Ultramarine — the deep, luminous blue made by grinding the gemstone lapis lazuli — is one of the oldest and most cherished of all the artist's pigments. For thousands of years, it was the most precious colour on earth, costlier by weight than gold, and reserved for the most sacred images a civilization could create. The painters who called it "a fragment of heaven" were not exaggerating. This is its story.
A single source, and a journey of thousands of miles
For as long as nine thousand years, almost every great civilization that met lapis lazuli fell under its spell. Long before it was ever ground into paint, it was treasure, and the remarkable thing is how universally it was recognized as such. Cultures that never met, separated by oceans and centuries, all arrived at the same conclusion about a single blue stone.
It came from one place on earth: the Sar-e-Sang mines in the Badakhshan mountains of present-day Afghanistan, worked by hand since at least the seventh millennium BC. From those remote, freezing tunnels, lapis travelled astonishing distances along the oldest trade routes in the world, east into Asia and west toward the Mediterranean, long before anyone had drawn a map of where it went.
The ancient world's most treasured stone
Wherever lapis arrived, it was given to gods, to kings, and to the dead, never to the ordinary. It reached the Sumerian city of Ur, where it was buried with royalty, set into the Standard of Ur and crowning the headdress of Queen Puabi some four and a half thousand years ago. It reached Egypt, where it ringed the eyes of Tutankhamun's golden funerary mask and was prized as a holy stone.
Part of the reason was the colour, but part was what people saw within it. A deep blue scattered with golden flecks of pyrite looked like nothing else on earth; it looked like the night sky. To many ancient cultures it was the heavens made solid, a fragment of the firmament fallen to the ground.
"Beyond the sea": how lapis became ultramarine
When the stone finally reached Europe, carried by sea and overland trade through the medieval centuries, Europeans had no source of their own and no real idea where it began. They knew only that it arrived from somewhere far across the water. So they named the colour for its journey: ultramarine, from the Latin ultramarinus, meaning "beyond the sea."
The name stuck because the blue earned it. No other pigment of the age could match its depth, its purity, or its permanence.
The colour of heaven: lapis in sacred art
The Christian world claimed it first for its holiest image. In the icon workshops of Byzantium, where sacred panels were painted in egg tempera, lapis ultramarine was set aside for the most sacred figure of all, the mantle of the Mother of God. Ever since the Council of Ephesus proclaimed her title in the year 431, blue had been her colour, and no blue was thought worthy of her but this one. From Constantinople the tradition spread through Greece, the Balkans, and Russia, and it lives on in Orthodox icon painting to this day.
In the West, the same devotion took hold. Ultramarine became the most expensive colour a painter could buy, and it was written into commissions and contracts, reserved, once again, for the holiest passage on the panel: the robe of the Virgin Mary.
The glory of the Italian Renaissance
The history of Italian painting opens with Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337), who flooded the vault of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua with deep lapis blue strewn with golden stars, a heaven made visible. The masters who followed him all reached for the same stone: Duccio, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Giovanni Bellini. In their hands lapis was not merely a colour but a mark of devotion and of value.
The High Renaissance only deepened its prestige. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Michelangelo, who carried ultramarine onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, enjoyed a social standing few painters had known before. Using lapis was part of that standing: it made a work more distinguished, more costly, and more clearly the product of a master. Titian poured it across the sky of Bacchus and Ariadne, where it still blazes today.
Northern Europe and the Dutch masters
The love of lapis was just as strong north of the Alps. Its brilliance lights the Annunciation of Jan van Eyck, the Adoration of the Magi by Albrecht Dürer, and the Death of the Virgin by Hugo van der Goes. In the following century came Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and the great Dutch painters Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer was especially generous, some would say reckless, with the costly pigment. He used it not only on the surface but as an undercoat beneath other colours and in his glazes, which gave his paintings their pearl-like luminosity and the brilliance of broad daylight. It is the lapis from these very Afghan mines that glows in the headscarf of his Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The blue that lit the page: illuminated manuscripts
Nor did the blue stay on walls and panels; it lit the pages of books. In Flanders and the Low Countries, the illuminators of the great books of hours spent it without restraint; the Limbourg brothers laid brilliant ultramarine skies and robes across the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the most celebrated illuminated manuscript ever made.
The pigment was so precious that, around a thousand years ago, a woman in a German monastery was buried with specks of lapis still caught in her teeth, the trace of an illuminator who had drawn her brush to a point against her lips. For centuries it was assumed only monks did such work; the blue in her mouth proved otherwise.
Persia, the Mughals, and the Islamic world
Europe was not even this stone's most devoted patron. Far closer to the mines, in the workshops of Persia and the wider Islamic world, lapis blue was not rationed but celebrated. In the art of tazhib, the illumination of manuscripts, the pages of the Qur'an were framed in gold and the deepest ultramarine, the two most precious materials a maker could offer, set side by side around sacred words like a border of heaven.
That same blue lit the jewel-like world of Persian miniature painting. In the royal workshops of Herat, a city in what is today Afghanistan, the very land the stone was mined from, masters such as Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād (c. 1450–1535) composed scenes of impossible delicacy, their skies and robes deepened with ground lapis. The tradition reached its summit in manuscripts like the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, where the lapis blue still glows on the page five centuries later, undimmed. The same beauty endures in the Mughal miniatures of India, where lapis carried the prestige of the imperial court.
A blue that defeats time
That endurance was the deeper reason lapis was so prized. Natural ultramarine is among the most lightfast pigments ever discovered; it does not fade, does not darken, does not surrender to time. The blue in those manuscripts burns as brightly as the day it was laid down. In the Buddhist cave murals of Bamiyan, painted in Afghanistan more than thirteen centuries ago, the lapis blue has outlived the empires that made it.
Nor was the stone ever confined to art. It was carved into amulets and royal seals, strung into the jewellery of queens, polished into columns for the palaces of Europe, and inlaid into the white marble of the Taj Mahal. Few materials, made by nature or by hand, can promise a thousand years. This one delivers them.
The same blue, still made by hand
The history of lapis pigment cannot be confined to a few countries or a single age. It is a pigment for all the artists of the world, for all times, and its magical deep-blue brilliance continues to fascinate as it always has.
At De Mairo, we continue that lineage, refining genuine lapis from the historic Sar-e-Sang mines using the same patient methods the old masters relied on. If you'd like to understand the most luminous grade of all, the one named for the Renaissance friar who loved it, read What Is Fra Angelico Blue? Or explore the full range of genuine lapis lazuli pigments we make today.
Frequently asked questions
Why was lapis lazuli more expensive than gold? For centuries, it came from a single, remote source in Afghanistan, travelled vast distances, and was painstakingly refined into pure pigment. That rarity, combined with an unmatched and unfading blue, made it the most precious colour a painter could own, and, by weight, costlier than gold.
What is ultramarine? Ultramarine is the brilliant blue pigment made from lapis lazuli. The name means "beyond the sea," because the stone reached Europe from far across the water. Genuine ultramarine is made from the mineral lazurite within the stone.
Where does lapis lazuli come from? The finest lapis has come for thousands of years from the Sar-e-Sang mines in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan, the source used by the ancient world and the Renaissance masters alike.
Which famous paintings used lapis lazuli? Among many others: Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Jan van Eyck's Annunciation, and Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Is lapis lazuli still used as a pigment today? Yes. Genuine lapis lazuli pigment is still made, refined by hand from the same Afghan stone, and remains prized by artists for its depth, transparency, and permanence.
Written by Irfan, Founder of De Mairo, who has spent more than twenty-five years refining genuine lapis lazuli pigment by hand.