Before you get too far, I would like to make a short disclosure: This post is about the color blue, not the soulful music. (If you are interested in the role of Germany in Blues music… check out “Monika’s Blues: On the Trail of the German Harmonica and African-American Blues Culture” by former German Ambassador Herbert Quelle.) And now back to Germany’s Blues.
In our modern world, it’s strange to think that the color blue used to be special. After all, blue is everywhere! I wear blue clothing, my sofa pillows are blue, and I write with a pen that puts out blue ink. Blue just IS!
But in human history, the color blue was sometimes challenging to make. After all, there isn’t much blue out in nature. That is, nature doesn’t provide things that could be used as dyes or pigments to recreate the sky’s beautiful blue color. (As George Carlin pointed out, “Blueberries are purple”). Artists and dye makers struggled to find the elusive blue dye. Blue was extraordinary, and blue was expensive.
Why was Blue Pigment and Blue Dye so Special?
Around the 400s CE, artists started painting Mary wearing blue. They used Ultramarine, a pigment made from ground Lapis Lazuli imported from Afghanistan, to create the marvelous blue robes. But, importing Lapis Lazuli was quite costly.
The veneration of Mary which had been steadily increasing in the Catholic Church from the 5th century, spiked in the 11th century, and with this came a surge in the need for blue dyes and pigments. As the devotion to Mary increased, more shrines and images appeared. Cathedrals were built in her name. Pilgrimages in the 11th and 12th centuries to these shrines were popular… and profitable … Churches wanted blue vestments and Altar cloths. They needed blue for the new stained glass windows. More (and cheaper) blue dye and paint sources were desperately needed to satisfy the demand.
(fun fact! Until recently, BLUE was the color for girls, and red or pink for boys. Mary wore blue robes, and Jesus wore pink or red. So, girls wore blue, and boys wore red or pink. Around the beginning of the 20th century, our association of color with gender changed).
And it wasn’t just Mary. Royalty saw blue clothing as a sign of “celestial divinity,” as well as wealth and status. They wanted to show their piety and wealth by wearing BLUE. Although Ultramarine worked well as a paint, it wasn’t practical to use as a dye. First, it was expensive and time-consuming to grind all that imported lapis lazuli; after all the work, the dye wouldn’t be as permanent. Woad dye was permanent, which meant more people could wear blue.
What is Woad?
On Erfurts Krämerbrücke you’ll find a Rosanna Minelli’s Shop “Erfurter Blau”. A plant with small yellow blooms that I mistook for mustard grows in a pot by the door, and in the window are brown balls about the size of a baseball. The plant, Isatis Tinctoria, or Woad (Waid in German), and those balls, made from the fermented leaves of the Woad plant, transformed the city into a wealthy city and powerhouse of medieval trade because of BLUE. Balls of Woad, when crushed, are used as a pigment and a dye and are the only natural source of blue dye in Europe.
Using woad as a dye wasn’t new. Blue woad dyed clothing was found in Hallstadt graves dating from 400 BCE. (In the British Islands, the Celts under Boudica painted themselves blue with woad dye when going into battle!) Growing and using woad wasn’t a secret; it was just grown on a small scale. Most farmers couldn’t be bothered with woad since the plant wasn’t great for the soil, and you couldn’t eat it. Why spend time, energy, and valuable land growing a plant that couldn’t do anything except turn your perfectly serviceable grey cloak blue?
(note- The Egyptians figured out blue much earlier, but the knowledge, like so much early knowledge, was lost during the Dark Ages. And Indigo? The few bricks of the pigment that did make it to Europe were WILDLY expensive)
How to make Blue from the Woad Plant
To make the blue dye, first, the leaves are stripped from the plants and mashed into a paste by a mill. The mash is formed into balls around 4 inches in diameter and set to dry for four weeks. Then, the dried balls get crushed to a powder. The powder is made wet again and then left for a few days to ferment. When it finally dries again, the powder gets stored in barrels.
Then the dyer takes over.
When it’s time to dye some cloth, the dyer puts a set amount of the powder into the dye vat, adds some urine, and lets that sit for three days to two weeks (yes, the smell is terrible…).
Then, finally, the cloth is dipped into the vat and comes out blue.
You can also grind those woad balls to make blue pigment for writing, drawing, and painting. Woad blue could even be used in the new stained glass that Cathedrals all wanted. It was fairly versatile stuff!
(Fun fact- According to Miniatures.de, adding alcohol to the urine would make a more intense blue… but rather than just pour the alcohol into the vat, the dyers would drink a lot, and add their alcoholic urine to the vat. Today Germans still use the term “Blau machen” or making blue, to describe taking a Monday off after a weekend of excessive drinking.)
“Erfurt Blue” the first Profitable brand of Germany’s Blues
As the need increased, the people of Erfurt took notice. The land in Thuringia proved to be the perfect micro-climate for woad, and the first mention of woad production in Thuringia dates to the 800s CE. By the 11th century, over 300 Thuringian villages around Erfurt specialized in growing woad. The villagers sent their product, in the form of Woad Balls, to the merchants in the city. (A tough occupation, since the plant is hard on the land, making it difficult to grow food crops) Waid Herren, the wealthy woad merchants in Erfurt, would then sell the balls to buyers from across Europe at the Waidmarket, and ONLY Erfurt citizens were allowed to sell there.
Erfurt sits near the crossroads of two major trade routes, one going north and south and the other east to west. The Via Regia runs straight down the Krämerbrück over the Gera river and funnels travelers to the Woad Merchants. A “blue triangle” developed between Erfurt’s woad production merchants, the textile manufacturers in Genoa, Italy, and the paint makers of Amiens and Lille in France supporting the woad trade.
(fun fact– Jeans, the blue pants we all love to wear, got their name from Genoa, and the blue pants that Genoese sailors wore.)
By the 13th century, Erfurt was at the center of woad trade in Europe. “Erfurter Blau” was renowned for its high quality. Money poured into the city thanks to the “Blue Gold.” Merchants built massive homes and warehouses to show their wealth and status. (Many of these homes still stand in the Altstadt). In 1379, the city used some of this money to build one of the first Universities in Germany. Scholars from all over the Holy Roman Empire, including Martin Luther, came there to study. (The university even features in a Till Eulenspiegel story!)
And with only a few interruptions (like the Black Plague), the people of Erfurt were all happy with their profitable enterprise until 1498 when Vasco de Gama discovered a (relatively) quick sea route to India. Within a few years, Indigo would chip away at the woad market.
Indigo wrecks Havoc on Germany’s Blue Market
A few words about Indigo: Indigo comes from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and requires a hot, damp environment to thrive. It would not survive in Europe. Workers in India produced solid bricks of indigo powder for sale. People would chip off parts to grind into a powder for use as dye or pigment. The cost of carrying these bricks overland from India to Europe was astronomical… but a new sea route made the price easier to swallow, especially since indigo was ten times stronger than woad and gave you a bluer blue.
Woad merchants didn’t go down without a fight!
By 1577, the first anti-indigo laws were enacted, and the use of indigo was forbidden in areas of woad production, trade, and use. In Württemburg, dyers had to swear, under THREAT OF DEATH, not to use indigo. But it wasn’t enough. Although local farmers were still producing woad dye balls for the woad merchants to sell through the 1620s, by 1630, the woad market collapsed. Fortunately, the merchants of Erfurt (and their stately homes) survived the crash, but the town never recovered to the status it once had.
So the world ticked along with Germany out of the Blue market until a pigment maker in Berlin had a breakthrough.
Prussian Blue
In the late 1600s and early 1700s, King King Frederick I summoned many alchemists and chemists to Berlin because it was in vogue to have these guys around. Among them was Konrad Dippel, an alchemist with the reputation for his ability to make gold with his chemistry set. Sadly for Frederick I, Dippel never produced any gold, but he DID create something called animal oil, a smelly remedy for typhus and, when mixed with turpentine, the animal oil cured tapeworm. (It stunk to high heaven and reading the ingredients, probably did as much damage to the host as the tapeworm).
(A quick aside- Konrad Dippel was born at Burg Frankenstein, near Darmstadt, where he developed quite a reputation for grave robbing and more. Read that here- Burg Frankenstein)
Sometime between 1704 and 1706, a pigment maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach took a job working in Konrad Dippel’s laboratory. His task for the day was to produce a “red lake” pigment using cochineal insects and potash. (I had to look it up… cochineal insects look a bit like those Rollie Poly bugs we played with when we were kids). Since he was out of potash, he borrowed some from Dippel. He didn’t realize that Dippel’s potash was contaminated with animal blood (from animal oil manufacture), so instead of a bright red, the resulting chemical composition came out BLUE. Really blue! The elusive blue that people had been hoping to find for years.
Selling Prussian Blue
Diesbach showed Dippel the new color, but didn’t understand how it happened. Dippel KNEW that the potash was tainted, so he successfully reproduced the results. It was an “Eureka” moment! Chemists, dye makers, pigment specialists, and artists had been searching for that elusive blue for years. Indigo was fine and good but still needed importing, and in that modern time, chemists were confident they could find a substitution. Anyone who found a great Blue Dye or Pigment could get rich!
Sadly, Dippel wasn’t a businessman. Instead of putting all his efforts into raking in gobs of money with their discovery, Dippel choses this moment to pick a fight with the Swedish king by writing an insulting pamphlet about religion. Since the Swedish ambassador had influence in Berlin, Dippel was arrested. (The Swedish was rather close at this time, and memories of the Thirty Years War were still fresh). One week later, while out on bail, he disguised himself as a Swedish officer… and ran off to the Netherlands.
Diesbach suddenly finds himself alone in the lab. He’s a chemist, not a businessman, so he entered a partnership with Johann Leonhard Frisch, and together they began producing and selling the new color as “Prussian Blue” (“Prussisch Blau”) or “Berlin Blue” (“Berliner Blau”).
Prussian Blue was the first modern synthetic pigment derived from a chemical. Basically, Diesbach created his blue pigment in a lab, and once someone knew the formula, they could reproduce the results cheaply and easily. Diesbach and Frisch knew this, so they kept the recipe a secret. And Dippel? He also subscribed to the “loose lips sink ships” philosophy in the Netherlands where he sold his version of the pigment.
By 1708, Frisch was making good money selling all of the Prussian Blue that Diesbach could produce. In 1714, he sold 100 pounds of Prussian Blue at 30 Thalers a pound in Paris alone. (To put that into perspective, in the 1700s a wool weaver would earn 2.1 Thalers a week). He used the money to buy a large plot of land outside the Spandau Gate, planted Mulberry trees, and set up experiments for more colors.
They rode that gravy train, having cornered the market on another of Germany’s Blues. Meanwhile, other chemists worked overtime trying to crack the secret of Prussian Blue, and after 20 years, someone did. Once the secret was out, others began to cash in. (Presumably, there were no patent attorneys at the time).
What made Prussian Blue so important?
Artists and fabric manufacturers LOVED the new Prussian Blue.
For artists, indigo gave them an adequate blue, but for a deep blue, they still needed the expensive Ultramarine with lapis lazuli. This made a rougher paint, or spending time grinding stone into a finer powder. The Prussian Blue could be used in watercolor or oil. Deep blue, light blue, it was just a matter of adding the right amount. And the color remained stable.
We’ve all seen the results. Van Gogh famously used Prussian Blue for his Starry Night.
Prussian Blue was a hit in the Far East. The Japanese adopted it for their woodblock prints and paintings. The color stayed clear and didn’t fade like the earlier dyes and pigments. Hokusai’s “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” still looks as fresh today as when it was first created.
Beyond art, Prussian Blue could be used for everyday items… like stamps. (The Prussian Blue 2 pence Mauritius stamp is considered the rarest stamp …check your collection), and Blueprints.
The big money from German Blue came from the military.
As expected, the Prussian Army always wore dark blue. Of course, officer’s uniform coats were dyed with indigo.. but the enlisted men wore coats dyed with woad. Over time, woad would fade. Cheap, colorfast dye was a huge help on the battlefield. By the mid-19th century, all Prussian uniforms were dyed with Prussian Blue.
To add to the confusion… the Parisian Army also wore blue, and the Bavarian Army wore Cornflower blue. The British Navy needed blue cloth for the uniforms, and importing indigo was expensive. And since they were fighting on so many fronts, they needed a big suppy. The English still used woad for basic uniforms, but Prussian Blue gave them a cleaner blue, and they didn’t need to rely on imports. George Washington also chose blue for his army. Using Prussian blue as a dye meant that the colors stayed true (and must have ended some of the battlefield confusion).
The dashing Prussian blue colors of the military uniforms spread to fashion, and during the Regency Period, a courtier named Beau Brummel made the close cut blue suit THE thing to wear. Suddenly, everyone was wearing BLUE.
Germany’s Blues
Of all the contributions Germany has made to society, the color blue doesn’t leap to mind (most people land on cars or beer)…but the importance of BLUE can’t be underestimated. Prussian Blue is still in use today, 300 years after its discovery. And woad based Erfurter Blau? You will still find it used by craftsmen who want to use natural dyes to color their fabrics and yarns. And of course, you can buy finished crafts at the shop on the Krämerbrücke.
References
Erfurt Die Blaue Stadt-The Blue City by Sara Keller, Martin Christ und Jörg Rüpke
Parisian or Prussian Blue -Historical Paint for Miniatures
Arty0 Why Jesus and Mary wear Red and Blue
Mary and the importance of blue
The Purchasing Power of the Thaler
The History of Prussian BLue- Jackson’s art blog
Chemistry Views- Prussian Blue Discovery and Betrayal
A Short history of BLue Pigments