15d • General discussion
🎨 Have You Ever Heard of Lapis Lazuli? Me Either… But This Is Interesting (and It Once Cost More Than Gold!) 💰
Imagine walking into an art store today and seeing a tiny tube of blue paint worth more than your car 🚗
That was basically Ultramarine Blue during the Renaissance — roughly 500 to 700 years ago.
This wasn’t just “blue paint.”
This was luxury.Power.Status.The colour of the rich 👑
The pigment came from a rare stone called Lapis lazuli, mined deep in the mountains of Afghanistan and shipped across dangerous trade routes into Europe.
Artists then had to crush the stone into powder and carefully refine it into pigment by hand
And the craziest part?
The finest Ultramarine Blue was sometimes worth MORE than gold 🥇
Yep… painters were literally brushing wealth onto canvas.
That’s why wealthy patrons often demanded it in contracts:
“Use genuine ultramarine.”
Because they were paying a fortune for that brilliant glowing blue 🔵
You’ll notice many old Renaissance paintings show Virgin Mary wearing deep blue robes.
That wasn’t random.
Blue became associated with holiness and importance partly because the pigment itself was so expensive
It was basically medieval luxury branding 😄
Meanwhile today…
we squeeze ultramarine acrylic from a $10 tube while eating a meat pie in trackies 🥧😂
Makes you appreciate modern paint a bit more hey. I sure do!
Cheers Heff...
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🎨 Have You Ever Heard of Lapis Lazuli? Me Either… But This Is Interesting (and It Once Cost More Than Gold!) 💰
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