Color: A Natural History of the Palette (40 page)

Lo Kao was made neither from leaves nor berries but from bark—which the Europeans do not seem to have thought of. Perhaps this is not surprising: it was an astonishingly complex process. The bark would be boiled for several days and then a length of cloth would be thrown into the mixture. Several days later the cloth—now brown—would be removed from the bark broth in the evening, and left to dry through the sunshine of the next morning. When the clock struck midday the cloth was brought inside, and in those places where the sun had touched it, it would be green. The cloth was then boiled again until the green pigment soaked off into the pot. The sediment was collected, dried, exported and sold for extraordinarily high prices.
²⁶

But coal-tar dyes were waiting in the wings, as I would find in my search for violet, and Chinese Green was so expensive that it was one of the first dyes to be completely displaced by synthetics in the 1870s. Indigo and madder lasted a little while longer in the world’s dye vats, but Lo Kao green vanished from them almost immediately. There was a rapid procession of new colors: iodine green arrived in 1866, methyl green in 1874, and synthetic “malachite green” dye was discovered twice, apparently independently, in 1877 and 1878. They have all been displaced by better, cheaper dyes since, although people still use malachite green today (to get rid of mold on goldfish, although it has the rather unfortunate effect of leaving them as greenfish for a while).

The new synthetic green dyes headed straight from European laboratories toward Asia. For me their impact is summed up in a carpet I saw in Pakistan, woven in the 1880s or 1890s. Most of the carpet is dyed traditionally with madder and indigo, but in the center are three small diamonds, one a brash synthetic mauve, the other two bright emerald green. Today they look odd; they clash with the natural dyes. But when the carpet was made, probably in a nomad’s tent on the steppes of Central Asia, those little bright squares were probably all the synthetically dyed wool the weaver could afford. They would have been a demonstration of the flash of modern colors that to her must have represented a wonderful future. Green color technology had headed from east to west for so long, celebrating nature. And now it was heading the other way— celebrating technology.

8

Blue

“Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière: the only window, as far as I know, to which in former times people knelt by hundreds in adoration, and before which they still occasionally burn a candle.”

HUGH ARNOLD, Stained Glass of the Middle Ages

In the National Gallery in London there is an unfinished panel by Michelangelo, showing Christ being carried to his tomb. It is curious on several counts. First, John the Evangelist—who is braced to take the weight of the Messiah—looks disturbingly like a woman. His hands and neck are muscular, but beneath his startlingly bright orange gown
¹
he appears to have female breasts. Second, the dead Christ, far from weighing the painting down, appears to be floating a few millimeters above the ground suspended on straps of bondage linen. And third, although the rest of the work seems to be almost finished or at least drawn out in detail, the whole of the lower right corner is blank. It seems to have been reserved for a kneeling figure, but it has not even been started.

One afternoon I was staring at the painting—
The Entombment
, dated 1501—trying to make sense of it in the fading light. The colors were disconcerting: not just John’s nearly fluorescent dress but Mary Magdalene’s ugly olive robes. And although all the mourners were grouped around the dead man, only one—Joseph of Arimathea—was actually looking at him. One woman was staring to the side in grief, but another was examining her fingernails, while John and Mary Magdalene seemed to be glaring at each other almost competitively. The composition seemed less about a team coming together than about individuals realizing they were once more alone.

Suddenly a crowd overtook me and an answer to some of my questions appeared during what turned out to be one of the National Gallery’s short talks for visitors. The lecturer agreed that John’s androgyny was perplexing, although I learned later that the oddly prominent nipples could be because the vermilion paint had blackened over time and created shadows where the artist wanted highlights.
²
On the floating corpse question, this was a painting of the raising of the sacrament—a subject that had become newly fashionable in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But most interesting for me, in this odd work, was the account of the kneeling figure.

It was probably intended to be the Virgin Mary. But the only blue paint that was deemed worthy for her holy robe in Renaissance Italy was ultramarine, the most expensive of colors except for gold. That corner was probably blank because the paint had not arrived from the patron—and the twenty-five-year-old artist could never have afforded to pay for it himself. He would have cursed for a while, and sent messengers to harry the sponsors and suppliers to make them speed up their delivery and allow him to finish this altarpiece,
³
thought to be destined for the Sant’ Agostino in Rome. But then in the spring of 1501 Michelangelo left both Rome and that canvas to carve his David in Florence, and he never returned with his blue paint to finish the Virgin’s robe.

BEYOND THE SEAS

One day many years ago somebody told me that all the true ultramarine paint in the world came from one mine in the heart of Asia. And that before it could be squeezed sparingly onto any European artist’s palette (mixed with linseed oil or egg like an exotic blue mayonnaise) it had journeyed in rough sacks on the backs of donkeys along the world’s ancient trade roads. I wasn’t sure that I believed this outrageously romantic description, but after that I dreamed of a mountain with veins of blue, inhabited by men with wild eyes and black turbans, and when I woke up I knew that one day I would go there.

My search for this one particular blue was to lead me to other blues as well. I learned how, trying to imitate the beauty of ultramarine, artists and craftsmen experimented with paints made of copper and blood. And I learned how miners discovered cobalt, a strange and rather nasty interloper of a mineral, which the Chinese used for their most valuable porcelains and with which the medieval glaziers caused sky-colored lights to dance around cathedrals. It made me begin to ask about the color of the sky itself—a child’s question, but one to which few adults know the answer, although we know we should. But those things came later: my first task was to go out and get the paint that Michelangelo was awaiting so eagerly during those months in early 1501.

Ultramarine is a word that has always seemed to me to taste of the ocean. It has a smooth, salty sound, suggesting a bluer blue than even the Mediterranean can reflect on a sunny morning. But medieval Italians had no intention of summoning specific sea-color images when they gave this marine name to their most treasured paint.
Oltramarino
was a technical term meaning “from beyond the seas,” and was to refer to several imported items, not just paint. And this particular
oltramarino
certainly came from way beyond the seas: the paint is made of the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. It is found only in Chile, Zambia, a few small mines in Siberia, and—most importantly—in Afghanistan.

With the exception of a few Russian icons which may have been painted with blue from Siberia, all the real ultramarine in both Western and Eastern art came from the last of these places—from one set of mines in a valley in north-east Afghanistan, collectively called Sar-e-sang, the Place of the Stone. It was where the Buddha’s topknots came from; it was where the monk painters of illuminated manuscripts found their skies; it was where the robe of Michelangelo’s Mother of God would have come from if he had waited long enough. And it was where I was determined to go.

On my first look at the map, however, it didn’t seem so easy. Actually, when I first consulted a
Times Atlas
, I couldn’t find Sar-e-Sang at all. The village was so small, squashed between the small town of Faisabad to the north and the even smaller town of Eskazir to the south, that it wasn’t even marked. Which was as it should be: hard to find. After all, part of the mystery of lapis was that although for millennia it travelled to Europe and Egypt it was always known to come from a mythical land so far away that no European or Egyptian had actually been there. Even Alexander had not managed to cast his greatly acquisitive eyes on the mines when he conquered the area 2,300 years ago, and Marco Polo in 1271 had only nodded in its direction from another mountain range to the north. “There are mountains likewise in which are found veins of lapis lazuli, the stone which yields the azure color ultramarine, here the finest in the world. The mines of silver, copper and lead are likewise very productive. It is a cold country.”
⁴

In 2000, when I first made inquiries, Afghanistan was one of the hardest places to visit on the planet. Four years earlier, the blackturbaned Taliban had driven into Kabul. Since then they had established an absolute presence, imposing vicious rules about women not working, men not shaving, girls not studying, and nobody listening to music or taking photographs. The place was literally in the fifteenth century—according to the Muslim calendar it was the year 1420—and tourists were not welcome. Yet I was determined to go.

A few weeks later, I received a surprise phone call. It was from a friend who had just found herself with a month between jobs as well as an e-mail correspondence with an Italian doctor she had met one dusty day while cycling down the Silk Road. “Do you want to come to Kabul?” she asked, with the nonchalance with which most people would suggest a picnic. The doctor, Eric Donelli, was there working for Unicef, and had said he could arrange visas for her and a friend. I said yes immediately, with the proviso that we would try to get to the mines if we could, even though I knew that the mountains of Badakhshan were far away, and that it was a cold country.

THE KHYBER

We waited eleven days in Pakistan for our visas. We spent them drinking tea in flower-filled gardens in Islamabad, swimming in a muddy lake at dusk and even, on one memorable day, asking camel drivers to unload their bales of sweet-smelling grass and taking us on camel-back to see the ancient ruins of Taxila. This was once the capital of the Gandharan empire stretching from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and nurturing the most skilled Buddhist workshops in history. Every day we would wait for the go-ahead from the Taliban embassy, and every day we would be told “not yet.” “You’d be lucky,” said skeptical Islamabad residents. “There are no tourist visas.” Others were more encouraging and we continued to hope. When the call came we were at dinner. “The Taliban have given me your visa number,” Eric said down the crackly satellite line from Kabul. We reached for a pen. “The number is five,” he announced grandly. It seemed ironic to have waited so long for a number we could so easily have invented.

Thirty-six hours later we were in a taxi heading for the Khyber Pass. In the front seat was the obligatory armed guard—ours was eighteen and casual about his Kalashnikov. As soon as we had crossed into the “tribal area” there was an arcade of gun shops. A little farther on there were graves covered with tinsel, a reminder that the land on the other side of the Khyber was going to have different rules from any other I had ever visited. At Torkham, the edge of Pakistan, our driver sorted out formalities while we stayed in the car, watching the border gate with fascination. Apart from a few lorries and a plastic bucket or two, there wasn’t much there that Rudyard Kipling wouldn’t have seen 130 years before when he was collecting images and stories for his book
Kim
. Men in turbans carried mysterious bundles of anything from cloth to bullets. Guns were everywhere and so were Kims—grubby urchins in brown waistcoats skipping away from men who chased them with sticks. For Kipling all these people would have been potential spies, working for either Britain or Russia to win control of Afghanistan. For us, bombarded with television images of a bombed-out Kabul, they were the besieged inhabitants of a disastrous land. And most of them were looking remarkably lighthearted about it, considering.

“Be demure,” we reminded each other as we adjusted our newly bought scarves and crossed the border on foot. But the smiling Taliban immigration official invited us to drink green tea scented with cinnamon and undemurely we agreed. Within moments he was— at our request—stamping our hands as well as our passports with the precious Afghan entry stamp, and we were—with his permission—taking photographs of the process. The Land of Blue was not, perhaps, going to be quite as conservative as we had thought, we decided. And then we jumped into another taxi to surf through to Kabul on a day of brilliantly courageous driving over atrocious roads.