Celebrating the theme of Pan-African art, today's..

Celebrating the theme of Pan-African art, today's color is Egyptian Blue. I had the privilege to attend the pre-opening of the Art Africa Fair 2017 yesterday, and to see contemporary art from all over the African continent. Very exciting. And what better color than Egyptian Blue to express the modern with a nod to the traditional.

Egyptian blue is famous for being the first synthetic color. Egyptian blue is actually calcium copper silicate and it has been used for 5000 years, found in a tomb painting dated to the reign of Ka-Sen, the last pharaoh of the First Dynasty. There is some dispute about this, with other experts claiming that Middle Dynasty applications introduced Egyptian Blue about 4500 years ago.

The calcium copper silicate was used as a pigment in painting, on sarcophagi in the tombs of the pharos, and in Egyptian faience, a kind of blue pottery glaze.

Blue was expensive, and hard to find, so even in Egyptian tombs it is reserved for the clothing of the gods. In an earlier Color Stories post, we described how lapis lazuli was used in Medieval times to create paint, but that it was very expensive. The Egyptians desired to imitate the color of Lapis and Azurite, and used chemistry to do so. The recipe was lost in the Middle Ages and not used again until the 1800s.

Synthetic Egyptian Blue was cooked up using: these amounts:

60–70% silica (SiO2)

7–15% calcium oxide (CaO)

10–20% copper(II) oxide (CuO)

The final color consists of rectangular blue crystals together with unreacted quartz and some glass. This blue pigment was suitable for painting if mixed with a binder such as gum arabic or egg, to make tempera paint.

Egyptian Blue is #40 of #100colorstories #colorlove. Pictured below are an Egyptian wall painting from 4000 BC, Egyptian pottery with faience glaze, and a cat ceramic with faience glaze. The frieze also uses Egyptian blue in the glaze.