“Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.”
This is a journey through time, pigment, power, and perception — a visual and cultural chronicle of blue, from sacred dust in Egyptian tombs to the conceptual purity of Yves Klein.
Blue is the most paradoxical of colors: rare in nature, yet revered across civilizations.
The
Blue
World
The first lapis lazuli mine in the Sar-i Sang, Afghanistan
7000 BC
The ancient Egyptians developed Egyptian Blue, a synthetic blue pigment made from materials like sand, lime, and copper.
Production of blue (German indigo) in Europe
Indigo imported from the New World
Invention of Prussian blue
Invention of cobalt blue
Invention of synthetic ultramarine
Yves Klein registered the formula for International Klein Blue (IKB)
2200 BC
XIII AD
1562
1802
1828
1960
1706
A Sacred Color for the Divine
In ancient Egypt, blue was more than a hue — it was a spiritual force.
The gods were often depicted with blue hair or skin, a symbol of their celestial and eternal nature. Blue represented the waters of the Nile, the sky above, and the realm of the gods. To depict these ideas in art, the Egyptians turned to rare and vibrant materials.
True blue did not exist naturally in Egypt. Instead, the pigment lapis lazuli was imported all the way from Badakhshan (modern-day Afghanistan), over thousands of kilometers. This semi-precious stone was ground into a brilliant powder and used in burial masks, jewelry, and wall paintings.
Most famously, the mask of Tutankhamun glows with bands of ultramarine lapis — a symbol of divine protection and immortality.
The mastery of blue in Ancient Egypt wasn't merely aesthetic. It demonstrated control over trade, chemistry, and cosmology. Creating blue meant commanding the forces of nature — fire, mineral, and time. It was an early form of technological alchemy, making the invisible visible: the divine, the eternal, the infinite.
Out of necessity and ingenuity, the Egyptians created the world’s first synthetic pigment: Egyptian blue, made from ground sand, copper, lime, and natron. This luminous pigment was applied to statues, papyri, and ceramics — and it still glows under infrared light today, more than 3000 years later. It was not just a color, but a material of power and innovation.
In medieval Europe, blue was not simply beautiful — it was sacred.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the frescoes of Giotto di Bondone, who, in the early XIV century, transformed the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua into a celestial theatre.
Ultramarine cost more than gold. Its presence in a painting was a statement: of wealth, piety, and serious artistic approach.Blue became the visual shorthand for holiness, radiating grace, peace, and otherworldliness.
Giotto —
Painting
Heavens
The
At the center of Giotto’s color palette was ultramarine, the most expensive pigment available — made by grinding imported lapis lazuli into an ethereal powder. Reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary, this blue was a sign of both artistic devotion and financial sacrifice.
With Giotto, blue took on a new cultural and spatial role: it wasn’t only symbolic — it shaped perspective, mood, and realism.
It was the beginning of blue as a dimensional force, capable of conveying distance, serenity, and the sublime.
In the mid-20th century, French artist Yves Klein set out not to paint with blue — but to become it.
Dissatisfied with the way traditional binders dulled the intensity of ultramarine, he collaborated with chemists to invent a new medium.
The result —
a matte, ultrachromatic
blue that seemed to radiate from the surface, infinite and immaterial. For Klein, this was not a color but a state of being.
With Klein, blue reaches its conceptual limit. It is no longer bound to gods or saints, oceans or textiles. Klein reminds us that color can outgrow the world, that history leads not only to refinement — but to essence.
Klein stripped away figures, subjects, and scenery. What remained was just blue — pure, resonant, undiluted. In his famous Anthropometries, nude models became human brushes, imprinting their bodies in IKB on vast white canvases. These were not paintings of women; they were traces of presence, of movement through color. Blue became a medium of the soul, detached from representation and logic.
He believed blue had no dimensions and no boundaries. It was the most immaterial color, the most spiritual color. To Klein, blue was not just the color of the sky — it was the sky. It was air, silence, the void.
In one of his performances, he leapt into the air — “into the void” — a gesture of faith in invisible forces. Blue was not something to look at; it was something to fall into.
The text content is AI generated.
All images for this project were taken from open sources and belong to their respective owners.
This is a non-commercial project and a manifestation of my love for color blue in all its shades and glory.