The Color That Once Cost More Than Gold

Walk into any art supply store today, and you can buy a tube of ultramarine blue for about twenty dollars. Reach for a different tube, and you have a small, ordinary decision about which color you like.

For most of the last thousand years, choosing this blue would have been one of the most expensive decisions a painter could make. The deep, luminous blue we now take for granted was, for centuries, literally worth more than gold.

A single valley, half a world away

Ultramarine comes from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious blue stone. And for most of history, essentially all the lapis lazuli used in European art came from one place: a narrow strip of mountains in what is now northeastern Afghanistan, where it had been mined since roughly the 6th millennium BCE. There was no second source. If you wanted this blue, it came from there, or it didn’t come at all.

The name itself tells the story. “Ultramarine” comes from the Latin for “beyond the sea.” The stone was imported into Europe by ship, usually through Venice, after a long overland journey along trade routes. It changed hands many times, with each merchant adding a markup. By the time the raw stone reached a workshop in Florence or Bruges, it had traveled thousands of miles and passed through many pockets.

But the distance was only half the cost. The other half was the labor.

Why was grinding up a blue rock so expensive?

You can’t just crush lapis lazuli and get that famous blue. Lapis is a mixture of minerals. The blue comes from one of them, lazurite, but it is mixed with grey and white impurities and flecks of golden pyrite. If you grind the whole stone without care, you end up with a dull, disappointing grey-blue.

Getting the pure, intense blue out required a truly laborious process: the stone was crushed to powder, kneaded into a dough of wax, resin, and oils, and then repeatedly worked in a dilute lye solution. This process slowly released only the purest blue particles, while the impurities stayed behind. It was slow, required skill, and produced little pigment. A large amount of expensive imported stone would yield only a small amount of usable pigment. One writer noted that the finished pigment could end up costing about ten times as much as the raw stone it came from. The 15th-century craftsman’s handbook author Cennino Cennini called it “illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colors.”

When you add together the distance and the labor, you get the main fact that appears in almost every history of this color: in 14th- and 15th-century Europe, ultramarine was worth more than gold.

How the price changed the paintings themselves

This is where economics stops being just background and starts shaping the art you see in museums. That is what makes this story so interesting to explore.

Because the pigment was so expensive, painters used it sparingly. They saved it for the most important part of a painting. In Renaissance religious art, this was usually the robe of the Virgin Mary. The choice was both practical and symbolic. The most precious color on earth was used to clothe the most revered figure in the painting, showing both her holiness and the wealth and devotion of the person who commissioned the work. The blue was a status symbol you could notice from across a chapel.

The high cost changed the business of being a painter. Renaissance commissions were controlled by detailed contracts, which often specified exactly how much ultramarine the artist had to use and where to use it. Patrons worried that painters might secretly use a cheaper blue and keep the extra money. Sometimes the patron bought the ultramarine separately and gave it to the artist, treating it as a material cost separate from the artist’s labor. There are stories of painters who finished an entire work except for the blue areas, waiting to buy the pigment until the patron’s payment arrived.

A few stories show just how high the stakes were. The Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi reportedly faced losing all her possessions over just an ounce and a half of unpaid ultramarine. The most famous example is Johannes Vermeer, who used the color so generously, not just for clothing but throughout his paintings, that he is widely believed to have driven his family into debt because of it. The blue you see in a Vermeer was, for him, a financial burden.

The day the bottom fell out.

For all those centuries, the price stayed high because the constraints remained: there was only one source, a difficult journey, and a tough extraction process. Then, in the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, chemistry changed the situation by removing the scarcity.

In 1824, a French industrial society offered a prize of 6,000 francs to anyone who could cheaply make a synthetic version of ultramarine. The challenge went partly unclaimed for years. Then, in 1828, the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet won the prize for a process he developed. A German chemist, Christian Gmelin, discovered a similar method around the same time, and the two argued over who deserved credit for years. The result, sold as “French ultramarine,” was almost identical to the natural pigment, but it cost about a hundred times less.

The change was complete. A color that had been a symbol of extreme luxury for a thousand years became, within a few decades, just another affordable tube on the shelf. Natural ultramarine did not disappear, but it was no longer a necessity and became something for connoisseurs. The deep blue that once signaled a patron’s wealth no longer signified wealth. It was simply a blue.

Why the story is worth knowing

This story is more than just a fun fact because it shows a complete economic life cycle in one color. Ultramarine became extremely valuable because of real scarcity: a single source, a costly journey, and a difficult process. It was valuable enough to change contracts, drive a great artist into debt, and decide which figure in a painting got which color. Then, it became ordinary as soon as technology removed the scarcity.

It’s also a helpful reminder when you look at an old painting. That blue robe is not just a beautiful design choice. It’s a kind of receipt, showing that someone decided this figure was worth the most expensive substance they could find, and that everyone who saw it would know what that meant. That is the ending the color has been waiting for: a blue once worth more than gold, now ordinary enough to buy, but still carrying the history that made it precious.

This article was written for EconMinded: exploring the economics behind markets, art, and luxury at econminded.com.

Sources: WebExhibits, “Pigments Through the Ages: Ultramarine”; Hyperallergic, “Lapis Lazuli: A Blue More Precious than Gold”; The Chrysler Museum of Art, “The History of Art in Color: Blue”; Winsor & Newton, “Colour Story: Ultramarine”; The Paris Review, “A Brief History of Ultramarine”; Daily Art Magazine, “Lapis Lazuli — A Pigment More Precious Than Gold”; Wikipedia, “Ultramarine” and “Jean-Baptiste Guimet.”