Friday Links – January 26 2018

The color blue hasn't been around in our art forever. Sarah Gottesman delves into the rich history of blue pigments. "Legend has it that Michelangelo left his painting The Entombment (1500–01) unfinished because he could not generate the funds to buy ultramarine blue. Raphael used the pigment scarcely, applying it above base layers of azurite when depicting the Virgin Mary’s blue robe. The Baroque master Johannes Vermeer, on the other hand, bought the color in spades, so much so that his indulgence pushed his family into debt."

The strange history of Charles I as art collector. "What the Habsburg misadventure had taught him was that a prestigious art collection was a prerequisite of dynastic power and display. It was a potent lesson since the Stuarts were relative newcomers, having occupied the English throne for only 20 years. Charles was a natural aesthete but he had also learned that art equalled authority."

The late Ursula K. Le Guin on the rules of writing. "Thanks to ‘show don’t tell,’ I find writers in my workshops who think exposition is wicked. They’re afraid to describe the world they’ve invented. (I make them read the first chapter of The Return of the Native, a description of a landscape, in which absolutely nothing happens until in the last paragraph a man is seen, from far away, walking along a road. If that won’t cure them nothing will.)"