The precious pigment ultramarine has been found in the tartar of a German woman who lived in the 11th century. How did that get there, researchers wondered and started experimenting.
Lapis lazuli is a rock that was more precious than gold a thousand years ago. The bright blue pigment obtained from this rock, ultramarine, was only used by miniaturists to color in drawings in the most precious books. Scientists led by the German Max Planck Institute unexpectedly stumbled upon ultramarine particles when they examined the tartar of medieval skeletons to learn more about the diet at the time. How did that expensive pigment end up in a woman's mouth?
Female writers
The woman's skeleton was buried near the ruins of a monastery in Dalheim, Germany, and is dated between 997 and 1162. In any case, the woman was not violently killed and did not carry out any hard labour. The bones of the woman, who died when she was between 45 and 60 years old, show little wear. What did she do then?
It is generally known that medieval monks (over) wrote books and made the most beautiful miniatures, although we often do not know their names. It is less known that women also performed this work:less than one percent of the books made before the twelfth century have so far been attributed to female makers. This explains the researchers' first surprise when they found the paint pigment in a woman's mouth.
Monk's work
It is a very nineteenth-century idea that manuscripts were mainly produced by male clergy, according to Micha Leeflang. She is a curator at the Catharijneconvent museum and a researcher into miniaturists, but she is not involved in this research. “Within the medieval monastic communities it was important to have Biblical literature and in the beginning sample books were often copied in order to build their own library. Writing and producing books was therefore considered a meditative activity in honor of God. This happened in both the men's and women's monasteries.” An indirect proof that more books must have been made by women than is currently known.
Recent research has also shown that especially in Germany, nuns were not only literate, but also actively participated in the production of books. The traces of their work discovered so far even go back to the late eighth century. This new research from the Max Planck Institute not only reinforces the image that female clerics worked on books, it also provides evidence of the earliest use of ultramarine by a woman in Germany. She was probably very good at her job:the one who was allowed to work with the precious ultramarine was not just one of the draughtsmen, but a true master.
Experiments
To find out what those tiny blue particles in the tartar were made of, the scientists conducted several tests. They removed the blue grains from the tartar via ultrasonication. This is a technique in which you send sound waves through a solution, containing the particles you want to investigate. The advantage is that the particles are not chemically attacked. In this way it was possible to vibrate the tartar, releasing the blue granules.
They then used different techniques to examine the blue grains in detail and determine the precise chemical composition. They compared the characteristics of the granules to those of various blue dyes known to have been used in the Middle Ages. This clearly showed that the granules consisted of the mineral lazurite, the main component of lapis lazuli and responsible for the intense blue color. So the woman really had ultramarine in her tartar.
Hard work
The next question was how the ultramarine particles ended up in the woman's mouth, other than by regularly licking the tip of her brush while working. The paint ended up behind the front teeth. For example, the researchers experimented with grinding lapis lazuli to see whether fine dust could have ended up in the mouth. However, this did not correspond to traces of paint that had only ended up in the tartar near the front teeth.
Leeflang:“I think the possibility that the woman was involved in illuminating [coloring, ed.] manuscripts is the most plausible. Precisely because this was such a precious dye. When the color was prepared, all the paint was processed down to the last drop and it was therefore often carried out by one person.” This may also explain why the woman was the only nun from the monastery with ultramarine in her teeth.
“An additional fact is that the skeleton showed little wear. She may therefore have performed little physical work, which is in line with the activities of aerating. The production of pigments was hard work. The (semi) precious stones that served as raw materials had to be ground in a mortar. I've done this myself once and it was really intense! The suggestion that she ingested the pigment during the grinding therefore does not seem immediately plausible to me," says Leeflang.
Female painters
Although few books have survived from the time of the illustrating nun, we know from sources that they were indeed made. Due to the often intensive use, the books have often been replaced and lost. Leeflang:“The specimens that we know also contain decorations in gold, blue and other colours. we have some nice specimens in our museum collection, such as the Bernulfuscodex. It dates from ca. 1050 and was made in Reichenau, southern Germany. It contains beautiful miniatures.” It is not known who made the Bernulfus Codex. They may have been monks as well as nuns.
Until the thirteenth century, monks and nuns also made the richly decorated books for the secular elite. “As a woman, I also believe that women are extremely suitable for making miniatures. And certainly women in a monastery, who must have had strong discipline and attention, will certainly have gained a lot of satisfaction from illuminating manuscripts”, thinks Leeflang.
From the thirteenth century, workshops for the production of manuscripts arose outside the monastery walls. Women could also be found here. Leeflang:“We know from fifteenth-century guild books that there were also women among the painters who were engaged in illuminating books and painting miniatures.”