When an artist paints a picture like this one, deciding which colors to use is very important. Hundreds of years ago in Europe, in a time known as the Renaissance, artists chose from paints made from minerals, such as azurite and malachite, and plants, such as saffron and Brazil wood. Some colors had such expensive ingredients that they were saved for only special parts of a picture.
A deep blue paint was made by crushing the valuable gemstone lapis lazuli into a fine powder and mixing it with other ingredients. This costly blue was used most often for the clothing of the biblical Mary. If a picture included a woman wearing clothes painted with lapis blue, people understood it was probably Jesus's mother.