Cover news reporter Yan Wenwen
From the Dragon Boat Festival' wonderful swim to the underwater Roselle to the flying sky, the works that peel off the elements in traditional culture to recreate the work have repeatedly left the circle, and the latest out of the circle is a dance on the New Year's Eve of station B - "Only This Green". Through the interpretation of the dancers, the dance made the famous painting "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" move, so that Wang Ximeng's Song Dynasty Jiangshan came to life in front of the audience. The dancers, with their hair in high buns and dressed in long green dresses, fully display the classical beauty of oriental women.
In fact, one of the important reasons why "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" can still show pleasing colors after a thousand years is that many of the natural pigments it uses are precious gemstones, and "Qing" is a "top match" in both Eastern and Western aesthetics, using top lapis lazuli hand-ground, once used 1 ounce of gold to buy less than 1 ounce of lapis lazuli, and until 1960, a genius artist invented a substitute, that is, sweeping the major fashion brands in 2021. Klein Blue".
"Only This Green" dance photo
Lapis lazuli was once a fan of Cleopatra's eyeshadow
As early as 6,000 years ago, the Afghans began to use lapis lazuli as a treasure and began to mine it. Until the 18th century, the world's lapis lazuli originated only in a valley in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. Its enduring natural color characteristics have made lapis lazuli a special offering of ancient royalty, and Egyptian kings, Sumerian queens, etc. have used lapis lazuli to symbolize their status as "chosen sons".
In 2500 BC, ancient Iraq imported lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and embedded it in the king's funerary products, and for a long time afterwards, lapis lazuli was made into rings, seals and other items because of its soft texture and easy carving.
Tutankhamun's mask
The use of lapis lazuli as a pigment dates back to the 6th to 7th centuries BC, when paints made of lapis lazuli were used on murals in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan.
According to legend, Cleopatra used lapis lazuli to powder and used as a decoration for the eyes, just like the eyeshadow used by modern people. The Egyptians' use of lapis lazuli in this way can also be verified from a cultural relic from 1300 BC: the pharaoh Tutankhamun's mask is inlaid with lapis lazuli, and the eyebrows and eyeliner are depicted with lapis lazuli, and it is likely that Cleopatra also followed a tradition of using lapis lazuli to make up.
Lapis lazuli as a dye is very expensive, not affordable for ordinary painters, so there has been another blue dye - azurite. Although azurite also presents a pleasing blue, its texture is not as stable as lapis lazuli, and it will oxidize, turn green or black over time, so lapis lazuli is still the most ideal ore as a blue pigment.
Michelangelo's Madonna of the Rocks
With the Silk Road into China, the top stream on the Song Dynasty scroll
Chinese the use of lapis lazuli is relatively early, archaeologists once excavated a Yue Wang sword from the Spring and Autumn Period, which was studded with blue-green gemstones. Gemologists identified the jade inlaid in the sword grid of the Yue Wang sword with lapis lazuli on one side and turquoise on the other.
In the 2nd century BC, after Zhang Qian's mission to the Western Regions, lapis lazuli was exported to China as a national treasure of Afghanistan and became a favorite ornament of the upper class. The tomb of Liu Gong, king of Pengcheng jing in the Eastern Han Dynasty of Xuzhou, once unearthed a gilded treasure-shaped stone box with red coral, turquoise and lapis lazuli.
From the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, it was a period of high development of the Silk Road, when Afghanistan was controlled by the powerful Kushan Empire. The Kushan Empire was vast, including parts of Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in addition to Afghanistan, connected to China through the Wakhan Corridor, from which precious stones, lapis lazuli, glassware, and luxuries of the Persian Empire entered China in large quantities.
The gold necklace excavated from the tomb of "Li Jingxun" Li Jingxun is inlaid with lapis lazuli
In the tomb of Li Jingxun, the most famous "Li Child" of the Sui Dynasty, a gold necklace in the Persian style was excavated, and the gold necklace was inlaid with lapis lazuli.
The use of lapis lazuli as a pigment in China is inextricably linked to the introduction of Buddhism. For example, the murals and painted sculptures of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and Dunhuang West Thousand Buddha Caves from the Northern Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty use lapis lazuli as blue pigments.
The "Map of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" also uses lapis lazuli as a pigment to depict the green waters and green mountains of the Great Song Dynasty, and it still shines after a thousand years.
Ultramarine pigments
The Renaissance made lapis lazuli more expensive than gold
In Europe, with the rise of the Renaissance, the pigment "ultramarine", which uses lapis lazuli as the main raw material, became the most popular color. The Renaissance artist Senino Senini once described "ultramarine" in this way: "A noble color, beautiful, is the most perfect color".
The production method of ultramarine is very complicated, you need to use the best lapis lazuli, without golden impurities, and then grind by hand, and then through multiple processes to complete the production. At that time, the demand for ultramarines was also extremely strong, especially in the field of religious painting, a large number of painters used ultramarines to make church prints and murals, and when expressing the robes of the sky, angels, and virgins, they all needed to use this pure Wuxi blue.
Interestingly, since most of the lapis lazuli was imported to Europe by the Venetians at the time, lapis lazuli was rarely used in other regions except Italy. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the price of lapis lazuli had become the most valuable item in Europe, and the price had long surpassed gold to occupy the first place.
Bringing ultramarines from "paradise" to secular society was the Dutch painter Vermeer. Although Vermeer is not a rich man, because his wife's family is not bad, Vermeer can still be exposed to ultramarine when painting, and the love of this color makes Vermeer use ultramarine to the point of "luxury". In his famous paintings such as "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" and "The Maid Who Pours Milk", he uses ultramarine in a large area, so that the picture presents a rich sense of beauty.
Vermeer's masterpiece "The Girl with the Pearl Earrings"
The Jimei Museum originated as an alternative to lapis lazuli
Due to the high price of ultramarine, painters have been looking for the perfect alternative to it. The great writer Goethe also played a role in this, and he found blue sediments in lime kilns near Palermo in Sicily. He thought that this blue precipitate might replace lapis lazuli as a decorative raw material, but Goethe did not propose to use this precipitate as a pigment.
In 1824, the French National Association of Industries offered a reward of 6,000 francs to encourage the invention of an alternative to ultramarines that artists could afford. Four years later, the chemist Jean-Baptiste Guime invented an alternative and received a reward of 6,000 francs. And the cost of the synthetic ultramarines he developed was only one-2500th that of natural ultramarines, which allowed him to obtain a lot of wealth.
Vermeer's masterpiece "The Maid Who Poured Milk"
But the color invented by Jimei is still too common, and the colors displayed in various lights are almost the same, so the works painted with this blue color are considered to lack soul, so the top painters still use ultramarine. But Jean-Baptiste's son, Emile, benefited from his father's interest in profit, and as a traveler and collector, Emir used the money earned from synthetic ultramarines to buy many foreign artifacts and established a museum, the Gemée Museum. This museum is also one of the most important Asian art museums in the world.
In 1960, Yves Klein invented Klein Blue, which officially became an alternative to "ultramarines" and, for its similarity, became known as "French ultramarines". Since then, natural ultramarine dyes have slowly withdrawn from the stage of history, and are rarely used except for the restoration of ancient paintings.
The Gemme Museum originated in the lapis lazuli of Afghanistan, and it also gives feedback to the cultural relics of Afghanistan. Due to national turmoil, the protection of Afghan cultural relics has always been a concern, and in 2006, a number of national treasures from Afghanistan were publicly unveiled in Paris, France, and since then embarked on a tour around the world. For more than 10 years, this batch of precious cultural relics has been "relay protection" by various museums, and the Jimei Museum is where this "relay protection" began.