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| Ultramarine in watercolor |
A history changing piece of news from January 9, 2019 brings me back to my blog after many months. Here we are in the twenty first century, and we are finding out surprising details about a woman artist who, according to radiocarbon dating, lived and died in a women’s monastery in Germany somewhere between 997 and 1162 CE in the tenth century. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History looking into the health and diets of people in the Middle Ages were closely examining bones of corpses buried in a medieval cemetery in Dalheim, Germany when they discovered something very surprising: a woman with dental plaque that was flecked with hundreds of tiny, bright blue particles barely visible to the naked eye. And here is where twenty-first century technology comes into the story.
Multiple spectrographic analyses of the dental calculus or plaque of this German nun’s teeth revealed that the blue flecks were in fact ultramarine pigment, a rare and very expensive pigment made from crushed lapis lazuli stones. Lapis lazuli at that time was mined from a single part of Afghanistan and was as expensive as gold. Only the finest artists used it. It is said that Michelangelo could not afford it, so rare and costly was the mineral. Yet this nameless nun in a women’s monastery was using the ultramarine pigment made from lapis to create art for an illuminated sacred book. I can imagine her sitting on a high stool, vellum page in front of her, and as her mind wandered, raising her brush with its bright blue beauty to her mouth looking at what she was drawing and thinking, maybe even praying. I thought of her as I made my two strokes of ultramarine. My ultramarine is affordable to almost any artist. I use at the top Daniel Smith's Ultramarine Blue and below Winsor & Newton's French Ultramarine both synthetically produced.
Unlike Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in which monks die from licking poison in their work as scribes, this unknown nun died of natural causes when she was 45-60 years old. The researchers believe that "she was herself painting with the pigment and licking the end of the brush..." https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46783610 The senior researcher in the team, Dr. Christina Warriner, said that dental plaque “is really cool, it is the only part of your body that fossilizes while you are still alive…it incorporates all sorts of debris from your life, so bits of food become trapped, it ends up being a bit of a time capsule of your life.” So think about that when you floss each day.
Unlike Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in which monks die from licking poison in their work as scribes, this unknown nun died of natural causes when she was 45-60 years old. The researchers believe that "she was herself painting with the pigment and licking the end of the brush..." https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46783610 The senior researcher in the team, Dr. Christina Warriner, said that dental plaque “is really cool, it is the only part of your body that fossilizes while you are still alive…it incorporates all sorts of debris from your life, so bits of food become trapped, it ends up being a bit of a time capsule of your life.” So think about that when you floss each day.
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| Magnified view of lapis lazuli particles embedded in medieval dental calculus. Photo by Monica Tromp. |
The teeth of this unknown nun change history in that they make the case that in medieval times women were artists and artists of such great ability that they were using the finest and most costly pigments in their work on illuminations of sacred texts. History tells us that women rarely signed their names to their works as an act of humility, and as a result, women were essentially rendered invisible. The findings in Dalheim may shine a light and make visible at least one of those invisible women.
