When you visit one of the great cathedrals of Europe, you may be forgiven for assuming the medieval mind was full of gloom. The cathedral often appears as a dark place with terrifying gargoyles and dangerously barbed capitals. The towering columns were to the Romantic tourist reminiscent of a forest from a nightmare. They called these cathedrals Gothic in honour of the barbarians who destroyed Rome.
But cathedrals were far from gloomy in their own day. The whole point of them was to bring a celestial light into a space so brilliant that it would awe a being into a state of grace. Architecture became increasingly light. Flying buttresses moved the weight outside so that windows could be expanded. Huge rose windows threw multi-coloured light into the massive space below.
And the walls were painted.
Much of the paint in these sometimes thousand year old cathedrals has dimmed or even disappeared. But in their time, we know artists adorned the walls and columns with the brightest paints in the world. These paints were so bright that some even called them gaudy in their own day.
By far the most impressive of all these paints was aquamarine blue. It was the brightest, purest, most lavish colour in the medieval repertoire. And it was expensive!
Aquamarine blue came from Afghanistan. It was found in a stone in the mountains that had to be ground by hand. The powder was then placed in leather sacks and wrapped around the hump of a camel. It travelled down through the valleys where Alexander marked his furthest border, down into the great Umayyad Empire where Islam was just taking hold. Then this powder moved along the ancient King’s Highway all the way to the Levant where it was shipped to Constantinople, Venice and Marseille.
By the time they reached the cathedrals of Europe, these powders had travelled the entire known world of the medieval mind. They were worth more than gold.
When the artist nervously dipped his brush into this paint, he knew that only the most important parts of the cathedral were to be touched—the robes of Mary, the cloth of Jesus. A cathedral as large as a city having taken over a hundred years to build would have one focal point, one simple place that took no longer than a day to paint.
This was the finishing touch, a brush stroke that would give the soul a glimpse of heaven.
When looking into the paint jars at Mega Screen Media, it’s interesting to see a color like aquamarine blue. It was once so important that it would form the centerpiece of a cathedral. But now it’s just one color in a sea of paints ready to be silk screened onto a cotton shirt.
Not bad.