Saints John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene by http://www.wikidata.org/.well-known/genid/ec0fbf4400ad5e80a07a1a601edb31bd

This is 'Saints John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene,' painted around 1340 by the Sienese master Lippo Memmi. It lives today at a public collection in the United States, quietly, far from the gold-ground walls of Tuscany it was made for. For centuries no one outside Siena knew it existed.

Look first at the pigments. The cobalt blue on John's mantle is ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli that traveled from a single mine in Afghanistan, ground by hand in Venice. In a 14th-century contract, ultramarine was often priced by the square inch, not the ounce. A patron paying for that much blue was making a loud statement.

Then look at how the two saints relate. Their bodies do not touch, but their golden halos interlock as if to say: separate in the world, united in the divine. Mary Magdalene's right hand lifts to her chin, the 'manus ad mentum', a gesture classical art reserved for grief and deep reflection. She is the witness to the Passion and the first to see the risen Christ. The painting encodes that weight without a single narrative prop.

Two tiny angels hover above, almost invisible against the gold. They were likely added to anchor the saints in a heavenly court, a compositional device Memmi used to balance vertical space. Every choice in this panel, color, gesture, space, was a theological argument rendered in tempera and gold leaf.

What do you notice first: the blue, or the hands?