The primary goal of this book is to show how much ingenuity man has needed to employ in order to make blue materials. From Egyptian blue to copper phtalocyanine, ranging through Maya and Han blues, smalt, blue ashes, Prussian blue and artificial ultramarine, we cannot help but be in awe of the variety of technical solutions found.

A concise illustrated history of one of art’s most important and elusive elements Over the millennia, humans have used pigments to decorate, narrate, and instruct. Charred bone, ground earth, stones, bugs, and blood were the first pigments. New pigments were manufactured by simple processes such as corrosion and calcination until the Industrial Revolution introduced colors outside the spectrum of the natural world. Pigments brings together leading art historians and conservators to trace the history of the materials used to create color and their invention across diverse cultures and time periods. This richly illustrated book features incisive historical essays and case studies that shed light on the many forms of pigments—the organic and inorganic; the edible and the toxic; and those that are more precious than gold. It shows how pigments were as central to the earliest art forms and global trade networks as they are to commerce, ornamentation, and artistic expression today. The book reveals the innate instability and mutability of most pigments and discusses how few artworks or objects look as they did when they were first created. From cave paintings to contemporary art, Pigments demonstrates how a material understanding of color opens new perspectives on visual culture and the history of art.

'Everything there is to know about inorganic pigments' Revised and updated, this book offers a concise and thorough presentation of inorganic pigments in their diversity: their manufacturing processes, their applications and markets, their testing procedures and standards, and also the health and environmental regulations relating to them. Over 40 first-class authors from leading chemical companies have created a uniform and clearly structured text, giving an excellent overview of the subject area. The reader is provided with more than 800 up-to-date references to the pertinent literature, which will be extremely useful for further studies. This book will be of benefit to all chemists, materials specialists, engineers, application technicians and students in pigment-related fields.

The Pigment Compendium Dictionary is a comprehensive information source for scientists, art historians, conservators and forensic specialists. Drawn together from extensive analystical research into the physical and chemical properties of pigments, this essential reference to pigment names and synonyms describes the inter-relationship of different names and terms. The Dictionary covers the field worldwide from pre-history to the present day, from rock art to interior decoration, from ethnography to contemporary art. Drawing on hundreds of hard-to-obtain documentary sources as well as modern scientific data each term is discussed in detail, giving both its context and composition.