Paper is an amazing piece of technology, the impact of its popularization can be felt on a trip to the Morgan Library—or any library. Without paper, we wouldn’t have the Gutenberg Bibles that fomented the protestant reformation, the greenbacks that funded the American Civil War or the COVID-19 masks that sowed the seeds for a second one.

One COVID-era project that just debuted at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is “Drawing on Blue: European Drawings on Blue Paper, 1400s-1700s,” an impressive exhibition focused on a single medium of great importance to Renaissance Italy, Enlightenment France and beyond. Originally created from discarded blue rags, and popularized in Bologna, blue paper was a low-cost alternative to white that was often used as a wrapper for purchases and came to be favored by artists for not only its price but also its tones.

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This impressive show features nearly forty drawings, most of which come from the museum’s collection and all of which push the boundaries of what can be done with paper. Blue paper allowed for a particularly rich form of chiaroscuro. See Bartolomeo Montagna’s Risen Christ (c. 1510), which pairs the rich shadows in the demigod’s robes with a gleaming upper body that reflects light from his halo. Cornelis Janson van Ceulen’s Study of a Woman’s Hands (1646) has similarly realistic light dancing off the woman’s jewels, upper wrist and pearls. The makers of modern graphics cards call this effect ray tracing, and van Ceulen achieves it with blue paper, black chalk and white chalk.

Blue paper was used quite differently in France, Spain, Italy and the Dutch Republic. As the excellent catalogue points out, the concept of blue carries different connotations in different languages. In German-speaking territories it related to “fraud, ignorance and deception,” but the Tuscan dialect “lacking a generic term for blue, instead used expressions derived from the dye and textile industry to distinguish specific hues (azzurro, turchino and celestrino).”

The portfolio of Jean-Baptiste Oudry consists of some one thousand drawings, seventy percent of which were on colored paper, which he used to create hunting and nature scenes infused with the richness of fairy tales. The Wolf and the Fox (1733), included in this show, was used to illustrate an episode in Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables wherein a wolf helps a fox disguise itself as the stealthier predator, only to have the fox blow its cover when it hears a cock crowing in the distance and runs to catch it, blowing the plan to sneak up on a sheep. In the drawing the shepherd is marshaling the idealized and fluffy quarry up the hill, the wolves in the foreground buff and evil with demented eyes.

Technological developments aren’t much without visionaries to put them to good use. This diverse and ambitious exhibition shows what can be done when such a development is dropped into an era of fertile minds.

“Drawing on Blue: European Drawings on Blue Paper, 1400s–1700s” is on view at the Getty Center through April 28.