drunken entourage; behind him a fat middle-aged cherub lolls over a donkey, while a debauched centaur waves the remnants of a creature he has just eaten for lunch. Suddenly our half-naked love-god sees Ariadne, grieving that her ne’er-do-well boyfriend Theseus has sailed off into the distance. With a single lascivious bound Bacchus flings himself toward her, and she half turns, to see her destiny changing. “Forget that wretch,” Bacchus is shouting. “I’m here and I will give you the world—and the sky and stars as well.”
The sky is the finest ultramarine, and in the top left corner is a constellation of seven stars. This bit of the picture has no perspective; it is almost like a still from a Disney cartoon, and I like to think that this is not because the conservators rubbed the canvas too hard, but because Titian wanted to show it as a fantasy, a mirage of what Ariadne could have if she followed her passion where it led. In 1968, when the painting was restored, the transformed color of the sky whipped up a storm far fiercer than any Turner prize-winner has achieved. The general public didn’t like the look. They felt it was too bright and preferred the off-greens and browns of the discolored varnish. Titian, it was argued, was a man of taste: he could never have chosen that gaudily shimmering blue.
They were in excellent critical company. Even Michelangelo had thought Titian’s colors a little too much. According to his biographer, Georgio Vasari, in 1546 the older man visited the younger in his studio in Rome. Michelangelo commented afterward that he liked the coloring, but “it is a pity that in Venice one was not taught from the beginning to draw well.” It was an expression of an important artistic dispute in sixteenth-century Italy. Ostensibly the argument was between disegno and colore—drawing and coloring. But more fundamentally it was about how to live life. Where—as I had seen in The Entombment10—Michelangelo planned every element of his composition and would only add colors when he knew exactly what was going where, Titian’s compositions used to evolve as he stood in front of his canvases, palette laden with paint. It is the division between spontaneity and careful planning, between rash Dionysus (or Bacchus, of course, for the Romans and for Titian, who may have been making a statement) and calm Apollo—and the benefits of each approach have been debated passionately over the years, partly because it is an argument about the nature of passion and creativity itself.
We sat in the merchant’s shop—among those very same shimmering blues that Titian had loved and the 1960s British gallery-goers had feared—and talked. In the late 1970s, before the Soviet Union invaded, lapis lazuli was a popular stone among Kabul’s middle classes. People made glitzy jewelry out of it and they kept the stones as savings, along with silver coins. In the past few years the shopkeeper had been seeing both lapis and silver arrive on Chicken Street with increasing regularity and at lower prices. “Families have been getting rid of their treasures,” he said. “We are all getting poor in Kabul.” He told us about the blue mines, and about how women were banned from Sar-e-sang. Once the mines were productive, he said, and engaged thousands of men. But then for a few months almost no lapis had come out of Badakhshan. “I don’t know why,” he said. I thought of a story I had heard from a foreign correspondent the night before. There had been folktales of the lapis veins drying up under the chaotic mujahideen rule in the early 1990s, “because, people said, the mine itself objected to the regime.”
Suddenly the megaphone from the mosques started to call the faithful—or at least the obedient—to afternoon prayers. The merchant quickly pulled down the shutters and we sat there in the half-dark, not speaking. If he had been caught doing business at prayer time he would have been beaten, he said. “It’s enough to make you not believe.” When prayer time was over he rolled up the shutters. A Toyota pick-up—the unofficial vehicle of the Taliban—had parked outside the shop. The shopkeeper looked relieved to see there was nobody in the car: the government thugs had evidently gone to look for someone else.
So now I had my stones—although not enough for a whole robe probably, just a weeping handkerchief’s worth. What should I do with them to make them into paint? I wondered, consulting Cennino Cennini. He is usually so scathing about pigments: one is too poisonous, another too fugitive, another is useless on fresco. But with ultramarine he goes into raptures—“a color illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would still not surpass.” However, to get paint from the stone was almost as hard as getting blood.
Lapis lazuli is a complex clump of minerals, including haüyne, sodalite, nosean and lazurite. In the best grades there is more sulphur, the yellow element curiously making the stone more violet, and in the worse grades there is more calcium carbonate, turning it gray. To make it into paint all these impurities—including the sparkling pyrite stars I liked so much—have to go. To achieve that, the color-maker had to be like a baker, lovingly kneading a dough of finely powdered lapis, resin, wax, gum and linseed oil for up to three days. To coax out the blue, our artist-cook put the dough into a bowl of lye (wood ash) or water, and then kneaded it with two sticks, squeezing and pressing it for hours until the liquid was saturated with blue. He then separated the blue into a clean bowl, and—leaving it to dry into a powdery pigment—started again with fresh lye and the same ball of resin. The first pressing was the best—a virgin pressing for a virgin’s gown. The final pressings (of what would now be a ball of mainly pyrite and calcite11) were called “ashes,” and were less beautiful and much less valuable.
BAMIYAN
I still yearned to reach the mines, which I had begun to call “my mines.” And now I wanted to find out why the supplies had stopped. But my understanding of Afghan geography was rudimentary, and of the movements of the front line even more basic. Sar-e-sang was a thousand kilometers away by road. More importantly it was on the other side of the fighting in that corner of the country that was controlled by the opposition, the Persian-speaking mujahideen. There was no way I could get there that year to find the paint for Michelangelo’s canvas—commanders were shifting sides every week and it was dangerous. I was going to have to try again the following year.
But there was another paint mission on this side of the line. The earliest recorded use of ultramarine was just a mountain away, in the town of Bamiyan, where two giant Buddha sculptures were said to have auras around their heads, painte
d in frescos of lapis lazuli. We wanted to go and see. And we were lucky, we were just in time: a few months later they would be dust.
The first difficulty was getting there. The Taliban were not giving passes to United Nations staff that week, and our host could therefore not go with us. So we accepted an invitation from a French charity called Solidarité. This group organized two types of aid—giving food in exchange for labor, and giving money. A bundle of the equivalent of even ten British pounds in the overinflated Afghan currency was as thick as this book—the biggest note was worth about five pence—so money was bulky to carry, and vulnerable to highway robbers. Hoping fervently that this was not the cash van, we jumped on board.
When war was just something that happened in other countries and roads had tarmac on them, the town of Bamiyan would have been a few easy hours from the capital. But after two decades of fighting, it was a day’s journey across two passes, and past so many derelict tanks that the Afghans laughed when we wanted to stop and photograph them. “If you take photos of every ruined tank in Afghanistan then you will never leave the country,” one former fighter turned charity worker joked. It was on this road that I had my most dangerous experience in Afghanistan. Not from the kohleyed Taliban, who waved us through every sentry post with various degrees of graciousness. But as I squatted in a ditch at the first “privacy” point we had seen in four hours—at the top of a pass—I noticed I was just a meter away from an unexploded rocket. It would have been a bad way to go.
We passed many beggars: men and boys who halfheartedly moved stones around the road all day, and waited for vehicle drivers to throw a few Afghan notes for them to chase in the wind. On the same road I also saw two travellers in a timeless scene. He was walking, she was riding a donkey, and her burka—that oppressive garment that covers the face and body, allowing women to look out on the world only through delicately laced bars—was sky blue. This was no doubt because it was the most fashionable color that season—burkas came in blue, olive, black, gold and white, and blue was the prettiest. But, with that color having such a potent symbolism when worn by veiled women on donkeys, it was impossible not to think of them as Mary and Joseph, travelling for miles to give birth to Christianity.
The Virgin Mary has not always worn blue. In Russian icons she is more often in red, while the Byzantine artists in the seventh century or so usually showed her in purple.12 Sometimes she is in white too—she had a big wardrobe. The trouble with color symbolism, or perhaps the joy of it, is that it is not a constant. Red could be for the birth, purple for her mystery; blue could dress the Queen of Heaven in the color of heaven; white is her innocence, black her grief. If they had wanted to, artists could have dressed her in the whole rainbow, although I don’t know of any who did. Instead they shifted their thinking to what would honor her, rather than resemble her compassion; and they often decided this on the basis of cost and rarity. In fifteenth-century Holland, Mary often wore scarlet because that was the most expensive cloth; the earlier Byzantine choice of purple was similarly because this was a valuable dye, and only a few people were important enough to carry it off. So when, in around the thirteenth century, ultramarine arrived in Italy as the most expensive color on the market, it was logical to use it to dress the most precious symbol of the faith.
And from that moment it became a reserved color in Christian churches. Even today, Catholic priests change their vestments according to the occasion: they can be black, red, purple, green or white, but only in Spain, and only for one day a year—the Festival of the Immaculate Conception—are they blue. Black explicitly represents death; red is fire or love or the blood of martyrs; violet is penitence; green is everlasting life; white symbolizes the pure union of the rays of light. But since Pope Pius V standardized liturgical color coding in the sixteenth century, blue has always been reserved for the Mother of Christ, not for the men who serve her. On the other hand, in parts of France and Spain, even until the twentieth century, parents of a sick child would promise the Virgin Mary that if the child recovered, he or she would be dressed in blue from hat to boot in gratitude. In French this was called “enfant voué au bleu.”
And as we arrived in the town of Bamiyan we mentally gave thanks as well—to whatever deities may have been looking after us. The United Nations had warned us the night before that the roads were not safe, but as we looked around we knew already that it had been worth the risk. The place was spectacular. The valley, in the shadow of the Grandfather Mountain, Koh-I-Babu, was fringed with sandstone, and we could see the two enormous Buddhas—55 and 35 meters high—guarding it, with their archways looking like sentry posts. When they were built, fourteen and thirteen centuries ago, this valley would have been packed with pilgrims and artisans, mixing with traders from Turkey and China. It was the end of the Gandharan period, and Bamiyan was full of some of the richest Buddhist art in the world. Thousands of monks lived there, and the grottoes were full of frescos and incense-filled shrines.
But when we arrived in 2000 there were just the Buddhas left, and they were in bad shape. A few months before, a commander had attacked them, saying they were pagan idols. His men shot rockets at the smaller Buddha’s face and groin. The larger statue was luckier: the men had just got to the point of suspending burning tractor tires from the top of its head when the order came from Taliban headquarters in Kandahar to stop the destruction. But by then the eyes were blackened, the effect one of haunting suffering as this lonely giant gazed blindly over the valley where once it had been worshiped.
They were just plain stucco, although once—according to local mythology—one was painted blue, the other red. They used to have wooden arms that lifted for prayer at sunset: the rattling of chains and pulleys must have quietened the noise of the bazaar every evening. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, as Islam spread, the meaning of the statues was forgotten. “We only know that once upon a time the big Buddha had eyes you could see from the other side of the valley, they shone so brightly,” said an Afghan charity worker over dinner that night. Were they blue? I wondered. “I believe they were green,” he answered. “Emeralds perhaps.”
The next morning we were given permission to visit the big Buddha; the other was only a few hundred meters away but it was under the control of another commander. We climbed up past the military post, then up steep hairpin paths cut into the startlingly orange sand. At the top we walked through low tunnels, and then out onto the Buddha’s head, which was big enough for a picnic. People had stubbed cigarettes out on it, and at the center—at the point that Buddhists would call the crown chakra—there was a hole for dynamite.
It was an extraordinary undertaking. How many artists had lain there on their backs, painting meditations all over the walls and the protective arched roof, praying that the 60-meter-high scaffolding was just wobbling, not tumbling? The frescos were faded, and some had crumbled when we saw them. But the Gandharan art—always so influenced by Greek ideas of what is beautiful—was extraordinarily delicate, with the draperies falling in classical folds. A series of Buddhas sat along both sides of the wall above us, each with their hands in a different meditation position, and each encased in a rainbow circle. And there, striped between yellow ochre and white lead and red vermilion (the Gandharans had idiosyncratic notions of the order of the rainbow), was the lapis I had travelled to see. The ultramarine still shone—just—against the ruined walls: and it was extraordinary to think that this was the first known use of the paint anywhere.13 The Egyptians had used it as stones, but not as pigment—their own blue paints had been based on glass that had been ground up finely into powder. And I wondered then, as I sat on the head of the great Buddha of Bamiyan, whether it was in that valley far below us that somebody once, fourteen centuries ago, had sat experimenting with blue powder and brown glue, and had discovered—by adding wood ash perhaps—how to make lapis lazuli into paint.
Those Buddhas and frescos were destroyed eleven months later. No drill holes and dynamite this time. The Taliban used
rockets for two days of bombardment, and allowed their photography rule to be broken, sending out images of bare arches where once there had been two guardians of a forgotten faith. In their week of fame and destruction the statues were seen and discussed by people all round the world: people who had never heard of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were shocked that now they would be unable to see them for themselves. On most levels it was a terrible cultural tragedy. But on one level it was not. Buddhism is a faith that understands impermanence. When else in their long history could these two vast and armless trunks of stone standing in the desert have reminded so many people in so many countries that nothing lasts forever?
A GREMLIN BLUE
Half the ultramarine in the world must have passed through Bamiyan, and along parallel roads to the north and south. And there was another blue that travelled through the town the other way, from Persia and through into China. It was not quite so valuable, but it was almost as valued. It came from mines in Persia— now Iran—and in English it was called “cobalt.” Calling it “cobalt” is rather like calling it “goblin”: in German folk legend Kobald was the name of a vicious sprite, who lived in the earth and resented intruders. It is a decent metal on its own, but it attracts a nasty companion in the form of arsenic, so the European silver miners who often came across it hated it, gave it the name of a gremlin, and for centuries they threw it away before it ate their feet and attacked their lungs. It was not simply the arsenic which made it seem a mysterious force: in the seventeenth century people discovered its propensity to change color on heating and used it in invisible inks; when the plain paper was held over a fire it would magically turn green where secret messages had been traced.
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