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Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c9.s4: Blue Pigments

Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c9.s4

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Blue Pigments

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Symbolically and æsthetically, the colour blue has appealed to Indian mind from very ancient days. In the wall-paintings of Ajaṇṭā, the brilliance of ultramarine supplements and vivifies, as it were, the dullness of the red and yellow ochres. The sparkling deep blue, used to delineate jewels in ornaments and garments, adds a peculiar charm to the figures, and the ultramarine tinged clouds and birds have a beauty of their own.

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*Indigo.*—The medieval texts on painting acclaim with one voice as indigo being the chief blue of the painters in the middle ages. The *Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa*²⁹ mentions *nīla* or indigo as one of the colouring materials, and, in the *Mānasollāsa*, the shade of indigo (*nīlī*) is compared to blue lotus, and its admixture with various colours to obtain various shades is described. Though indigo has not been used in the wall-paintings of Ajaṇṭā or Ellura, its use is apparent in the illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts from Bengal, Nepāl³¹ and Western India.

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²⁹ The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, ed. by W. Foster, p. 485, Lond., 1899.

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³¹ *Rūpam*, 1920, p. 9.

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Indigo was known to the ancient Egyptians, and it was imported by the Greeks and Romans from India, whence its name. It was extracted from a certain plant known to botany as indigoferæ. It was primarily used as a dye, but was also used as a blue pigment. The importation of indigo to Europe from the Orient continued through the Middle Ages, and the best quality in European markets was known as Baghdād indigo or Gulf indigo.

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*Ultramarine azure (rājāvarta, lāzvard).*—There is evidence to show that blue was extracted from the lapis lazuli in quite early times, long before any of the recipes for its extraction was known to European texts on colour-making. As its name suggests, this colour was brought ready made from some land ‘across the seas’ to Europe. The lapis lazuli, from which ultramarine blue was extracted, is almost exclusively found in Badakshān and Persia. Its source as a colour was known since a long time, as attested by the wall-paintings of Ajaṇṭā³². The *Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa*³³ counts the lapis lazuli (*rājavarta*) as a colouring material, and in the *Harshacharita* (middle of the 7th century)³⁴ the ultramarine tunics (*rājavartaka mechakaiḥ kañchukaiḥ*) are praised. In the *Mānasollāsa*³⁵ the shade of the *rājavarta* is compared with the colour of the flowers of *Linum Usitatissimum* or common flax plant, which shows that its author was well acquainted with this colour. The *rājavarta* or *rājavarta*, wrongly translated by Dr. Stella Kramrisch as ‘deep coloured brass’³⁶, is apparently the Sanskritised form of the Persian *lāzward*, meaning lapis lazuli, the source of ultramarine azure. It could be, therefore, said that the stone was imported from Persia, and, perhaps, the colour was also imported ready made, as no process for its manufacture is mentioned in Sanskrit texts.

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³⁰ *Viṣṇudharmottara*, III, 40.

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³² G. Yazdani, *Ajaṇṭā*; Vol. I, pp. 1-2.

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³³ *Viṣṇudharmottara*, III, 40.

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³⁴ *Harshacharita*, p. 202.

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³⁵ *Mānasollāsa*, II, 1, 161.

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³⁶ *The Viṣṇudharmottara*, p. 51, Calcutta, 1928.

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In the palm-leaf period of Western Indian painting (circa 1200—1400 A.D.), ultramarine blue was not used. But in a palm-leaf manuscript of the *Kalpasūtra*, owned by the Sheth Anandjī Mangaljīnī Peḍhīnā Jñāna Bhaṇḍār at Iḍar, which Prof. Norman Brown dates at the close of the 14th century,³⁷ there is a miniature depicting the birth of Śrī Mahāvīra (Fig. 59) in which the border of the *oṛhanī* of the queen, lying on a couch, is outlined with a thick streak of ultramarine blue. As the miniatures in this manuscript have also gold in their colour scheme, and to which we will have to refer later on, it seems possible that the ultramarine blue was reintroduced in India by the Persians, sometimes in the 14th century. In Western Indian miniatures on paper, however, ultramarine is the favourite blue.

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Even the best and darkest lapis lazuli contains a good deal of material which is not blue, such as calcite which is white, and iron pyrite which sparkles like gold. If lapis lazuli is powdered, then the result is disappointing as a pigment, as, unless the stone is unusually deep coloured, the powder is not blue at all but simply grey. Under a microscope, this powder may be seen to consist of a few particles of blue among a great many colourless particles. The blue cannot be separated from the impurities by washing with water. More complicated methods had to be invented in the Middle Age in Europe to extract good ultramarine from the lapis lazuli; and there is no documentary evidence to show that the necessary invention was known before the 13th century.³⁷

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³⁷ *J. I. S. O. A.*, V (1937), p. 6.

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³⁷ *Thompson*, loc. cit., p. 146.

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