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“Blue,” I say, “is the color of death.”
There is no blue found on the earth. You can’t take from the sea or the sky to concoct a color for painting.”
“It wasn’t until the twelfth century that blue found a place on artists’ palettes, when they began to create it through grinding up certain stones. Every Madonna in a medieval painting wore blue robes, every stained glass window contained blue. It’s as if all men decided, at once, that blue was the color of…” I mull the right word… “the divine.”
“The seven are gold, silver, copper, tin, mercury, lead and iron,” he continues. “Then Georg Brandt comes forward with cobalt. He said that this dark blue substance, the one that in impure forms can be turned into glazes for porcelain, is a new metal and he has a way of extracting it. No one believed him, but when I read one of his papers, I thought my God, he could be right. My next thought was, What if I could develop a new, richer color blue from Brandt’s
color?” “Blue is the sky and the sea, it is eternity.
as Rousseau said, ‘The fruits of the earth belong to everyone.’ Science is the only master I can ever have.”
“It was and always will be the most beautiful color ever seen,” he
says. “Something that beautiful couldn’t last long. Remember the butterfly? If it exists for one night, and then it vanishes forever, like…” He pauses, searching for the word.
