Egyptian Blue

I’ve been considering the color of my archaeologist’s thermos, an important detail when you have to get up early every morning and deal with a bunch of bratty high-school kids attending field school in an incompatible spot.  In the end my choices came down to Persian blue, Palatinate blue—which, oddly, means the blue of Durham University, where I stayed that July up the winding stairs of the castle while doing archaeology—or, what I’ve finally settled on, Egyptian blue.  The blue of the fresco above.

Colors, and their pigments, are always intriguing, sensual in many ways.  Blue does seem especially to draw me.  This little meditation on its possibilities comes from a short creative nonfiction piece I wrote several years ago.

Put on your favorite cashmere sweater, and see if you think its color is closest to

· soft powdered Egyptian blue (pigment ground into tree resin)

· the blue robe of a Renaissance saint (lapis lazuli incorporated into viscous oils and honey, wrapped in a cloth and kneaded)

· the blue of a Pompeian fresco excavated from ash (sand and copper, baked)

· partly cloudy Constable blues

· the blue of one of the Auguste Macke watercolors in Tunis—Woman on a Street, maybe, or View of a Mosque without the camels

Image: Pond in a garden. Fragment from the Tomb of Nebamun, 1400 BCE