In January 2019, The Atlantic magazine published “Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth,” Sarah Zhang’s account of archeologist Anita Radini and anthropologist Christina Warinner’s historic discovery. While conducting tests on the remains of a female monk who lived between 997 to 1162 in the now fully destroyed monastery of Dalheim, Germany, the researchers examined the monk’s teeth. They were hoping to detect microscopic residues of grains or even the DNA of ancient oral bacteria that could help them reconstruct the monk’s diet. Instead, embedded in the centuries-old tartar, they found brilliant particles of luxurious lapis lazuli stone.
Though it failed to shed light on the woman’s alimentary habits, the discovery illuminated an overlooked aspect of medieval art production and its erasure from accepted narratives of art history.
The fine blue fragments in the monk’s mouth constituted of ultramarine pigment, a rare and precious material mined from deposits in northeastern Afghanistan that was prized for its intense, luminous blue color and reserved for artworks of extraordinary value. After excluding other possibilities, Radini and Warinner concluded that the woman may have been a scribe or painter and likely ingested or inhaled the pigment while adorning the kind of manuscripts that art history has deemed the prerogative of male artists. The blue trace in the monk’s teeth diverted the initial purpose of their research, yet led to the astounding realization that women, too, may have been involved in the artistic production of elaborate illuminated manuscripts.
Displaced from works of art and organically ingrained in the monk’s desiccated mouth, the lapis lazuli functions as a thread that connects images, objects, and bodies, bringing to light histories that have been silenced and forgotten, but not erased.
Beyond its connection to the journal’s name, Radini and Warinner’s discovery emblematizes the goals and aspirations of Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts, housed at the Institute’s James B. Duke House. The unexpected presence of the prized ultramarine pigment in the monk’s remains spurs the enthusiastic surprise and new, unasked questions that Lapis wishes to contribute to the fields of art history, architecture, and art conservation. With its inaugural issue, Lapis promotes case studies and methodologies which demonstrate that paradigms shift, canons expand, and artifacts never cease to generate knowledge. With emphasis on the perspectives of early career scholars, Lapis presents research that, like the seemingly misplaced ultramarine pigment, provides new answers but especially produces new problems.
The Atlantic article documents how these problems can be productively addressed through a conceptual openness to collaboration and interdisciplinarity among researchers attuned to diverse historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. To this end, Lapis includes contributions that discuss not only the visual qualities of artifacts, but also their preservation and presentation, thus fostering a greater exchange between art historical, technical, and curatorial frameworks. This journal’s endeavor to bridge these frameworks in a broad chronological, geographic, and methodological scale echoes in the name Lapis, which connotes both the precious pigment and a writer’s pencil in the Spanish lapiz– or more loosely, artworks and their interpretations. Primarily an open-access, online publication, Lapis will appear biannually, publishing in May and December.
With this first issue, Lapis is thrilled to present four articles that complicate and interrogate issues such as the relation of art and ethics; the porosity of stylistic and medium-specific categories; the complex interplay of racial and sexual difference in erotic representations of “the other”; and the role of technology in the development of modernist visual idioms. Featured authors include Ivana Dizdar (Columbia University), on the work of Santiago Serra; Phoebë Herland (The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), focusing on the artistic legacy of Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet in post-World War II London; Dana Ostrander (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), examining Marsden Hartley’s primitivist depictions of indigeneity; and Ramey Mize (University of Pennsylvania), analyzing the productive exchanges between Italian Futurism and technological developments in the United States
These thought-provoking articles inaugurate what we hope will become a generative space for early-career scholars to challenge and re-work existing art historical paradigms, expanding the disciplinary boundaries of art history while also achieving visibility for their research. For any further information about Lapis, feel free to contact the editors.
Sincerely,
Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar, Sarah Cohen, Francesca Ferrari, Emma Kimmel, Kolleen Ku
The Editorial Board, Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts
