Azurite for a Kingdom. An overview of the pigments, binders and painting technique used in the craft of mural painting in the Kingdom of Navarre from the 12th to the 14th century and the symbolic implications of blue color

Abstract

The importance of the Navarrese mural painting in the thirteenth and fourteenth century has been already pointed by art historians in the past. But in the last three decades, many unrevealed sets of medieval mural paintings have been discovered behind altarpieces or whitewash layers. In Navarre, since 1993, for each new finding of a wall painting a restoration report has been carried out. Since 2002 samples of pigments were send to laboratories to be analyzed. Such corpus of scientific data brings a new source of study for the art historian, added to the previous style-based and iconographical analysis.

This article pretends to gather all these data from twenty restoration —with the available data up to 2022—reports and draw a small history of the use of pigments and binders in Navarrese mural painting from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries. From those reports, it is clear that there is a shift in the pigments used during the fourteenth century, when the gothic linear style arrives to the cloisters of the Cathedral of Pamplona, and later to parish churches through the kingdom. Among these new pigments is significative the presence of azurite.

Through the rich documental sources of the Archivo General de Navarra, we find that a local Navarrese painter was send to the Pyrenees mine of Urrobi, to gather silver, copper and azurite. As such, combining the data of the restoration reports and archival documentation, in the last part of this article I discuss the importance that this pigment had in the Navarrese painting scenario of the fourteenth century. Such importance was not material, but symbolic too, as the 14th century blue color was highly esteemed as a sacred color.