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Artist Joel Garcia asked the pointed question at last night’s Zócalo program, “What Is the Value of Art?” Put on in partnership with NeueHouse, KCRW, and Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the program took place just days before Frieze Los Angeles—a week of art exhibitions, events, and big money—descends upon the city.

The panel spoke to a packed house at the ASU California Center. The conversation, moderated by curator Helen Molesworth, considered the long, entangled history of art and money in the West and what a decommodified art world might look like. They also interrogated the program’s premise—ideas of “value” and “art”—and found within it a space for curiosity and critical thinking.

Molesworth began by asking the panel to describe a formative work of art. For LAXART director Hamza Walker (who filled in at the last moment for his friend, CEO of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Sandra Jackson-Dumont), it was the album covers that he encountered as a “young punk” in Baltimore. Artist and activist Andrea Bowers mentioned Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” which was on her mind because she recently learned more about the weekly potluck dinners the studio volunteers came to during the making of it. And Garcia, who is also a cultural organizer and co-founder of Meztli Projects, evoked the scene in Purple Rain where the camera pans in the crowd and you see the punks, the goths, and other folks coming together. “I want to be able to do that,” he said.

Hearing these examples, Molesworth observed that the panel was already opening up the traditional meaning of art: “It’s not ‘I went to the museum and saw Rothko and had to bow down.’ It’s being in community with others.”

This, of course, runs counter to the current media obsession with art that’s rooted in its market value. That connection isn’t new; art and money, Molesworth joked, have been in bed together in the West from their “Roman Catholic church marriage” onward. She turned to the panelists: Do you think the field is less tied to institutions and markets than it used to be? “What,” she asked, “is your hope meter at in this long game we’re playing with art? Because art really is a long game.”

“I want to believe it’s as-long-as-the-species-itself game,” Walker said. “We’ll continue to do it as long as we’re around. Market this, that, or the other. Good, bad, fact of life—I’m not bothered by it. It’s there. But it isn’t the end all, be all in any way whatsoever in terms of the gauge of the value.”

It isn’t about what’s being showcased at these art fairs, Garcia agreed, “it’s what’s on the outside of it.” He referenced the ’80s Chicano artist collective Asco who spoke of the unpopular in-between in the kinds of spaces where the “spotlight isn’t on [but] where a lot of the magic happens.”

Molesworth asked Bowers what she thought: “Do you see an increasing democratization of art or a decreasing democratization of art?”

Decreasing, said Bowers. “I see a decrease of democracy in general. I can’t separate art from capitalism. We’re stuck as artists and curators and directors in this f—ed up system.”

But there was a consensus among the panelists: if anyone can help change the current paradigm, it’s artists.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

“We can create a new way of seeing things,” said Garcia. “We can create many worlds and where many worlds fit.” That’s why artists can take on the undefined and identify the gaps in systems and open them up in ways that aren’t rooted in white supremacy. Take the toppling of the Junipero Serra statue in Father Serra Park in downtown Los Angeles that Garcia witnessed firsthand. “Someone in policy may be so deep into it, they don’t see these points of intervention that artists can exploit,” he said.

What is it about art, Molesworth asked the panelists, that is so intertwined with justice and equity?

For Walker, what makes art so powerful is that it can mirror conditions, and by doing this, it can produce a “radical consciousness” of those conditions, if people let it. But rather than think about art in terms of solving social justice, he said that he finds it more useful to think about art as a space to ask questions: “Do I go to museums to look at art for solutions? To be honest in most cases, not necessarily,” he said. “I have to ask myself, what, if anything, am I looking for when I go to look at stuff? But there are those experiences that do inform me in terms of critical capacities, in terms of thinking that I don’t get through what I read in the newspaper.”

Art is not in the category of social justice, Bowers agreed; art is a category all its own. But as her passion and subject matter, she is constantly thinking through questions like, “how I can be of service, and what art can do?”

As the conversation came to an end, an audience member shared that when he first read the title of the event, money or commodification didn’t cross his mind. To him, the question was clear: “I thought of the value of art to people and improving society.”

Molesworth observed how, after an hour of conversation, that showed just how open to interpretation the value of art remains. It reminds us, she said, that one of the biggest “values” of art is that it gives us a “critical questioning relationship with those terms.” It’s important, she continued, to recognize that art plants seeds “not only of beauty and love but also of disrepair to break things that need to be broken and repair things that need to be repaired.”

That’s why art is “so valuable to all of us, and so crucial to all of us” she said, bringing the conversation to a close, because “it is so fungible.”

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Critics claim the cool palette of Picasso’s blue period reflects the depression he experienced between 1901-1904. When standing in front of Picasso’s Death of Casagemas (1901), for example, we experience the weight of grief at the loss of his best friend. But for the next artist, blue can evoke the very opposite. Consider, for example, International Klein Blue, the dazzling ultramarine that defined the Yves Klein’s oeuvre. Face-to-face with the luscious electric blue of the French artist’s paintings, we want to dive in and revel in their vibrancy. The contrast between Picasso’s and Klein’s blues could not be more pronounced.

Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962. Photo by Paolo Monti. Courtesy of the Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC, and Wikimedia Commons.

This variability in tone, texture, hue, and temperament can be found in different artists’ uses of the color gray. In the case of Giacometti’s portraits, the multiple uses of gray even can be found on a single canvas.

According to Giacometti, gray was the color “that I feel, that I see, that I want to reproduce,” the color that “means life itself to me.” But what was this life that he sought to reproduce, in gray?

Giacometti did not come to gray by chance. His critics and commentators like to explain the gray in which his figures are immersed on the canvas as an extension of the plaster and stone shavings that formed layers of dust over his chaotic studio. Others write about his use of gray as a disregard for, or negation of, the substance of paint. For them, gray is the background, the inconsequential space within which a human figure sits.

However, I don’t believe Giacometti pursued an aesthetic nihilism. Prior to World War II, his portraits were the same multicolored palette as those of the surrealists, expressionists, cubists, and formalists. After focusing his energy on sculpture during World War II, he returned to painting with two male busts and two standing women in 1946. These four paintings are gray. In 1947 and 1948, following a brief experimentation with a brown palette, Giacometti settled on gray for the remainder of his life. He never returned to other colors.

Critics like to explain Giacometti’s turn to gray as a response to photographs he saw of the suffering on the World War II battlefields, including images from the concentration camps.

But this explanation doesn’t match the complexity of Giacometti’s gray canvases. In an interview towards the end of his life, he discussed the reality of the streets he had been searching to recognize. He claimed that, prior to the war, reality presented itself to his eyes as a photograph, that he saw the world as if on a screen: distant, yet accessible from different perspectives. On his return to Paris, after the war, reality became unfamiliar, increasingly unstable, and eventually, unknowable. Reality on the Boulevard Montparnasse, outside Giacometti’s studio, might have been “marvelous,” but it became altogether out of reach for the artist.

Could it be that gray was the color best able to represent this feeling of a strange, unknowable reality? Certainly, the irresolution and ephemerality of the color gray seems well-suited to Giacometti’s ongoing and impossible search to represent modernity.

While siblings of the portraits can be found on the canvases of artists such as Francis Bacon, Giacometti’s figures find their closest relatives in literature. Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, and Hamm and Clov, are the literary cousins of Annette, Diego, and Caroline. They are all immersed in stagnant, gray worlds, always with a slither of light coming through a dirty window. Giacometti’s models recess into their gray backgrounds, as do Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist beings, their spiritual kin. The unidentifiable heads of Diego, Annette, Caroline and others are filled with an existentialist “nothingness” that defines their intrinsic lack of human self-identity. Indeed, Giacometti turns to gray to capture the fleeting moments as Sartrean-like human beings move along a path to ultimate disappearance.

Giacometti’s canvases also capture the myriad possibilities of existentialism in their materiality. Giacometti’s gray is tinged with purples and greens; it is, at times, steely blue, and at others, muddy brown. It can be highlighted in red or white, washed in rich earth tones, or, in a painting such as Dark Head (1959), gray is almost black. Giacometti’s gray not only opens itself to all other colors, but it also covers the spectrum from light to dark, and white to black. In the portrait, Diego (1958), gray is light itself, shining around the head of Giacometti’s brother, illuminating the shape of his nose. Gray often moves from ice cold to warm and sunny on a Giacometti canvas. As it oscillates between dichotomies, gray never sits still, bringing life to the figures and the backgrounds against which they are painted. Characteristic of both Giacometti’s conception of humanity after Sartre and the color itself, the rainbow of grays on Giacometti’s canvases are vibrant and always in process. They are neither—and both—figure and ground, representation and abstraction, perpetually in the process of becoming, often taking shape as what they are not.

In keeping with this colorful vibrancy, when we stand before them, the paintings come alive, we see figures as people with personalities given to them by their luminous gray faces. Giacometti’s figures have few individual characteristics; their only expression is in the variant gray tones of their bodies and faces, highlighted by the gray brushstrokes that surround them. True to the modernist challenge to classical portraiture, these works have nothing to do with capturing an individual’s identity or soul. They are about the perception of a body and face, distorted by its posture, in space. Like their sculpted siblings, the portraits are figures in which we identify the human. But, in the end, they are no more than manipulations of an anonymous, gray medium.

Giacometti’s tall, slender figures might be in motion, but they are trapped inside the frame. They are like their maker, who is also stuck on an idea, obsessively working and reworking their bodies until he tears their canvases. The worn, gray canvases bring out the substance of the material of painting, and simultaneously, expose what might be seen as their creator’s internal frustrations. The figures, in frames within frames within frames, are at the vanishing point of a mise-en-abîme of incarceration, sometimes about to fall out of the frame. They never succeed in freeing themselves fully from entrapment in their gray world. Together with their artist, they represent the curse of modern existence, mired in gray. In time, however, the portraits—like Beckett’s well-known characters—carry within them the promise of freedom.

The appeal of Giacometti’s portraits to the popular consciousness and the art market is inconsistent with their abstract philosophical complexity. But one thing is sure: Giacometti’s gray figures are not specific to their postwar historical moment, and neither do they belong solely to the existential crises of the 20th century.

Giacometti’s process made visible on the canvas is an expression of time, an evocation of memory and history. The figures are worked over in pencil, charcoal, or paint; rubbed out, smudged, drawn over until the canvas is torn. The “never-finishedness” of Giacometti’s portraits is evidence of his obsessive excavation of the past, as well as his belief in a future moment when resolution might occur.

When we stand before these paintings, we recognize that they are not simply unfinished. It is as though Giacometti is still working, and will continue to do so into infinity. We don’t need to hear from those who sat for him that Giacometti was a perfectionist of sorts. His models tell of endless sittings, and a continual postponement of the end. We see this exact perpetuation in the paintings themselves: Like gray, they are unfinished, ill-defined, uncertain, and still breathing possibility into the present. If Giacometti kept his sitters much longer than they anticipated, on the canvas, he never let their representations go, even when he claimed he was finished.

As much as Giacometti had a love affair with the placement of a figure in space, and an obsession for how and where, whether it was still or moving, what size and scale the figure should be, he also had a love affair with paint—with the material as opposed to the materialism of painting. That love affair gives the portraits life; in the scratches and scrawls and the swathes of gray, we see the hand of Giacometti at work, still. We meet with Giacometti on the painting to give it significance, creating an ongoing conversation between artist and viewer in the 21st century. As single-color field canvases, what can the portraits have to say about the complexity of the three-dimensional world, of the evolving patterns of human life? Everything, I would argue—just like the color in which they are painted.

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The color is associated with introversion and introspection, but it’s also associated with the expansiveness and openness of oceans and skies. It’s a sacred color in the world’s religions, but blue movies are obscene movies. And while the color can represent life in many ways, it’s also true that “when we die, we turn blue,” said art historian Carol Mavor. Blue, she added, “does seem to depend on a sense of paradox.”

The color and all its permutations were the subject of a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event before a large and appreciative audience Thursday night at the Getty Center. On an auditorium stage bathed in blue light, in front of blue backdrop in a blue state, a blues quartet of a panel—a chemist, an art historian, a photographer and researcher of West Africa, and a comedian-musician-playwright—offered very different reflections on blue in an awe-inspiring array of contexts.

The conversation started with a look at the blues of the Morpho butterfly and the Giotto frescos in the 14th-century Arena Chapel in Italy, and covered bluestockings, blue bloods, blues music, blue-collar workers, blue eyes, the civil-rights era film A Patch of Blue (about a blind white girl who befriends Sidney Poitier), the iris in Vincent Van Gogh’s work, and the magic of that little blue pill, Viagra.

Oregon State chemist Mas Subramanian talked about his accidental discovery of a new shade of blue, “YInMn blue,” during work to create compounds that might improve the memory of computers. He said that is typical—blue is an unpredictable color, even a deceptive one.

“Nature plays tricks on us—many things that we think are blue are not really blue,” he said. “Living organisms are not very good at making blue.” The sky, for example, is not really blue. But, he added, deep bodies of water are actually blue, in that they absorb reds (which have longer wavelengths), leaving blues, which have shorter wavelengths.

Another panelist, Catherine McKinley, author of Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World, spoke of the value, financial and spiritual, of blue cloth—specifically indigo products—in west Africa, where she traveled along traditional indigo trade routes in 11 countries. In the 1800s, lengths of blue cloth were exchanged as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In some contexts, a human being could be traded for two yards of cloth. During the American Civil War, the U.S. dollar became so devalued that trade was conducted in indigo cakes.

McKinley said that across different cultural contexts, there is often a connection of blue to life and death. “Blue as cool,” she explained, “representing a kind of spirituality, exemplified by a coolness.”

Panelist Garrett Morris, an original Saturday Night Live cast member who has worked as a musician, actor, and playwright, pointed out that blue is not just a color. “Blue is also something you can feel,” he said. He described how his grandfather, a Baptist preacher, introduced him to the blues when he was a young child in New Orleans, “even though he shouldn’t have” since the blues were considered evil and dirty.

Morris, who also has owned a comedy and blues club in Los Angeles, said he loved the “elusiveness” of the blues. “It’s not sad or happy. There’s a bittersweetness about the blues. It’s more sentimentality, melancholia, which can be good or bad … It doesn’t have to be definite.”

As the event went on, the panelists—and several audience members—exchanged a river’s full of facts and questions about the color blue.

Did you know that Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind, and blue is the only color he sees well? Did you know that the Hindu god Vishnu is blue, and associated with life and death and rejuvenation? Subramanian noted how Indians became excited about perceived connections between the blue characters in the James Cameron film Avatar and aspects of Hindu religion and culture.

Morris pondered, “When was the first time someone said, ‘I feel blue.’ Why didn’t they say, ‘I feel green.’” (Other panelists suggested that the body can turn blue when it is hurt or ill). And a retired swimming pool contractor in the audience described how much work goes into making sure that when water fills a pool, it looks blue.

In response to an audience member’s question about how blue tastes, the art historian Mavor, who is the author of Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, discussed a blue mushroom, the indigo milk cap, that bleeds a delicious milk. But she noted that many blue tastes are artificial—like blue jello—and desired by children.

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Something is missing, even a blind person could tell that. The scent is all wrong. Instead of damp mustiness, it smells of, well, tourists. You are not in the real Chauvet cave, which is closed to the public, as the atmospheric conditions which preserve its fragile paintings must be maintained. Instead, you are in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, a recently opened replica of the Chauvet cave. It’s accurate down to the last undulation of the stone wall—to the last stalactite—but patently false.

Now, you travel blindfolded to some anonymous, freshly built art museum. Down goes the blindfold, and you stand before van Gogh’s Almond Blossom. Surely you must be in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Why, the painting is obviously a van Gogh, with the artist’s globular, three-dimensional application of vast, snotty quantities of oil, so much that the paint casts a shadow.

But no, you’re looking at a work from the Relievo Collection, an odd package offered by the Van Gogh Museum to collectors and institutions who would like nine of van Gogh’s greatest hits on their walls, at a cool quarter million dollars for the bunch, proving that even for the wealthiest people art can be difficult to procure and prohibitively expensive. These pricey reproductions are pinpoint accurate, made with sophisticated three-dimensional scanning and printing, so that every brushstroke is just as van Gogh made it. Only van Gogh did not make it. A printer did.

Caverne du Pont d’Arc.

Welcome to what we might call “art in the age of digital reproduction.” This idea is riffing on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he argued that authentic artworks have a certain, indefinable “aura” about them that makes them great. Reproductions—whether produced mechanically, as they were in 1936 when Benjamin was writing, or digitally as they are today—are missing this. We might even risk calling this the missing “soul” of the work—a key component that art lovers find lacking when they see a digital copy of a work.

I specify digital copy, because these reproductions are very different from forgeries. In my recent book, I discussed whether a forgery of a great work of art could itself be considered great. Most forgeries that make any headway in fooling experts are unique works themselves, made by hand by an artist in fraudulent imitation of the work of some other, more famous artist. These forgeries are “originals,” in that they are still created by a passionate craftsman, and therefore possess their own kind of aura. They are just made in a derivative style and then later passed off as something they are not.

Such unique, handmade forgeries, created with skill and ardor—like Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers, Eric Hebborn’s rendition of Van Dyck’s Christ Crowned with Thorns or even Michelangelo’s Sleeping Eros, which he passed off as an ancient statue before he had made a name for himself—can indeed be great works of art unto themselves, in a similar vein as the work done by an assistant in a master’s studio. Apprenticeship is part of a long tradition in Western and Asian art, distinct from forgery in that there is no proactive attempt at fraud. With few exceptions, at least since the days of ancient Athens, master artists all worked in the studio system. The master was the head of a studio consisting of apprentices, who functioned like live-in interns, and paid assistants. While these apprentices and assistants handled much of the actual painting—the under-layers, still-lifes, architectural features, backgrounds, and clothing—the master designed the work and supervised its creation. The mark of a good assistant was his ability to paint in a way that was indistinguishable from the master’s style, so that the finished painting, sculpture, or decorative object would appear to have been created by a single artist. All the works that emerged from the studio were under the authorship of the master, who was licensed by the local painter’s guild to run the studio and accept commissions.

This method was almost always the way artists worked, with the few who did not run studios—such as Caravaggio—acting as the exceptions rather than the rule. One might pay a fortune to get a work entirely painted by Rembrandt, or a more modest sum for a work designed by Rembrandt but largely painted by his staff. This did not mean that the less expensive option was poorly made, and technically, it could even still be called a “Rembrandt.” This process was an entirely legal, artist-sanctioned form of forgery.

When we speak of scanned and printed works of art, copies made by computers and a fabrication mechanism rather than a human hand, it is a different story altogether. It might look good, but what about Benjamin’s “aura?”

Almond Blossom, Vincent van Gogh.

Digital reproductions do not have to be copies of existing works. Recently, The Next Rembrandt project saw scientists develop a brand-new painting, complete with an original subject and composition, digitally designed and printed to look like a lost work of Rembrandt’s. Aesthetically, when viewed on a computer or television screen, it convinces. Since the most successful art forgers do not copy existing works, but instead create new pieces that they attempt to pass off as an established master’s lost work, the compelling nature of this digital experiment is disturbing. Giorgione created only a handful of paintings in his career. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more works “by” Giorgione could be created? Or would it?

Perhaps creating new works of art designed by committee, and made by computer, feels morally questionable. But what of resurrecting works that once were, but are now destroyed? My next book is an illustrated history of lost art—the technology exists now to recreate lost masterpieces, from the Athena Parthenos to the bombed-out ruins of Palmyra. And what of finishing projects that the fates did not permit to come to fruition? Leonardo’s colossal Sforza horse would have been the largest cast-bronze sculpture in the world, but he only made a full-size terracotta version of it before he was driven from Milan by the invading French (who used the horse for target practice). Now we could build the bronze version according to Leonardo’s exact specifications. But should we?

It is when you see such a work in person that the veil begins to peel back. One can just feel the inauthenticity of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc cave paintings, of the Relievo van Goghs, of the “new” Rembrandt. These digital copies lack Benjamin’s aura. That aura is what divides the real world from the Matrix. In the film, The Matrix, most of the world chooses to live in blissful ignorance in a computer-generated simulation of a pre-apocalyptic version of the world. But a handful of heroes want to “unplug” the Matrix and reveal to humanity that it is living in a simulacrum, a lie, so they can rebel against it. One scene from the film references Lewis Carroll: The hero, Neo, is offered either a blue or a red pill. Taking the blue pill would allow Neo to forget that the Matrix is a computer construct, to rejoin the blissfully ignorant. Taking the red pill would keep him aware of painful reality, but this awareness would allow him to do something about it. Connoisseurship, an innate feeling for art and authenticity, is the red pill that allows experts and passionate amateurs to feel the difference between art that emerged from a three-dimensional human hand, versus that spit out by a three-dimensional printer.

Subtract the post-apocalyptic warzone, and the parallel with The Matrix is apt. Experts and art lovers can tell the simulacrum from the authentic work. The rest of the world could, likewise, if they tried, but they may not care to. Perhaps they are just as happy with a Relievo Collection van Gogh on their walls? A danger arises when amateurs and bogus experts aren’t able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s reproduced. Worse, they might see the digital copy and decide that it is not worth the effort to see the original. They might not think that the work is better, but it is unarguably more convenient to access. All this talk of simulacra and The Matrix may bring to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which he describes what humans perceive as akin to shadows dancing on the back wall of a cave in which humanity is chained, facing the back wall and unable to turn around. Light from outside shines on life passing by the mouth of the cave, but humans cannot see it directly, only by way of the shadows thrown by the light onto the back wall. Those accepting of the shadows as sufficient live in blissful ignorance inside the Matrix. Those who are convinced that a simulacrum is not enough struggle against those chains.

Back in the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, the tourists all look perfectly content. And perhaps they should be, for in this situation, it is literally not possible to visit the Chauvet cave itself, and this is the only option—a simulacrum, but a very good one, made with passion, though produced by digital technology and mechanics, by a human mind but not a human hand. This is less objectionable than, say, the tourist who visits The Venetian hotel and casino in Las Vegas—which includes a vast, elaborate reproduction of Venetian streets and canals—and then decides that he has already seen Venice, and doesn’t need to go to the real city. If this happens too often, with simulacra so much more convenient to experience, the real version can slump into disrepair and eventually become abandoned. Then we may be left with the body, but risk the loss of the most important thing to those who truly know and love art and history: the soul.

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Even today, we interpret these vibrant images as celebrations of eating and drinking in a time when food was sometimes scarce for the poor and part of a conspicuous display of wealth and bounty for the upper classes. But amidst all the pageantry and spectacle, it is easy to overlook that something is amiss: Nobody’s eating.

Medieval people had what one might call an uncomfortable relationship with food. Of course sustenance was both essential for survival and a source of pleasure. But when allowed to run wild, pleasure could lead to sin. Overindulging in food and drink trod dangerously close to gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins prohibited by the Church beginning around the 4th century A.D.

I first considered this uneasy balance after my colleague Amy Neff, a professor at the University of Tennessee, pointed it out. A few years ago, she was preparing a fascinating study of images of the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, in which Christ miraculously transforms jugs of water into fine wine. In image after image, she started to notice a pattern: None of the attendees are ever shown drinking it. Even the steward who samples the vintage and pronounces it superior to wine served earlier in the meal doesn’t actually take a sip.

As I prepared for the exhibition currently on view at the Getty Museum, “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Food in Medieval and Renaissance,” and gathered manuscripts from the Getty’s collection and from a private collection depicting the consumption of food, each and every feasting image supported this observation. Take a look:

Last Supper, Benedictional, Regensburg, about 1030-40, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig VII 1, fol. 38

In the earliest manuscript in the exhibition, a 1,000-year-old book of prayers from Regensburg, Germany, has a striking Last Supper scene. At a semicircular table, Christ sits with his apostles and blesses them. Some of his followers pick up knives to eat bread, fish, and, yes, even a pretzel, laid out on the table before them. The two figures closest to Christ raise food to their mouths, but do not actually consume it. Only one apostle ingests the bread—Christ’s betrayer, Judas, who’s seated alone on the side of the table closest to us. In the biblical text, Christ identifies the rogue apostle by his act of consuming food: “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me” (Mark 14:18). The sinister black bird that emerges from Judas’s mouth in the image marks not only his sinful act of betrayal, but also his solo consumption of food.

Temperate and the Intemperate, Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, miniature from Valerius Maximus, The Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Romans, Bruges, about 1470-80, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 43, recto

Valerius Maximus, the author of The Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Romans (circa 30 A.D.), appears at far left in blue conversing with the emperor Tiberius. He gestures to two groups of diners, one staid and one rowdy, discussing good and bad behavior of the temperate and the intemperate, respectively. The well-dressed nobility sit in an orderly fashion at the dining table elevated in the back of the room and placed before a luxurious textile cloth of honor. Items on the table are carefully arranged, and each individual sits in his or her proper place. In the foreground, dressed in coarse clothes, the lower-class figures signal the server for more drinks, sleep at the table, and fall off the bench onto the floor. Crumbs and an overturned cup litter the rumpled tablecloth.

Valerius never mentions feasting in his writing, and his text pre-dates the Christian Church and its warnings against gluttony, but the artist responsible for illustrating this 15th-century copy of the text chose to illustrate moral versus immoral behavior through the lens of eating. Although the haphazard arrangement of the “intemperate” people implies over-consumption of food and drink, close examination of the image reveals otherwise. Even those who demonstrate their moral failings with their poor table manners and inappropriate feasting behavior don’t actually eat.

The Feast of Dives, Master of James IV of Scotland, Spinola Hours, Bruges and Ghent, 1510-20, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 18, fol. 21v

In this early 16th-century image, “Spinola Hours,” the cut-away view displays both the exterior and interior of a well-appointed dining room in a wealthy household. A retinue of servants brings various dishes to the well-fed gentleman’s table, including roast poultry rakishly decorated with one of its own feathers. More than just a slice of medieval life, this image depicts the biblical story of Lazarus and Dives (the Latin word for “Rich Man”). When Lazarus, a beggar, comes to the door asking for scraps from the table, the Rich Man sets his dogs on him. For medieval Christians, the Rich Man came to represent the epitome of gluttony, not only because he consumed food to excess, but because he failed to share his bounty with others less fortunate. One would expect such a figure to be shown lustily consuming the bounty of his table, but though he raises a bowl, suggesting the impending quaff, it remains a good distance from his mouth. Even a biblical figure closely associated with gluttony does not eat.

Images of feasting that appear in medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts illustrate the types of foods consumed by people at that time, elegant food presentation, and proper table manners. More importantly, they reveal medieval attitudes toward food. In the earlier Middle Ages, and in the context of books used by high-ranking clergy, such as the Regensburg Benedictional, it was desirable to implicate Judas as a sinner through his act of eating and to set up a contrast with the 11 more restrained apostles. Centuries later, as the concept of the seven deadly sins became more entrenched, concern seemed to increase about the depiction of eating, especially in manuscripts owned by wealthy laypeople who might easily be accused of gluttonous behavior at their feasts. The ambiguity revealed in the fact that people do not eat, especially in these later illustrations, expresses the medieval struggle to straddle the fine line between eating enough food to survive and eating to excess.

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That spontaneity required two remarkable advancements—a scientific understanding of the laws of light and color, and a new palette of colors that could be used to exploit these laws. As luck would have it, both happened around the year 1704. Sir Isaac Newton published his revolutionary text Opticks, and a German chemist discovered a vivid new blue pigment with amazing properties.

I’m fascinated by how those two developments come together. I am a museum conservator, not a curator. I bring a scientific and technical perspective on the methods and materials of art to the preservation of the collections. I am also a painter, and it was my passion for decoding the mysteries of “old master” paintings that led me to art conservation.

In mounting the exhibition “A Revolution of the Palette: The First Synthetic Blues and Their Impact on French Artists” at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, I seized the opportunity to share my investigative processes with museum patrons. Given the opportunity to choose masterpieces from the collection and study them under the microscope, I looked for evidence of how painting in oils had changed between the end of the Baroque era and the mid-19th century, thanks to a single color: Prussian blue.

That blue was an accident. In 1704, a chemist and color maker named Heinrich Diesbach was rushing to manufacture a batch of Florentine lake, a red pigment derived from boiled cochineal insects, alum, iron sulfate, and potash. Lacking this last ingredient, he borrowed some from the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, not knowing it had been contaminated with so-called “animal oil”—a foul concoction of blood and other animal-derived ingredients that Dippel sold as a “cure-all.” Diesbach returned in the morning to discover a deep blue substance, thanks to the presence of an iron-cyanide contaminant. The two men quickly realized the commercial potential of this new pigment, and independently began producing batches of it to sell to painters at the Prussian court. By 1710, the first samples of Prussian blue pigment arrived in Paris, where Antoine Watteau is known to have shared it with his fellow painters Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher. Both were early and enthusiastic adopters of the new blue for their compositions. So was Canaletto in Venice, who found it indispensible in achieving his atmospheric effects. This fête champêtre (scene of a garden party) by Bonaventure de Bar, an intimate of Boucher’s circle, was painted in 1728. A glimpse under the microscope reveals rough, irregular particles typical of early Prussian blue, scattered in a thin glaze over the sky and clothing.



Although Prussian blue lacked the clear, “true blue” hue of lazurite, Prussian blue had unique properties that allowed painters to work more spontaneously. Only a small amount was required to impart a strong tint to other colors, including white. Painters could now mix a much wider spectrum of colors on their palette.

Painters could also take advantage of new knowledge. Artists were keen to depart from the old conventions of representing space and form, which depended more on metaphysical and philosophical arguments than scientific facts. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, was now begun. In his Opticks, Newton wrote about his findings regarding light and color: For example, he had separated a beam of sunlight into its component colors with a prism. Word spread of Newton’s work, thanks to highly vocal supporters like Voltaire and vehement opponents like Goethe. Artists began to experiment with color harmonies to create illusions of depth in new ways. Color wheels and other diagrammatic representations of color theory revealed sophisticated relationships, and artists soon realized that colors diametrically opposed on the color wheel, known as complementary colors, had a special “harmonic” relationship. Placing one next to the other, or partially covering one with the other, results in optical effects simulating three-dimensional depth. One color tends to “advance”—or “pop,” as we sometimes say now. Thanks to the discovery of Prussian blue, painters had, for the first time, a palette of oil paints that could let them reproduce the full color wheel, and thereby experiment spontaneously on the canvas to achieve marvelous optical effects.

In France, these new possibilities came to fruition in Rococo painting. With its playful subject matter, delicacy of color, and exuberant brushwork, this art movement became known in the early 18th century as peinture moderne. Deceptively simple, these paintings reveal a mastery of the new scientific principles of color theory. Boucher, Fragonard, and others experimented with advancing and receding complementary colors. Color harmonies were everywhere, in the deepest shadows and the most brilliant sunlight. Black was all but banished. Practices popularly credited to the French Impressionists have their origins more than a century earlier as Rococo artists took advantage of an expanded palette. Look, for example, at a painting like Jupiter and Semele, by Deshays de Colleville, Boucher’s son-in-law. His masterful brushwork, characterized by deftly placing and blending strokes of varying colors and hues directly into each other, juxtaposes complementary colors in carefully orchestrated variations. As a result, his figures project forward from the Prussian greens and blues of the forest backdrop.



The Norton Simon exhibit moves forward from the full blossoming of the Rococo era through the French Revolution, after which the new Republic desperately sought to develop new products and revive the shattered economy. A centerpiece of this effort was the nationally subsidized quest for new paint pigments inspired by the brilliant ceramic glazes seen on French royal porcelain, resulting in the discovery of cobalt blue and its variants, and ultimately the attainment of the “holy grail” of an inexpensive “true blue,” aka “French ultramarine.” The exhibition concludes with the Impressionists, who went even further with optical color manipulation and spontaneous brushwork. They enjoyed the advantage of myriad oil paint colors now sold in convenient, re-closable metal tubes, easily taken outdoors for true plein air painting.

In helping viewers read the surfaces of paintings from this remarkable period, I have rekindled my own desire to look, to experiment, to study for a new series of paintings. But more than that, I have gained renewed optimism regarding the potential for an accidental discovery to occur at just the precise moment when it can be best exploited to the benefit of all. Prussian blue was made in the “laboratory” of an alchemist at the right time to resonate with the dissemination of a grand scientific revelation and to catalyze a whole new direction in human expression. Serendipity happens, and sometimes the result is revolution.

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