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The Quest for Blue
Information technology'southward easy to think of blue every bit a naturally pervasive colour. Information technology's all around u.s.a. in clear skies and bodies of water. Yet elsewhere bluish appears infrequently, coloring only a handful of minerals and less than 10 per centum of flowering plants. Even the feathers of birds, from bluish jays to bluebirds, are not truly blue only the effect of a biologically sophisticated trick of the centre. The scarcity of blue in the natural globe has, for much of history, made it difficult to reproduce.
"Other colors were made from natural materials that you perhaps processed, but blue as a pigment didn't already exist and had to be created," says Marker Pollard, professor of archeological scientific discipline at University of Oxford .
The primeval humans could pick up chunks of reddish or yellowish ochre or white chalk and apply them almost similar crayons, and black could be found at the end of every burnt stick. But the transformation of natural materials into the colour bluish, Pollard explains, required considerable try and ingenuity.
The quest to unlock the secret of that transformation dates back millennia and spans cultures and civilizations, from Statuary Age Central Asia to early imperial China, from medieval Venice to the modern Maghrib (Islamic North Africa).
The breakthrough came more than than 5,000 years agone along the banks of the Nile when early Egyptian chemists starting time brought the color of the heaven down to earth.
The First Blueish
"[T]he fields are acquired to abound, the fields are made blue, everything alongside the world is caused to come into beingness," reads a hieroglyphic inscription from the third-century-BCE temple of Horus at Edfu, referring to how the annual floodwaters of the Nile nourished the fields. A source of inspiration and worship, blue was also the color of the cosmos, fertility, sustenance and rebirth, co-ordinate to Lorelei Corcoran, professor of Egyptian art and archeology at the University of Memphis and a translator of the Edfu text. Additionally, the shimmering coaction of lord's day and sky embodied the spark of life itself, Corcoran explains.
"Blue isn't immediately a colour one would associate with the sun. We usually think of xanthous or red," she says. "But if yous look at the headdress that the aboriginal Egyptian kings wore, at the mask of Tutankhamun for case, you see it's made out of blueish and aureate stripes, and it's been suggested that represents the rays of the sun breaking through the heavens."
Using bluish to represent the heavens, Egyptian artists of the outset century BCE produced ceiling reliefs in the Hathor Temple in Qena, Egypt, that draw the zodiac.
The Egyptian proper name for the blue they used transliterates phonetically every bit hsbd iryt, which means "artificial lapis lazuli." The proper noun reflected the high regard for the semiprecious gemstone that, together with cobalt, azurite, turquoise and indigo, was one of several sources of blue-hued raw materials Egyptian craftsmen used in pigments, amulets, beads, jewelry, scarabs, statuary and textiles.
Still, these raw materials had their limitations.
Of all the colors on a painter's palette, the most elusive have been dejection.
Lapis lazuli was rare and wildly expensive. Mined from a unmarried valley in northeast Afghanistan, a shipment of the gemstone took three years to arrive in Egypt. Cobalt, from the much closer western desert of Egypt, proved most useful in glassmaking and, briefly during the Amarna menstruation (1365–1345 BCE), to decorate pottery. Azurite could be establish in the Sinai Peninsula and Arab republic of egypt'southward eastern desert, but it was difficult to carve, and it produced pigments closer to green than blueish. Turquoise could besides exist found in the southwestern reaches of the Sinai, merely information technology was rare and thus expensive. Indigo, meanwhile, had to come from furthermost Republic of india.
Thus faced with the demand for an affordable and readily available blue, the Egyptians invented the world's commencement synthetic paint: Egyptian blue.
Merely 9 centimeters tall, this juglet was shaped and fired betwixt 1750 and 1640 BCE using Egyptian Blue. The color's intensity could be varied by changing the proportions in its formula, with results from the saturated, lazurite-like tones that led Egyptians to proper noun their colour hsbd iryt, "artificial lapis lazuli," to delicate pastels.
Chemically known as calcium copper silicate, the recipe called for mixing chalk or limestone with a copper-rich mineral, typically malachite, together with silica-rich sand and an alkali to fuse it all together. When fired at extremely high temperatures the event was a blue, opaque, drinking glass-like chemical compound ceramic. When ground to pulverisation and mixed with a binder such every bit oil, it produced enduring paints that could be varied in intensity from a deep, rich lapis-like shade to lighter, pastel ones, all depending on how finely it was ground.
Corcoran's inquiry shows that Egyptian blue fabricated its debut near the beginning of pharaonic times, effectually 3250 BCE. With their formula, Egyptians were able to employ it on everything from walls and ceilings of temples and tombs to funeral masks and illuminated hieroglyphic texts.
Egyptian ceramists as well found that by using a similar method they could produce objects self-coated in a vivid blueish glaze by firing a gummy combination of silica (either sand or crushed quartz) with small amounts of sodium, calcium and water. (Some scholars maintain that Mesopotamians may have developed this technique as early equally the 5th millennium BCE and passed it on to the Egyptians.)
Roughly during the same era equally the juglet higher up, ceramists figured out how to use powdered silica, quartz and other locally available agents to produce a brilliantly glazed blue ceramic that became known as faience, which remains glossy on both of these hippopotamus statuettes. Egyptians of the time regarded hippos every bit the deadliest inhabitants of the Nile, and the larger 1—affectionately named William by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—is amongst the finest examples of many faience animals that take been found in Egyptian tombs. (The smaller hippo is a fleck older, from 1810-1700 BCE.) Both are decorated with designs of marsh plants, and on "William," the lotus appears prominently.
The result of this process was faience, which due to the soft composition of the base paste, proved nigh useful for pocket-size jewelery and decorative objects. The sheer difficulty of the procedure is a testament to the Egyptian fondness for blue and the persistence of experimentation that the colour demanded.
"It's just in the last century or then that nosotros have an understanding of how faience was actually made," says potter Amy Waller, who mimics Egyptian techniques to produce modern versions of faience in her studio in Bakersville, North Carolina. The recipe for Egyptian blueish spread to Mesopotamia and the Aegean region effectually 2500 BCE. The Greeks named it kyanos, the root of the English give-and-take cyan. Traces of the paint accept been detected on the Parthenon, built during the fifth century BCE. To the Romans, it was caeruleus (in English, cerulean), significant sky-blue, a favorite colour for the villa walls of the well-to-do. It was a Roman who preserved the noesis of how to make Egyptian blueish: In his wide-ranging first-century-CE work, De Architectura, military machine engineer and builder Vitruvius recorded the color'due south ingredients and a detailed word of its industry.
While some say Egyptian blue died out with the Romans, fine art historians have detected the pigment on the walls and statues of medieval churches and abbeys from northern Italian republic to the British Isles. In 2011 a squad of Belgian and Danish researchers, using high-tech optical equipment, discovered the use of Egyptian blue by Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Benvenuto in a painting of the Christian Saint Margaret in 1524.
The squad's analysis also revealed the presence of another blue mingled with the Egyptian blue of Margaret'due south cloak: ultramarine, a deep blueish pigment made from lapis lazuli. Why Benvenuto mixed the two paints is uncertain: Was he aiming to produce a particularly precise shade? Or was he stretching his supply of ultramarine—the costliest, rarest, most-celebrated and sought after pigment of the day?
Color from Beyond the Sea
If Benvenuto was indeed being parsimonious with ultramarine, information technology was with good reason. It was costly: 100 florins for barely a pound (the equivalent of $228 an ounce today), as boyfriend creative person Albrecht Dürer grumbled in 1508. Just a few years earlier, Michelangelo left a painting permanently unfinished in Rome considering he couldn't go his easily on enough ultramarine. Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer died broke in 1675 in function because of his lavish use of the pigment in many of his famous paintings, such as the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "Woman in Blueish Reading a Letter."
In this detail from a belatedly-15th-century-CE illuminated manuscript from Herat, now in Afghanistan, a fellow picks upwards a rock that is probable meant to be lapis lazuli. The painting uses ultramarine derived from crushed lapis lazuli, and Afghanistan is the world'southward leading source of the semiprecious mineral.
A detail from the frontispiece of the same manuscript shows extensive utilize of ultramarine. Scarcity, together with the daunting difficulty of producing paint from the mineral, kept the cost of ultramarine ultra high.
Ultramarine was expensive considering lapis lazuli was no more than readily available in Benvenuto's or Vermeer'due south 24-hour interval than information technology was in pharaonic Egypt. Information technology still had to travel from a unmarried source in Afghanistan's Sar-i-Sang Valley where it had been extracted in the same manner since the seventh millennium BCE, or the Bronze Age: past heating the walls and ceilings of mine shafts with fire and dousing them with ice-common cold river water to crack open veins of the gemstone. (Today miners use dynamite, merely soot from centuries-old fires tin however be seen in the shafts, and though lapis can be found in other locations globally, none are of comparable quality or equally bountiful.)
The name of the gemstone comes from the Latin lapis (stone) and lazulum, from the Arabic gizr al-lazaward (the root of azure), itself a loan word from the Persian name for the mineral, lajvard. Yet the name by which its derivative pigment came to be known among Italian and other painters and merchants in the 14th and 15th centuries reflected its enticingly afar origin: ultramarinus, "beyond the sea."
"Ultramarine bluish is a color illustrious, beautiful, and well-nigh perfect, across all the other colors," wrote Italian craftsman Cennino Cennini in his Il libro dell'arte (The Craftsman's Handbook, c. 1390). In the book Cennini also left a detailed description of another reason ultramarine was and then costly— its production.
Separating lazurite, the bluish mineral, from its surrounding material began with grinding the gemstone to a powder. This was mixed with resins into a paste, heated to a putty, then soaked and kneaded in a bowl of alkaline solution for days earlier yielding a paltry amount of the rich blue, bordering-on-purple pigment, which settled in the bottom of the basin.
An arduous process transforms this composite mineral into the pigment ultramarine during a workshop at the Bodleian Library that prepared the ultramarine for painting.
Prior to its inflow in Western Europe, isolated examples of lapis as a pigment popular up here and at that place: in a 16th-century-BCE statue of an Egyptian queen and on 13th-century-BCE plaster wall fragments from Mycenean Hellenic republic. During the 4th through the eighth century CE, it appeared in Primal Asia, in cave paintings forth the Silk Road, in Turkic parts of western China, and in the robes and wall paintings of the swell, recently destroyed sixth-century-CE Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan.
While Cennini's is the oldest European recipe for ultramarine, a considerably before mention of the process appears in an Arabic treatise ascribed to the ninth-century-CE "father of chemical science," Jabir ibn Hayyan. Farther written evidence that purifying lapis was already known in the Eye and Nearly Eastward is the mid-13th-century book on gemmology, Azhar al-afkar fi djawahir al-ahdjar (Best Thoughts on the Best of Stones) by Berber polymath Ahmad al-Tifashi. In his chapter on lapis, al-Tifashi recommends mixing "powdered lapis" with resins "into a dough" and manipulating the batch in water "until its essence will come out."
Ultramarine was also often used together with gold-foliage paint to illuminate manuscript editions of the Qur'an, such as this Ottoman copy. Information technology dates from the aforementioned 17th century every bit the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer'due south famous "Girl with a Pearl Earring," in which he used copious amounts of ultramarine in her headscarf. Vermeer died broke, in part due to his liberal expenditures on the earth'southward most costly colour.
Effectually the same time, Georgia-born Hobays Teflisi also included a method for rendering pigment from lapis in his Bayan al-shena'at, a work that offered applied information on alchemy, jewelry, coloring crystals and glass.
Arab alchemists, nonetheless, were more interested in the pharmacological virtues of ground lapis, which they prescribed to care for center palpitations and melancholy, amid other ailments, as well equally using it to brand ink. Miniaturists and manuscript illustrators, many in Persia, used ultramarine to decorate texts, including editions of the royally commissioned Shahnama (Book of Kings).
Such prove prompted belatedly art historian Daniel V. Thompson, author of The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting (Dover, 1956), to speculate that "the invention of the method" of transforming lapis into a paint "may well be a product of Moorish ingenuity, and it may even have been from some Arabian source that Europe earlier the 13th century obtained its ultramarine azure."
Once it did, Europe couldn't become plenty of it despite the price. Monks used information technology to illuminate sacred texts while kings and princes, like their Western farsi counterparts, paid princely sums to commission elaborately illustrated books showcasing the paint, such as the famed, 15th-century Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Drupe). Because of its exorbitant price as well as its chromatic proximity to royal purple, ultramarine as well became the favored shade of Christian artists depicting the robes of Mary, mother of Jesus, in medieval and Renaissance paintings, symbolizing Mary's elevated status. Artists of the day had clauses written into their contracts that patrons had to pay extra for supplies of ultramarine while some required travel expenses for trips to Venice to obtain them.
In the early 19th century, European chemists, mimicking their pharaonic Egyptian predecessors, mixed china dirt, soda, charcoal, quartz and sulphur to produce an affordable, synthetic ultramarine. Artists groused that the copycat color lacked the dimensional depth of true ultramarine, but they couldn't argue with a price that was 2,500 times less than ultramarine from lapis lazuli. As ever, the concern of blue played a major role in its utilise, production, procurement and prestige. And by then ane of the near profitable businesses of blue was porcelain, thanks to cobalt.
Bluish Meets White
Enumerating the virtues of a 15th-century porcelain cup in his catalog of Ming dynasty ceramics, 16th-century creative person and calligrapher Xian Yuanpian remarked, "The glaze is of a uniform translucent white, like mutton-fat or fine jade … and the blue so pure and brilliant equally to dazzle the optics, being painted with Muslim blue."
And then-chosen "Muslim blue" was blue made from Western farsi cobalt, a mineral known to be imported to China during the starting time quarter of the 13th century CE, maybe earlier. Its Chinese name, huihui qing, clearly identified the pigment as "a product of strange lands," as bureaucrats of the day described information technology: Huihui was the common Chinese term for Muslims during the Ming Dynasty, from 1368 to 1644 CE, into the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912. Today, most Chinese-speaking Muslims in Red china still place as Hui.
Past the Ming dynasty, cobalt, as a paint, had been used in some wall paintings and statuary in Prc and as far west as Turkey in a 14th-century-CE Byzantine church mural in Istanbul. But information technology was its employ in tough yet translucent porcelain—an invention dating to the Han Dynasty (22 CE–250 CE)—that popularized cobalt-based blue on an international scale. Indeed, its prominence in porcelain's most familiar color scheme, blue and white, was the product of centuries of cultural and commercial interchange among Cathay and Islamic lands.
"There was this commutation going on between materials, technology and design," says archeological scentist Pollard.
Left Imitating the the drinking glass lamps of mosques, this 16th-century-CE ceramic vase was made in Iznik, Turkey, using cobalt for both the fine swirls and the calligraphy. Centre Painted in vivid cobalt, this Yuan Dynasty pot was made in the 14th century, when porcelain was amongst China's leading exports. Correct The raw material of cobalt paint and glaze is potassium cobalt silicate, or smalt, shown hither in a canteen dated to the 17th or 18th century.
The earliest-known examples of bluish-and-white pottery in China appointment to the tardily Tang Dynasty (618 CE–907 CE) with product centers in the region of Gongyi Metropolis (at present Gongxian) in key Cathay'due south Henan province. The color scheme enjoyed a brief popularity, then disappeared in China for the next five centuries. Whether the source of Tang cobalt was local or imported remains an open question. What is sure is that by the 9th century CE, potters in the Iraqi port city of Basra—a center of Abbasid culture and commerce—had been exposed, via Silk Road trade, to Chinese ceramics. Though they didn't have the technical know-how to reproduce porcelain (a well-guarded secret), Muslim potters were able to approximate the flossy white sheen of Gongxian ware, which they embellished with delicate, cobalt-blue floral designs and Arabic lettering.
The source of Abbasid-era cobalt every bit a raw material also remains uncertain. But by the early 14th century CE, the major Heart Eastern location of the world's finest, inky-bluish cobalt was widely known to be Qamsar, a village in the mountains around Kashan, in key Islamic republic of iran'south Karkas Mountains. "[P]eople there claim it was discovered past the prophet Sulaiman," wrote the Persian historian Abu'l-Qasim Kashani in his 1301 CE treatise on ceramics. The fable of its discovery, Kashani noted, prompted craftsmen to refer to Qamsar cobalt as Sulaimani, a proper name that came to be reflected in some other Chinese term for Muslim blue: su-ma-li or su-ma-ni. Scholars suggest that su-ma-li may besides be a Chinese transliteration of the Arabic word samawi (sky-colored).
The vaulted ceiling, domes, columns and walls of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, or "Blue Mosque," in Istanbul, Turkey, are covered with some 20,000 hand-painted ceramic tiles that feature more than 50 designs. The tiles were produced in Iznik, which at the time of the mosque's structure, between 1609 and 1616, had become the leading ceramics center of Ottoman Turkey.
In the mid-1870s, French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir used cobalt blue heavily in "La Premiere Sortie" ("The Showtime Outing"), showing a immature woman at the theater.
Less laborious to process than lapis, raw cobalt was washed and crushed to obtain the pure ore. This was mixed with an organic binding agent and formed into easily transportable cakes. These, when melted together with potash and borax, hardened into a drinking glass chosen smalt that was ground into a pulverisation to brand pigment. In either cake form or as smalt, cobalt fabricated its way east along the Silk Road and past sea to the Fujian province city of Quanzhou, China's principal port for strange trade from the 11th through the 14th century. There it fetched loftier prices: two catties (a little over 2 and one-half pounds) equaling the value of one coil of fine silk, per imperial prescript. To conserve the pigment, craftsmen in the southern city of Jingdezhen, China's porcelain majuscule, blended Persian smalt with locally obtained cobalt to produce huihui qing, with which they busy a wide variety of porcelain objects. Most of these were destined for markets back in the Eye East, as the Chinese preferred solid colors and were not specially fond of mixed blue-and-white patterns.
"It was never really Chinese and only became an adopted taste," Pollard says.
The driving force backside the adoption were wealthy Muslim merchants living in Quanzhou who controlled much of the export, marketing and even industry of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain targeted to serve virtually exclusively an Islamic market. Jingdezhen potters responded past creating blue-and-white plates, bowls, jars and other fine-porcelain objects featuring Islamic-inspired floral and geometric designs. Some, unschooled in the linguistic communication, attempted to imitate Standard arabic lettering, with mixed results.
Even though the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming Dynasty and ruler of People's republic of china from 1368 to 1398 CE, abruptly shut down overseas trade (he favored agriculture every bit the country'south economic cornerstone), the foreign gustation for porcelain was too lucrative to carelessness. In 1383 China exported some xix,000 pieces as diplomatic gifts to Muslim rulers, co-ordinate to Ming court records. In one case Hongwu's son Yongule lifted the trade ban upon his accretion in 1403, blue-and-white porcelain again "comprised the majority of [China's] export trade in ceramics," according to ceramics historian Robert Finlay.
The color combination "went on to triumph far and wide, reshaping (and sometimes destroying) pottery traditions in well-nigh every society information technology touched, from the Philippines to Portugal," Finlay wrote in Pilgrim Fine art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (University of California Press, 2010).
This stylistic juggernaut rolled through Islamic Spain, where bluish and white strongly influenced al-Andalus' intricate azulejo tilework: azul means "blue" in Spanish. Renaissance Italian republic'due south colorful Maiolica tradition, French faience, Dutch Delft, Danish Royal Copenhagen, English language blue-and-white wares and, across the Atlantic, American Currier & Ives designs—and more—all descended from China'due south blue-and-white cobalt porcelain.
On its way w, blue and white porcelain passed through the busy trading metropolis of Iznik in western Anatolia. There, its fashion was reinvented during the 15th and 16th centuries past Ottoman potters who took their cue from Chinese bluish and white while adding decorative flourishes of their own: intricately interlaced, spiralling floral and geometric designs also as additional colors such every bit turquoise (from the French for "Turkish"), emerald green and clay-colored bole red.
These ornate polychromatic patterns came to characterize what became synonymous with the city, Iznik pottery. Withal bluish remained a predominant, foundational color. From the lavish walls of Istanbul's Topkapı Palace to the stunning interior of the nearby, early-17th-century Blue Mosque, Iznik ceramics flourished under the patronage of Ottoman sultans, peculiarly Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566). While certainly a display of earthly wealth and ability, the prominence of blue Iznik tiles served to transcend the secular, according to Idries Trevathan, author of Colour, Light and Wonder in Islamic Art (Saqi Books, 2020) and curator of Islamic art and culture at Saudi Arabia'due south King Abdulaziz Centre for Earth Culture.
"The vast expanse of tiles decorating every surface of bluish-tiled mosques," he says, evokes "blossoms and flowers strewn on night-blue meadows, or even a nighttime-blue background and inner field suggesting the depths of the sky covered in stars. Thus, the design simultaneously evokes the flowers of paradise and the stars in the heavens," Trevathan says.
This symbolism reflects the linguistic roots of the Arabic word for blueish, 'azraq, which originally meant a glittering or gleaming point, such every bit a star. The concept, says Trevathan, conveyed "a sense of brightness combined with movement."
Or dazzle, as Xian Yuanpian observed.
Bluish'south shimmer and intensity, in fact, take always drawn attention, inspiring a global industry and impacting the dress of kings and common men akin.
Truthful Blueish
Beginning in the 16th century, all across Europe, those with financial stakes in the product of blue dye made from the scrawny flowering plant called woad launched an ambitious smear campaign against its new competition, indigo, one of the many goods flooding into Europe thanks to the expansion of trade with Asia during centuries of colonialism.
Officials in Dresden claimed in 1650 to have "clear proof that indigo not only readily loses its colour, only also corrodes dress and other fabrics." In Nuremberg, dyers were forced to swear non to use "the devil's dye," as German Emperor Ferdinand III deemed indigo in 1654. In England Queen Elizabeth I decreed the dye poisonous and banned its use throughout the realm under threat of prison house. The French government took it a step further: the penalty for dyers caught using indigo was expiry.
None of these charges were truthful.
Indigo dyed the estimated 600 parchment folios of one of the most renowned copies of the Qur'an ever produced: The so-called "Blue Qur'an," which dates to the tardily ninth and 10th centuries in Tunisia, where calligraphers used golden leaf.
In fact, indigo derived from the native Indian plant Indigofera tinctoria produced the most-colorfast, most-intensely bluish dye in the history of textiles.
"Information technology can't lose its blueness. Information technology's the just dye that has that quality," says Jenny Balfour-Paul, honorary senior research fellow at the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and writer of several books on indigo, including Indigo in the Arab Globe (Routledge, 1996).
Indeed some of the world's oldest-known indigo textiles, such as the blue borders of linen on dress establish with Egyptian mummies, dyed more than 4,000 years ago, retain color.
Greeks and Romans coveted indigo as a luxury and shipped it to Egypt and the Mediterranean by style of the Indian Ocean. The give-and-take indigo derives from the Greek indikón, which was Latinized as indicum, pinpointing the product's geographic origins.
The chemic compound, known every bit a forerunner, responsible for indigo's intensity is indican, present in all members of the botanical genus indigofera. Woad contains far less of its own blue-producing forerunner, thus requiring far greater amounts of the constitute to procedure than Indian indigo. The recipe for extracting the colorant from either species requires fermenting the leaves in an alkaline metal solution to chemically transform the precursor to a blue dye that reveals itself through oxidization, via repeated dunking of the dyed material. After each immersion, the textile, which starts out yellow, becomes increasingly blue as it is exposed to air.
During the Umayyad era from the mid-seventh to mid-eighth century CE, much of the indigo trade was in the hands of Arab merchants who ultimately helped spread the popularity and cultivation of indigo from Kabul west to the Levant and across Northward Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa, all in the wake of the spread of Islam.
By the 14th century, Baghdad had go famous for the best indigo.
By the 14th century CE, Baghdad became the virtually famous and agile center for the best indigo, virtually of which likely came from Kabul and Kirman in southeast Persia, according to Balfour-Paul. Fifty-fifty though it cost upwards to three and four times equally much as indigo from other sources, endego fino de Baghdad, every bit Italian merchants referred to it, was "best of all," in the words of one 14th-century-CE Catalan trader.
Owing to its prestige, indigo blue became the colour of European royalty, specially the French, who adopted it for robes and heraldry.
New Blue
YInMn Blue, or "MasBlue" as information technology is commonly referred to at Oregon Country University (OSU), was discovered in 2009, when OSU educatee Andrew Smith was exploring the electronic properties of manganese oxide by heating information technology to approximately 1200 degrees Celsius (~2000 °F). Instead of a new, high-efficiency electronic material, what emerged from the furnace was a brilliant blue compound—a bluish that OSU distinguished professor Mas Subramanian knew immediately was a enquiry breakthrough.
"If I hadn't come from an industry research background—DuPont has a segmentation that developed pigments and obviously they are used in paint and many other things—I would not take known this was highly unusual, a discovery with strong commercial potential," he says.
The pigment contains the elements Yttrium, Indium, Manganese and Oxygen.
Blue pigments dating back millennia have been notoriously unstable—many fade hands and contain toxic materials. The fact that this pigment was synthesized at such high temperatures signaled to Subramanian that this new compound was extremely stable, a belongings long sought in a blue pigment, he says.
In May 2012, the Subramanian team received a US patent and began rigorous testing of the pigment. They concluded that the increased UV absorbance and stability in outdoor weathering and heat-buildup tests demonstrate that YInMn bluish is superior to cobalt blueish. In addition the high solar reflectance (compared to similarly colored pigments) indicates that this "cool pigment" can notice employ in a multifariousness of exterior applications by reducing surface temperatures, cooling costs and energy consumption.
—Oregon State University Section of Chemical science
"Fifty-fifty King Arthur, the most important legendary king invented by the medieval imagination, was not only depicted wearing blue from the eye of the 13th century on, but was also shown carrying a shield 'd'azur à trois couronnes d'or' (of a blue field and three gilded crowns), the same colors every bit in the artillery of the king of French republic," observed historian Michel Pastoureau in Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton University Printing, 2001).
In the Arab world, indigo blue was held in similar high regard, peculiarly when applied to fabric that was worked and beaten to a sheen.
"The shinier information technology is, the more prestigious it is," says Balfour-Paul, citing the iconic, electrical-blue robes and headdresses of N Africa'southward Tuaregs as just one example of indigo blue's widespread cachet in the Muslim earth. Many historic Western travelers to the Arabian Peninsula noticed both its cultivation and popularity.
In his 1830 Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Johann Ludwig Burkhardt remarked that blue was the "universal" favorite color for Bedouin clothing "in all the tribes due north of Mekka," while 18th-century German explorer Carsten Niebuhr noted in his 1792 Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries in the East that the "indigo shrub … is cultivated through all Arabia, blueish existence the favorite color of the Arabians."
This favorability extended beyond style. Whereas cerise is associated with heat, blue connotes the reverse, and "was widely used for cooling feverish conditions," notes Balfour-Paul. In his 13th-century-CE pharmacopoeia, Compendium on Simple Medicaments and Foods, Arab botanist Ibn al-Baytar catalogs a long listing of medicinal uses for indigo, based on its cooling properties, Balfour-Paul points out. Even well into modern times, amongst tribal peoples of the southern Arabian Peninsula, indigo remained a component of traditional folk medicine, applied to the pare, for instance, as an insecticide.
Indigo-dyed robes, such as this ane worn in Kingdom of morocco are characteristic of Tuareg peoples, a loose confederation of Amazigh (Berber) tribes of Northwestern Africa.
In Gujarat, India, a gimmicky dye master works a material in a vat of indigo. Over the centuries, indigo's unique colorfastness made it a favorite for heavy-use attire such as war machine uniforms, industrial work coveralls, and pants kickoff made with American cowboys in mind—bluish jeans.
Culturally in Islam, blue'due south prestige extended to sacred uses also during the Heart Ages. Today 1 of the near stunning examples is the renowned Blue Qur'an, with its gold-leaf calligraphy inscribed on indigo-dyed parchment, produced in either Spain or Tunisia sometime in the late ninth or early 10th century CE, as scholarly opinions differ. The color scheme, says fine art historian Maria Sardi, was likely inspired by earlier court documents in circulation among Muslim and Christian rulers of the day.
"When the Byzantine emperor sent diplomatic correspondence to the Sultan, he wrote with gilt on blue parchment, which was very impressive to the Muslims," says Sardi, who has also studied the Mamluks' fondness for blue and gold in their decorative arts, habiliment, and regalia.
The Arab monopoly on indigo ended, as it did with spices and much of the maritime Silk Road trade, in 1498, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa's Cape of Practiced Hope and opened the way for Europe to take a directly channel to the East. Even as the Arab authority in the indigo trade eroded, Western demand only increased and eventually overcame the attempts to suppress it.
Its adoption in two major markets turned the tide: the military and industry. Indigo's durability made information technology the dye of pick for hardy uniforms of wool and cotton fiber, be they those of soldiers in the ranks, sailors at sea, or workers in the field or factory. (Retrieve "navy blue" and "bluish collar.")
These last two cohorts were beneficiaries of one terminal durable legacy of the Arab world's indigo trade. Equally Balfour-Paul has chronicled, during the early Islamic era, a sturdy Egyptian textile known every bit fustian (named for Fustat, the urban center that preceded Cairo) was imported to Italy. Imitating the material, Genoese weavers produced their own version, known as Factor fustian, which they dyed indigo blue. Equally Gene fustian'due south popularity grew, its name was abbreviated to Factor and, every bit legend has it, somewhen to bluish jeans, perhaps the nigh globally popular innovation in the modern history of fashion.
Source: https://www.aramcoworld.com/Compilations/2021/March-April-2021/The-Quest-for-Blue