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Glorify yourself and your family: A Portrait of Yourself: Artist Interview
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£ = Super-cheap
££ = Budget-minded
£££ = Good quality, no frills
££££ = Almost spectacular
£££££ = Fit for a pope |
My lord, I have a very special offer for you today—a custom portrait for just £££ lire. Your neighbors will never guess how little
you paid for it, I guarantee it! |
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Will you use ultramarine blue? I'm not interested in that cheap German blue pigment. |
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Alas, no, ultramarine must be made from the rare and lovely lapis lazuli, imported from the East. That would cost an extra ££ lire. What do
you desire? |
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- German Blue—but good luck fooling the neighbors with it
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Honey, you know how I hate to look cheap in front of the neighbors. If we can't afford ultramarine, let's skip blue entirely.
You could wear your gold jacket. I hear that artists nowadays can capture the look of gold with paint alone! |
- Ultramarine—for those who care enough to show how wealthy they are
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That's not what Hans Maler looked like! That's a portrait of someone else entirely, by Titian. But there are
no portraits of Hans Maler. Like most Renaissance artists, he probably wasn't rich or famous enough to have a portrait made and of course, cameras didn't exist 500 years ago.
But he's right about ultramarine. Artists were stuck using whatever colors they could mix from raw pigments. This rarest and most beautiful blue was sometimes even more
expensive than gold! It was made from lapis lazuli, a mineral that had to be imported from Asia. |
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