Blue teeth paint portrait of female medieval artist
WASHINGTON — About 1,000 years ago, a woman in Germany died and was buried in an unmarked grave in a church cemetery. No record of her life survived, and no historian had reason to wonder who she was. But when modern scientists examined her dug-up remains, they discovered brilliant blue flecks in the tartar on her teeth.
And that has cast new light on the role of women and art in medieval Europe. The blue particles were
lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone highly prized at the time for its vivid color and was ground up and used as a pigment.
From that, scientists concluded the woman was an artist involved in creating illuminated manuscripts — a task usually associated with monks.
The discovery is considered the most direct evidence yet of a particular woman taking part in the making of high-quality illuminated manuscripts, the lavishly illustrated religious and secular texts of the Middle Ages. And it corroborates other findings that suggest female artisans were not as rare as previously thought.
“It’s kind of a bombshell for my field — it’s so rare to find material evidence of women’s artistic and literary work in the Middle Ages,” said Alison Beach, a professor of medieval history at Ohio State University. “Because things are much better documented for men, it’s encouraged people to imagine a male world. This helps us correct that bias.”
The unnamed woman buried in the German churchyard was probably a highly skilled artist and scribe.
Ultramarine, as the powdered form of lapis lazuli is
known, was the finest and most expensive pigment in medieval Europe. The stone came only from Afghanistan. Because of the cost of carrying it to Europe, ultramarine was reserved for the most important and well-funded artistic projects.
“If she was using lapis
lazuli, she was probably very, very good,” said Beach, co-author of a report published this month in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers pored over old painting manuals to form a hypothesis as to how the woman got blue flecks in her teeth: She periodically licked the tip of her brush to bring it to a fine point for detailed work.
A building renovation in 1989 uncovered the woman’s tomb, along with those of other women who were apparently part of a female religious community attached to the church. Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton revealed the 45- to 60-year-old woman died between 997 and 1162.
In 2011, a team of scientists decided to use the fairly new technique of analyzing tartar on teeth to gather information on long-ago diets.
But Anita Radini, an archaeologist at the University of York in Britain, saw something under the microscope she wasn’t expecting: “It looked like nothing I had seen before — bright blue particles, almost like robins’ eggs.”