Lapis Lazuli

More than four millennia ago, the high priestess Enheduanna, daughter to the Akkadian King Sargon, wrote in Ezagin, the House of Lapis Lazuli:
“O Ezagin, house of lapis lazuli, bright like the stars of
    heaven,
welcoming shrine in Eresh!

All primeval lords look up to you every month.
The great Nanigbal, Nisaba,
brought down divine powers from heaven
and added them to your own,
set up your sanctuary ready for praise.”

As Ezagin was the temple of Nisaba, who was the Sumerian goddess of writing, mathematics, and learning, the role of the true woman’s wisdom was the interpreter of knowledge written on tablets of lapis lazuli.  Lapis lazuli had long been considered a precious gemstone of the divines in ancient Mesopotamia.  Dating back to 4900 BCE, the first temple in Mesopotamia dedicated to the god Enki was said to have been built entirely from silver and lapis lazuli.  Enki, lord of the “abzu”, the primordial freshwater ocean, was the only deity who saved humanity from the deluge.

Remarkable quantities of lapis lazuli objects have been found in early Bronze Age settlements such as Shahr-i Sokhta and Tepe Hissar on the Iranian plateau.  That they were found along with equally large numbers of stone implements made of flint, jasper, and touchstone indicate productive workshops processing these stones.  Sourcing from rugged mountains of Badakshan, present-day Afghanistan, lapis lazuli is found embedded inside a lime­stone cortex, requiring initial cleaning to separate the pure lapis from the impurities accompanying it.  Then the purified lapis lazuli bead could be obtained by repeatedly smoothing, incising, chipping, and finally polishing.  By the third millennium BCE, lapis had become the most precious bead-making stone, with exchange networks from the lapis sources by land through Iran and by long-distance maritime trade from the Indus Valley.  When the eclipse of the Indus trade in 1750 BCE resulted in the decline of lapis supplies, high demand for this stone gave rise to a popular glass imitation of lapis, made by adding cobalt to achieve a purplish-blue color.  Indeed, by the second millennium BCE, the Akkadian word for glass had become “lapis from the kiln” to distinguish it from “lapis from the mountain.”  

Throughout the Bronze Age, lapis lazuli was among the most valued gifts exchanged between kings and lords across the Near East.  In ancient Egypt, it was a favorite stone for amulets and ornaments such as scarabs.  During the reign of the 15th-century BCE Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III, tributes from far-flung Isy, the Kingdom of Alashiya, present-day Cyprus, were inscribed to consist of pure copper, blocks of lead, lapis lazuli, ivory tusk, and wood.  Among the most elaborate funerary masks discovered is that of the 14th-century BCE pharaoh Tutankhamun, of which the eyebrows and eye liners are inlaid with lapis stones.  In ancient Persia and Mesopotamia, it was used for seals and jewelry.  The 13th-century BCE Assyrian King Tukulti-Ninurta I was said to have sent a mina (roughly an American pound) of lapis lazuli as a gift to the Mycenaean king in Boeotian Thebes on mainland Greece, all the way across the Aegean.

In late classical times and as late as the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli was often called sapphire.  Since sapphire was not known before the Roman Empire, mentions of sapphire in the Old Testament are most likely references to lapis lazuli.  For example, Exodus 24:10 reads, “And they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness.”  Lapis lazuli imported into Europe was ground into fine powder to make a deep blue pigment called ultramarine, meaning “beyond the sea.”  Ultramarine was the finest and most expensive blue throughout the Renaissance and well into the 19th century, when synthetic ultramarine was developed in 1826.  The 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was unique for his frequent use of this costly natural ultramarine.    

The use of natural ultramarine in Vermeer’s painting constitutes a study in itself. Although genuine ultramarine can be found in almost every of his paintings, the extent at which the artist employed this pigment is extraordinary. Not only is it found in the blue colored objects themselves but upon close inspection traces can be found in the shaded portions of white drapery, ceramic jugs, black marble tiles, green foliage, white washed walls, and even in the shadows of the brilliant orange gown in The Glass of Wine.  In Girl with a Pearl Earring, the artist used ultramarine extensively in the girl’s headscarf and in the shadows of her yellow jacket. A trace amount of ultramarine was also found in the pink flesh paint.  Vermeer employed the admixture of genuine ultramarine with tones of gray, usually composed of lead white, bone black, and raw umber in varying proportions, lending them a characteristic luminosity produced by intense daylight which cannot be produced otherwise.

It is said that Vermeer died penniless because of the collapse of the art market.  But could it possibly be from all those frivolous expenses upon the most expensive paint pigment of the time?  While lapis lazuli no longer commands the price that it did, the artist’s paintings go on to become among the most treasured in the world.  Forever, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, “the Mona Lisa of the North,” will be recognized as one who wears the tinge of heaven, the most prized pigment from the exotic East that was lapis lazuli, upon her head.