Color: A Natural History of the Palette (41 page)

If ever a city was singing the blues, Kabul was it in those strange hazy days of Taliban rule. It was not that the place was entirely grim. Far from it. Despite what the television footage suggested, there were street markets, weddings and ordinary people just trying to follow ordinary lives. It was more that—in the reflective jazz sense of “blues”—people in Kabul tended to mix their melancholy with dark humor. Not so long ago this had after all been the party capital of Central Asia, and the spirit remained, if not the songs. One day we went for a picnic in the hills with an Afghan family. None of the children had ever been on a picnic before, even though before the wars this had been a national pastime. “Are there landmines here?” I asked the father, a forty-five-year-old university teacher who had all but lost his job under the regime. It was a fair question: the Soviets and others had scattered their time bombs all over the country. “Do not worry,” he said gravely as we made our way through cherry blossoms and bombed-out village houses. “Walk behind me, in my footsteps.” The next day he was taken by the Taliban and whipped on his wrists with wire. They said it was for having a video player, but we feared it was because of the picnic. When we saw him two days later we said how sorry we were. “It was worth it,” he said.

The most popular film in this landlocked place was
The Titanic
: Kabulis had even nicknamed a market the “Titanic Bazaar” because they felt the whole city was going down into the depths. “I would like to have been on the Titanic,” said one of the local U.N. employees one day. “But it sank,” we exclaimed in horror. “Yes, but there were some lifeboats. There are no lifeboats for Afghanistan,” he said with the typical dark humor of his countrymen. No one could have guessed that eighteen months later there would be some “lifeboats” of sorts in the form of bombs from the U.S. and U.K. They would free Titanic-Kabul, although at a high price.

It is curious that in English the word “blue” should represent depressing as well as transcendent things; that it should be the most holy hue and the color of pornography.
⁵
Perhaps this is because blue recedes into the distance—artists use it to create space in their paintings; TV stations use it as a background on which they can superimpose other footage—so it represents a place that is outside normal life, beyond not only the seas but the horizon itself.
⁶
Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness. Until the eighteenth century it was spelled “blew,” and I sometimes think of it as related to the doldrums—the areas between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn where sailors sometimes had to wait for weeks for breezes to blow and let them resume their journeys. Thinking back to Kabul in those days, I think of the ordinary people I met there then as waiting, quietly but rebelliously, for something to happen.

We found plenty of lapis lazuli, some in chunks of half a kilo or more, in the shop windows of Chicken Street. Once this was one of the busiest antiques bazaars in Central Asia; even in the 1970s it was famous among travellers as a place to pick up rugs from Uzbekistan, turquoise glass from Herat and treasures from all over the continent. When we saw it, it was quiet, although most of the shops were still open—just. I bought a rough blue stone from a man who had plenty of lapis getting dusty in his window. How much is it? I asked. “Anything.” He shrugged. “I just need money, my stock has no value for me.” I paid him a fair price, and he threw in another piece, free, for good measure.

It was strange to get the stone free, when the reason for my search was because it was once the most valuable paint material in the world—and in a way it still is. Just as Michelangelo had done, artists in Renaissance Europe would have to wait for their patrons to give them the ultramarine. They could not afford to buy their own. The artist Dürer wrote a furious letter from Nuremberg in 1508 complaining that 100 florins barely bought a pound of ultramarine. Today the paint, made from Afghan stones from a Renaissance recipe, costs around £2,500 for the same amount.
⁷

Michelangelo could have used a cheaper blue mineral
⁸
called azurite to finish his painting if he had wanted to: indeed, he did use it to paint Mary Magdalene’s strange brown dress. Azurite was sometimes called “citramarino,” indicating that it came from this side of the seas, and Michelangelo would probably have got his from Germany. But azurite is a byproduct of copper mines, and it is the sister stone to malachite. So it naturally tends toward the green side of the spectrum, whereas ultramarine veers toward violet. The difference can be summed up in how artists used the two paints: ultramarine to give height to the skies, and azurite to give depth to the seas. The cheaper pigment was also much less stable: Mary Magdalene’s robe in The Entombment
⁹
was never intended to be that unfetching shade of olive; it had just faded that way— from the color of the sea to the color of seaweed.

It seems stupid in retrospect, but I was surprised, seeing my first piece of raw lapis, to find how very blue it was. Until then I had seen only polished stones, and not the best, and they had always seemed rather dull. The other surprise was the stars. All lapis lazuli contains speckles of iron pyrite—fool’s gold—and it makes the best stones look like the firmament. No wonder some people think it is holy: it is a rock picture of the universe. And looking at it, I was reminded not of Michelangelo’s painting, but of another more startling canvas hanging in the room next door.

It is
Bacchus and Ariadne
, painted by the Venetian artist Titian in 1523. I love it partly for its colors, which seem to come from a jewelry box not a paintbox, but mostly because it is the embodiment of pure lust, so always makes me smile. It shows the god Bacchus coming back from India with a drunken entourage; behind him a fat middle-aged cherub lolls over a donkey, while a debauched centaur waves the remnants of a creature he has just eaten for lunch. Suddenly our half-naked love-god sees Ariadne, grieving that her ne’er-do-well boyfriend Theseus has sailed off into the distance. With a single lascivious bound Bacchus flings himself toward her, and she half turns, to see her destiny changing. “Forget that wretch,” Bacchus is shouting. “I’m here and I will give you the world—and the sky and stars as well.”

The sky is the finest ultramarine, and in the top left corner is a constellation of seven stars. This bit of the picture has no perspective; it is almost like a still from a Disney cartoon, and I like to think that this is not because the conservators rubbed the canvas too hard, but because Titian wanted to show it as a fantasy, a mirage of what Ariadne could have if she followed her passion where it led. In 1968, when the painting was restored, the transformed color of the sky whipped up a storm far fiercer than any Turner prize-winner has achieved. The general public didn’t like the look. They felt it was too bright and preferred the off-greens and browns of the discolored varnish. Titian, it was argued, was a man of taste: he could never have chosen that gaudily shimmering blue.

They were in excellent critical company. Even Michelangelo had thought Titian’s colors a little too much. According to his biographer, Georgio Vasari, in 1546 the older man visited the younger in his studio in Rome. Michelangelo commented afterward that he liked the coloring, but “it is a pity that in Venice one was not taught from the beginning to draw well.” It was an expression of an important artistic dispute in sixteenth-century Italy. Ostensibly the argument was between
disegno
and
colore
—drawing and coloring. But more fundamentally it was about how to live life. Where—as I had seen in The Entombment
¹⁰
—Michelangelo planned every element of his composition and would only add colors when he knew exactly what was going where, Titian’s compositions used to evolve as he stood in front of his canvases, palette laden with paint. It is the division between spontaneity and careful planning, between rash Dionysus (or Bacchus, of course, for the Romans and for Titian, who may have been making a statement) and calm Apollo—and the benefits of each approach have been debated passionately over the years, partly because it is an argument about the nature of passion and creativity itself.

We sat in the merchant’s shop—among those very same shimmering blues that Titian had loved and the 1960s British gallery-goers had feared—and talked. In the late 1970s, before the Soviet Union invaded, lapis lazuli was a popular stone among Kabul’s middle classes. People made glitzy jewelry out of it and they kept the stones as savings, along with silver coins. In the past few years the shopkeeper had been seeing both lapis and silver arrive on Chicken Street with increasing regularity and at lower prices. “Families have been getting rid of their treasures,” he said. “We are all getting poor in Kabul.” He told us about the blue mines, and about how women were banned from Sar-e-sang. Once the mines were productive, he said, and engaged thousands of men. But then for a few months almost no lapis had come out of Badakhshan. “I don’t know why,” he said. I thought of a story I had heard from a foreign correspondent the night before. There had been folktales of the lapis veins drying up under the chaotic mujahideen rule in the early 1990s, “because, people said, the mine itself objected to the regime.”

Suddenly the megaphone from the mosques started to call the faithful—or at least the obedient—to afternoon prayers. The merchant quickly pulled down the shutters and we sat there in the half-dark, not speaking. If he had been caught doing business at prayer time he would have been beaten, he said. “It’s enough to make you not believe.” When prayer time was over he rolled up the shutters. A Toyota pick-up—the unofficial vehicle of the Taliban—had parked outside the shop. The shopkeeper looked relieved to see there was nobody in the car: the government thugs had evidently gone to look for someone else.

So now I had my stones—although not enough for a whole robe probably, just a weeping handkerchief’s worth. What should I do with them to make them into paint? I wondered, consulting Cennino Cennini. He is usually so scathing about pigments: one is too poisonous, another too fugitive, another is useless on fresco. But with ultramarine he goes into raptures—“a color illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would still not surpass.” However, to get paint from the stone was almost as hard as getting blood.

Lapis lazuli is a complex clump of minerals, including haüyne, sodalite, nosean and lazurite. In the best grades there is more sulphur, the yellow element curiously making the stone more violet, and in the worse grades there is more calcium carbonate, turning it gray. To make it into paint all these impurities—including the sparkling pyrite stars I liked so much—have to go. To achieve that, the color-maker had to be like a baker, lovingly kneading a dough of finely powdered lapis, resin, wax, gum and linseed oil for up to three days. To coax out the blue, our artist-cook put the dough into a bowl of lye (wood ash) or water, and then kneaded it with two sticks, squeezing and pressing it for hours until the liquid was saturated with blue. He then separated the blue into a clean bowl, and—leaving it to dry into a powdery pigment—started again with fresh lye and the same ball of resin. The first pressing was the best—a virgin pressing for a virgin’s gown. The final pressings (of what would now be a ball of mainly pyrite and calcite
¹¹
) were called “ashes,” and were less beautiful and much less valuable.

BAMIYAN

I still yearned to reach the mines, which I had begun to call “my mines.” And now I wanted to find out why the supplies had stopped. But my understanding of Afghan geography was rudimentary, and of the movements of the front line even more basic. Sar-e-sang was a thousand kilometers away by road. More importantly it was on the other side of the fighting in that corner of the country that was controlled by the opposition, the Persian-speaking mujahideen. There was no way I could get there that year to find the paint for Michelangelo’s canvas—commanders were shifting sides every week and it was dangerous. I was going to have to try again the following year.

But there was another paint mission on this side of the line. The earliest recorded use of ultramarine was just a mountain away, in the town of Bamiyan, where two giant Buddha sculptures were said to have auras around their heads, painted in frescos of lapis lazuli. We wanted to go and see. And we were lucky, we were just in time: a few months later they would be dust.

The first difficulty was getting there. The Taliban were not giving passes to United Nations staff that week, and our host could therefore not go with us. So we accepted an invitation from a French charity called Solidarité. This group organized two types of aid—giving food in exchange for labor, and giving money. A bundle of the equivalent of even ten British pounds in the overinflated Afghan currency was as thick as this book—the biggest note was worth about five pence—so money was bulky to carry, and vulnerable to highway robbers. Hoping fervently that this was not the cash van, we jumped on board.

When war was just something that happened in other countries and roads had tarmac on them, the town of Bamiyan would have been a few easy hours from the capital. But after two decades of fighting, it was a day’s journey across two passes, and past so many derelict tanks that the Afghans laughed when we wanted to stop and photograph them. “If you take photos of every ruined tank in Afghanistan then you will never leave the country,” one former fighter turned charity worker joked. It was on this road that I had my most dangerous experience in Afghanistan. Not from the kohleyed Taliban, who waved us through every sentry post with various degrees of graciousness. But as I squatted in a ditch at the first “privacy” point we had seen in four hours—at the top of a pass—I noticed I was just a meter away from an unexploded rocket. It would have been a bad way to go.