Color in art is pigment doing three jobs at once: describing an object, setting a mood, and steering your eye around the picture. Painters have always chosen it for effect more often than for accuracy.
It also has a supply chain. Some pigments cost more than gold, some were toxic, and some have changed color since the painter put them down. These twelve paintings each hang on one documented color decision.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting is here if the artist explained its color in a letter, a notebook or a title, or if lab work or a cleaning showed which pigment was used or how it aged. Color that departs from the real color of the thing painted also counted. Pictures praised only for being bright stayed out.
12. Giotto, Lamentation (c. 1305)
The dead Christ lies on the ground, his head held by his mother. Above, angels twist in grief across a blue sky.
The scene is a Lamentation, the mourning over Christ's body after the Crucifixion. Giotto painted it around 1305 on a wall of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua.
Enrico Scrovegni, a Paduan banker, had the chapel built next to his palace. It received its final consecration on 25 March 1305.
The Lamentation belongs to a long cycle on the life of Christ that covers the walls.
For generations, specialists took the chapel's blue for lapis lazuli. Lapis is the stone that gives ultramarine, the most expensive pigment of the Middle Ages.
The restoration of 2001 to 2002 identified something else. Giotto had used azurite, a copper mineral that was far more common and far cheaper.
Azurite came with a problem. Painters of the time considered it incompatible with wet lime plaster, so it could not go into true fresco.
Giotto first painted the blue areas in fresco with a grey or dark red base. Once the plaster had dried, he laid the azurite on top, bound with animal glue or egg.
That blue never became part of the wall. It sat on the surface, like paint on a door.
A surface layer is the first to go.
Where the blue has flaked, I look for the grey or dark red base showing through, because that is the fresco Giotto painted before the azurite went on.
The Second World War added its own damage. Sandbags had been stacked against the painted walls to protect them from bombing, and the paint surface came out of the war covered in dust.
At a Glance
Artist: Giotto di Bondone (about 1267 to 1337)
Painted: About 1305
Medium: Fresco, with the blue added on dry plaster
Where to see it: Scrovegni Chapel, Musei Civici, Padua
About This Painting
How big is Giotto's Lamentation?
Giotto's Lamentation measures about 200 by 185 centimeters.
How do visitors get in to see the Lamentation?
Visitors to the Scrovegni Chapel first wait fifteen minutes in a climate controlled room outside, so that the humidity they carry in is lowered before they enter.
Who restored the Lamentation in 2001 and 2002?
Italy's Central Institute for Restoration restored the Lamentation between July 2001 and March 2002. Giuseppe Basile directed it. An earlier campaign, led by Leonetto Tintori, had filled gaps in the plaster with sand bound in synthetic resin.
Why did Enrico Scrovegni pay for the chapel that holds the Lamentation?
Historians usually link Enrico Scrovegni's chapel to his father's fortune. Reginaldo degli Scrovegni was a moneylender, and Dante put him in the Inferno among the usurers.
11. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
A man and a woman stand hand in hand in a well furnished room, with a round mirror on the wall behind them.
She wears a long green dress lined with white fur, its skirt gathered up in front of her. Jan van Eyck painted the couple in oil on an oak panel in 1434.
Above the mirror, he wrote "Johannes de eyck fuit hic", Latin for "Jan van Eyck was here". The man belonged to the Arnolfini, a merchant family from Lucca, in Italy.
Several of its members lived in Bruges. The National Gallery names him Giovanni, with a question mark.