Practice question · True or false
Ghirlandaio's 1485 contract for the Tornabuoni Chapel specified ultramarine by value, at about four florins the ounce.
Hints
- Contracts of the period priced the blue separately from the painter's labour.
- Baxandall quotes the clause.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the clause exists because the patron did not trust the substitution. Ultramarine and azurite look alike on a wall and differ enormously in price, so the contract names the money rather than the mineral, a reminder that the most spiritual passage in a fifteenth-century altarpiece was also its most expensive.
Practise The Symbolic, Psychological and Social Life of Colour
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Painting I is free to start.
More questions on The Symbolic, Psychological and Social Life of Colour
- Why does each of these statements about colour hold? Sort them by the kind of claim being made.
- English has eleven basic colour terms in Berlin and Kay's account. Their study tested 20 languages directly…
- A student writes that her red panels will read as danger to any viewer. Why is that claim weaker than it…
- Complete the account of colour's social history.
- The blue of the Virgin's mantle in Renaissance painting communicated through its material cost rather than an…
- Arrange the stages by which a colour loses the meaning its scarcity gave it, in causal order.
- Guimet was awarded his prize for synthetic ultramarine in 1828. How many years earlier had Ghirlandaio's…
- Which of these are fair summaries of the evidence on colour and psychology?
- Perkin's mauveine of 1856 was extracted from a shellfish, in the same way as the purple of the Roman imperial…