The Colour of Heaven

by Runcie, James

  ‘Where have you been, boy? I have nearly finished.’

  ‘I have travelled to the ends of the earth.’

  ‘And yet you live.’

  ‘I do.’

  Simone could scarcely believe it. Paolo wondered how long it would take him to ask about the stone. He wanted to wait, but realised that he could not do so. ‘I have found it.’

  The painter looked surprised, uncertain. ‘And what have you found?’

  For a moment Paolo stopped. Surely he could not have forgotten? Or was he joking?

  ‘The stone. The blue.’

  Simone raised his hand to his head in mock astonishment, pretending he had suddenly remembered. ‘You have? Then let me see it,’ he exclaimed. ‘But what have you got on your face?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘No, tell me now, tell me everything.’

  Paolo unfolded his knapsack and picked out a piece of lapis. ‘Look.’

  Simone picked it up. ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Don’t sound so disappointed.’

  Simone tried to scratch the stone with his fingernail, testing its durability. Then he took it into the light. ‘Like azure, only paler.’

  ‘It is pale now but I know that it can yield colour,’ said Paolo. ‘I have ground it down and I have seen it polished. This is not azurite or indigo, but the truest blue you longed to see. We will turn stone into pigment, paint into eternity.’

  ‘I can see the silver in the blue, and the gold. But the stone seems chalky. Look at the white.’

  ‘Crush it. Wash it. And separate it. Then mix it with tempera. The colour is not as it seems.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  Simone placed the lapis in a bronze mortar which he then covered to prevent the dust escaping. He took a heavy pestle and pounded the stone, breaking it into small fragments of shattered blue, flecked with silver and gold. Then he transferred the pieces into a smaller mortar and pulverised the stone until it was ready to sift.

  ‘It needs to be as refined as possible, finer than flour. We must make it last.’

  He placed a sieve over a brass bowl and scooped in the mixture, letting the powder fall, blue against gold. He repeated these actions four times, pounding and sifting, coaxing the colour, as if seeking the heart of the stone. They would create ultramarine – sea, sky, and eternity – as if it were the last missing colour on earth.

  Simone took another bowl and placed it over a low flame. He asked Paolo to measure out six ounces of pine rosin, three ounces of gum mastic, and three ounces of new wax for each pound of lapis lazuli. These were then blended, stirred, and mixed together over the heat until they melted.

  ‘We will make batches combining this mixture with the powdered stone,’ said Simone. ‘As this cools let us start another.’

  They began to pound the stone again, breaking the colour, releasing the blue. When the gum mastic mixture had cooled they strained it through a white linen cloth into a glazed washbasin. Simone asked Paolo to coat his hands with linseed oil and work the lapis powder and the gum mastic together into a dough, as if this blue were nothing less than the bread of life. They folded it over and over, coaxing the colour, releasing the violet hue at its heart.

  Then Simone added a warm bowl of alkaline water and vegetable ash. This was the lye. He began to pummel and squeeze the dough, his hands looking as if they bled blue blood.

  When the lye had turned its deepest ultramarine, they drew the liquid off into another container, and began again.

  ‘Let us see how much we can make. Take seven porringers,’ said Simone. ‘Lay them out. We will add as much lye as we can to this first bowl, letting it blue, and then decant it into each of those bowls. We will go on until the blue is exhausted. The first washing will, I think, be the darkest.’

  ‘When will it be ready?’ asked Paolo.

  ‘We must be patient. Imagine this is a feast, a banquet of colour. It will take time, and it must not spoil. The blue will sink through the lye and settle on the bottom of each bowl. Then, when it has done so, we will drain it, and collect the pigment. Only after it has dried can we add the egg yolks and make the tempera to paint.’

  ‘Do you think it will work?’

  The painter smiled. ‘I have never seen such a colour. Where did you find it?’

  ‘There was a woman,’ Paolo replied. ‘She could see more colour than any I have ever known. She could sense the colour between colours.’

  ‘She could hear it?’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I can taste it.’

  When the powdered ultramarine was finally ready, Simone cracked an egg, separated the yolk, and began to mix in the powder, folding the paste over and over with a knife. The golden yolk made the ultramarine swell into life, a deep, eternal blue, luminously rich, infinite in density.

  Now every memory of Aisha seemed to return to Paolo at once. The first time he had seen her, the stone, and the mountain; her eyes, her hair, and her laugh like silver. He imagined her voice, calling him, telling him that all would be well. Was it the last voice? Yes, he thought now, yes it is, it is the only voice.

  ‘Let me show the men,’ said Simone. ‘This is how we will paint heaven.’

  They crossed the square and entered the Palazzo Pubblico, climbing the great marble stairs to the Consiglio della Campana. A large scaffolding structure obscured much of the wall to the east where Simone’s assistants were working. Beneath the fresco one man was slaking quicklime, the steam rising around him. A boy carried buckets of water up a ladder and began to wet the wall in preparation for that day’s plastering; another cracked eggs for the tempera; while the paint grinder began to mix pigments into ready-made colour: malachite, verdigris, lime white, and giallorino.

  Paolo looked at the half-finished Maestà, the Virgin and Child accompanied by saints and angels in the Court of Heaven. The fresco was not just painted but carved, incised with coloured glass and raised surfaces. Simone had insisted on inserting glass directly into the plaster as jewels of the Virgin and the Christ child.

  The assistants smoothed the plaster over the underlying design, spreading just enough to cover that day’s painting, and Simone began to work on the face of St Paul. He balanced three dishes on a low stool, each containing a different flesh colour, and started picking out the halftones of the face, hands, and feet. Then he accented the shadows, blending one flesh colour into another. When he had finished, he turned his attention to the eyebrows, the relief of the nose, the top of the chin, and the eyelid.

  As Simone painted, Paolo remembered Aisha wiping the dust from his eyes.

  He looked at the fresco of the Virgin, staring out into the world with sorrow and with love, knowing both its secrets and its finitude.

  To the left of her throne stood St Catherine of Alexandria, John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene, and two archangels, Gabriel and Paul. To the right stood St Barbara, John the Baptist, St Agnes, and the archangels Michael and Peter. The four patron saints of Siena knelt below: Ansanus, Savinus, Crescentius, and Victor, accompanied by two angels offering roses and lilies to the Mother and Child, arrayed under a ceremonial canopy of silk.

  The people in the painting were stilled, their lives suspended in the great wake of time, rooted in eternity. This was the reward of faith, thought Paolo, an everlasting moment of stability and serenity, unchanging, forever calm, promising nothing less than the certain hope of resurrection. As he looked at the impassive figure of the Christ child, he knew once again that this life, lived in a moment, meant little when viewed from such a prospect. Perhaps Salek and Jacopo had been right to keep one foot in heaven throughout their lives, fearing that if they ever removed it they would lose their place for ever.

  ‘Now, the sky,’ Simone exclaimed. ‘We must apply the paint a secco, after the plaster has dried. We do not want to waste it.’

  ‘The Maestà is unlike anything I have ever seen,’ said Paolo. ‘Such stillness.’

 
‘And so it should be,’ Simone replied. ‘Perpetual calm, an end to suffering.’

  The late sun shone through the southern windows, illuminating the jewels in Christ’s halo, the brooch on Mary’s breast, and the tracery behind them. The painting began to shimmer, for it revealed different secrets throughout the day, echoing the rise and fall of the light, everlasting and yet never the same, a continually changing blaze of gold.

  Paolo handed Simone the bowl of ultramarine and watched him spread eternity over the walls. He had completed his task.

  This is how love should be, he thought: a great wash of colour across the blank plaster of our lives.

  He let his head fill with the blue and remembered sitting with Aisha, watching the night sky darken.

  The painters worked on, lit by candlelight as evening fell.

  Paolo walked out into the Campo and took off his glasses, letting his eyes rest in the gathering darkness. The first stars had begun to appear in the sky and the air had sharpened. The square was almost empty; a priest made his way home, an innkeeper tethered his horses, a baby was crying in the distance.

  He thought of his life: the days so long, and yet the years so short. What now lay before him? If he stayed in Siena then his future life could all be imagined: paint, gold, ultramarine; the certainty of belonging.

  And yet such comfort seemed nothing when set against the rage of love.

  Paolo considered what it might mean to leave once more, begin again, and fulfil his last promise. He knew that the truth of his affection was more powerful and more lasting than the familiarity of home. He had tested its absence and found that his life was barren without it.

  It was no longer possible to live apart from Aisha. He would go to her and cling to her.

  And he would bring up her child.

  His life was learning to love.

  SAR-I-SANG

  He saw Jamal first, playing with a catapult, throwing stones back into the river.

  The boy looked up at Paolo and stopped as if he only half remembered him. His eyes squinted against the light. Then he turned and scrambled back up across the scree and stone of the mountain.

  Paolo stood below and waited.

  At last he could see mother and son emerge from their tent: out of the darkness and into the light.

  Aisha placed her right arm around her child.

  Together they looked down at him and smiled.

  That is my family, Paolo thought. This is my life.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The main inspiration for this novel was the strange conjunction of the coming of ultramarine blue (which encouraged the development of landscape, perspective, and depth in Italian painting) with the invention of spectacles.

  The Maestà can still be seen in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. It is dated 7 June 1315 and Simone Martini was paid a total of 81 lire and 4 soldi for his efforts.

  The lapis lazuli mines are mentioned in Marco Polo’s Travels and, for much of the Renaissance, the principal source of ultramarine blue was Badakhshan (now northern Afghanistan). The colour was the ultimate luxury, more expensive than gold, and was adopted for the most sumptuous details of a painting, particularly the mantle of the Virgin. When the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio was commissioned to paint an Adoration of the Magi in 1485 it was specifically stated in his contract that ‘the blue must be of ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce’.

  The best early description of extracting the colour from lapis lazuli can be found in The Craftsman’s Handbook by Cennino Cennini, completed in 1437.

  The precise date of the arrival of eyeglasses in Italy is unknown but on 23 February 1306, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Fra Giordano di Rivalto delivered a sermon in which he observed: ‘It is not yet twenty years since the art of making spectacles, one of the most useful arts on earth …’ This would put the date at around 1287, which neatly coincides with Marco Polo’s reference to the use of eyeglasses by the elderly in China.

  Early Italian lenses were not made by glass-makers but by the cristallieri, a flourishing branch of Venetian goldsmiths dedicated to working on quartz or rock crystal. This was shaped and polished like a magnifying glass to make convex lenses for the correction of long sight. These ‘reading stones’ were single lenses, held in a frame made from horn or bone. After the invention of the double frame, probably in Florence in the 1290s, ‘eye-cylinders’ were born.

  Because these early lenses were used mainly for reading they soon came to be seen as a sign of scholarship and wisdom. Tommaso of Modena adds spectacles to his portrait of the Dominican Cardinal Hugh of St Cher at Treviso in 1362; while St Jerome has spectacles dangling from his lectern in Ghirlandaio’s painting of 1480. In a Heidelberg miniature of 1456 a piece of inspired anachronism takes place: even Moses wears specs.

  The development of concave lenses for short sight is extremely problematic, and the current received wisdom is that they took a further one hundred and fifty years to produce. Quite why spectacle makers took so long to realise that if a convex lens could aid long sight then a concave lens might aid short sight remains something of a mystery. It could be due to the difficulties of manufacture. Achieving flat glass that is thinner in the middle than at the edges is quite a challenge. It could also be due to the need for secrecy. Lenses distort normal sight and could have been regarded as heretical alterations to man and woman, created as God intended them to be. Magnifying glasses are acceptable for scholars because they aid the study of God’s word. But concave lenses for improved general sight raised suspicion. Some oculists as late as the nineteenth century believed that the use of spectacles with concave lenses might deform the eye (see A. Sorsby, A Short History of Ophthalmology, 2nd edn, London and New York, 1948, p. 73).

  Perhaps the secret was lost. It certainly seems strange that a concave mirror could be described by Euclid in the third century before Christ and that the Chinese could make both concave and convex mirrors in bronze as early as the first century BCE. (David Hockney compares it to the loss of the secret of concrete, which was known to the Egyptians and the Greeks but ‘disappeared’ between 430 and 1744.)

  It does seem possible that concave lenses were known and used earlier than the fifteenth century. The Chinese writer Shen Kua, for example, refers to concave burning mirrors as early as 1086; and both Alhazen and Roger Bacon were aware of their effect.

  Vincent Ilardi has shown (Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 29, Autumn 1976, Issue 3, pp. 341–60) that by the late-fifteenth century spectacles could be found to suit most basic visual needs (other than for astigmatism). In De Beryllo, written in 1450, Nicholas of Cusa describes beryl as a ‘bright, clear and transparent stone to which a concave as well as a convex form is given; by looking through it you reach what was previously invisible’.

  Glasses were often categorised by the age of the wearer, separated by five-year intervals, from the age of thirty (concave, myopic) to the age of seventy (convex, presbyopic). By 1462 Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan is ordering all kinds of spectacles from Florence (‘one dozen of those apt and suitable for distant vision, that is for the young; another [dozen] that are suitable for near vision, that is for the elderly; and the third [dozen] for normal vision’).

  The fact that people are even ordering glasses for normal vision shows that by 1462 spectacles are worn for looks alone, and then begin their intermittent history as a fashion accessory. I still find this extraordinary: but then I am one of those short-sighted people who was raised on wire-framed NHS spectacles held together by Sellotape. By the 1960s and 1970s this certainly wasn’t a stylish advantage. The brother of my first ever girlfriend once remarked: ‘I bet he’s no good. I bet he’s got red hair and glasses.’ This was, indeed, the case.

  ENVOIE

  from A Crowne of Sonnets dedicated to Love

  In this strange labourinth how shall I tourne?

  wayes are on all sides while the way I miss:

  if to the right hand, ther, in love I burn
e;

  let mee goe forward, therein danger is;

  If to the left, suspition hinders bliss,

  lett me turn back, shame cries I ought returne

  nor fainte though crosses with my fortunes kiss;

  stand still is harder, allthough sure to mourne;

  Thus let mee take the right, or left hand way;

  goe forward, or stand still, or back retire;

  I must thes doubts indure with out allay

  or help, butt traveile find for my best hire;

  yett that which most my troubled sense doth move

  is to leave all, and take the thread of love.

  From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth (1586–1651)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am indebted to Dr Peter Carter who first told me about the importance of ultramarine blue. Nick Sayers, my editor, encouraged the initial idea and I am ever grateful to him. Bridget Kendall alerted me to John Simpson’s report for Newsnight on the Sar-i-Sang lapis lazuli mine in Afghanistan, and I have been inspired by Patricia Wheatley and Jamie Muir’s work with Neil MacGregor in his BBC Television series ‘Making Masterpieces’.

  Many people have helped me in the writing of this book and I would particularly like to thank the following: Cecilia Amies, Peter and Diana Balfour, Jane Barringer, Mark Brickman, Stewart Conn, Nici Dahrendorf, David Godwin, Patrick Hughes, Marilyn Imrie, Lisa Jardine, Gabriele Jordan, Rosie Kellagher, Emily Kennedy, Olly Lambert, Allan Little, Juliette Mead, Fergus Meiklejohn, Jamie Muir, Susan Opie, Robert Roope, Charlotte Runcie, Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith, Jo Terry, Nigel Williams, and Caroline Wright.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James Runcie is a writer and film-maker. His first novel, The Discovery of Chocolate, was published to great acclaim and his films include Heaven, The Great Fire, My Father, Saturday/Sunday, Miss Pym’s Day Out and Childhood.