The colors of oil painting are not merely aesthetic choices; they are material substances with histories, economies, and meanings. The pigments used by painters have been mined, manufactured, traded, and fought over for millennia, and the availability of a particular color has often determined the possibilities of an entire era of painting. Ultramarine, the brilliant blue made from lapis lazuli imported from the mines of Afghanistan, was more expensive than gold during the Renaissance, and its use was reserved for the most important passages of a painting—the robe of the Virgin, the sky of a sacred scene. Lead white, the essential white of the pre-modern palette, was poisonous and laborious to produce but unmatched in opacity and warmth. Earth pigments—ochres, umbers, siennas—were abundant and cheap, the foundation of the landscape painter's palette. The nineteenth century brought a revolution in pigment chemistry: the invention of synthetic ultramarine, the discovery of cadmium and chrome colors, and the development of aniline dyes. Each new pigment expanded the painter's possibilities and transformed the look of painting itself.
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