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Medieval Arab scholars developed sophisticated theories about perception, light, and color. Regarding the rainbow, both celestial and refracted, some added blue to its canonical red, yellow, and green. The best evidence for a comparable four-hue concept in contemporaneous Christian Ethiopia comes from Lalibela. Now mostly gone, glass crosses and stars in all four colors originally filled rainbow-arched windows. Today, the quartet comprises the palette for mural and panel paintings, with the Virgin wearing, as here, splendid blue robes. In the modern windows of St. Mary of Zion at Aksum, three tall blue crosses rise beneath a soaring vault, while nuns and priests meditate at rainbow’s end. The same ethereal blues and golden yellows arc over the Ethiopian highlands in the clouds heralding the coming summer rains.

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