![]() The art giants mentioned above – along with their northern European counterparts, Grünewald, Dürer and Hieronymous Bosch – were locked in fierce competition, all fighting for the same commissions. The stakes were that much higher in 1510, when my novel is set. One painter monopolising it was “a crime against art” he declared. The artist Christian Furr attacked him in an article, arguing that black is sacred, possessing a visceral power, and that Goya, Turner and Manet could not have created their most memorable work without it. But whereas this was never hailed as the bluest blue, Kapoor took for himself the definitive version of black, and since he hadn’t even invented it this was unforgivable to some of his peers. In the ’60s, Yves Klein patented a mixture for blue, named International Klein Blue, which he went on to use in a series of monochrome paintings and sculptures. Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to it from an engineering company in Surrey. It absorbs light at 99.9% and to look at it is like staring into an abyss. He had just copyrighted Vantablack, “the world’s blackest black”. The notion of pigment being something people would fight over, even die for, came to my mind after hearing a radio interview with Anish Kapoor, the great modern interpreter of form and colour. The novel is all about colour, and the lengths artists will go to possess one that’s never been seen before. ![]() Giorgione is in the fight of his life to lay his hands upon an otherworldly colour, Prince Orient, before his fellow-painters: Titian, Leonardo, Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo. Who can he be meeting in such a treacherous place: a black-marketeer or a wanted man perhaps? It turns out to be his colourman, who supplies rare pigments that can’t be procured from any of the other “vendecolori” in the city. ![]() It opens with the real-life Venetian painter, Giorgione, taking a boat to the plague island of Poveglia. This is the crux of my thriller, The Colour Storm. Titian used it to bring to life the heat-baked skies of mythological Greece, turning fable to super-reality.īut what if there had been a colour even more remarkable than ultramarine? Leonardo and Raphael employed ultramarine for the most crucial part of a painting, such as the Virgin’s gown, as did Giotto and Masaccio before them. It’s reported that Michelangelo gave up on his painting of The Entombment because he couldn’t secure any ultramarine, whereas Raphael only used it in the final coat, having built up earlier layers with more affordable azurite, or even indigo and smalt. ![]() Lapis was expensive, literally worth more than its weight in gold, and hard to come by since it was found solely in one remote stretch of mountains in the Hindu Kush. That rich, irrefutable blue, the pinnacle that all other blues, all other colours, can only aspire to. In the fifteenth century, when emerging global trade sparked a hunger for fantastical goods from faraway lands, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan – from which the colour was derived – must have been a sumptuous treasure. ![]() Before it was even seen, its name conjured magic, literally meaning “beyond the sea”. Ultramarine was the star colour of the Renaissance. ![]()
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