Lapis lazuli found on a Medieval woman’s teeth smashes the preconception that illuminated manuscripts were solely the works of monks. Nuns may have been much more involved than is commonly believed, bringing women artists to the fore from much earlier on. A recently published artnet article talks of lapis lazuli and its residue on teeth being due to inhaling during pigment grinding or licking a paint brush during manuscript illumination. Such exciting art decoding in this great read. For me it also reopens the subject of materiality in art, a theme I spent much time researching in the context of my Oxford Art History Studies last year. For those of you interested in going a bit deeper, I am sharing excerpts here. Some forms of early medieval art gave much emphasis on corporeality – quite literally in the case of reliquaries where saintly body parts were enshrined in bejewelled cases of gold and silver. Yet when looking at divine figures in Byzantine icons such as the early Christ Pantocrators, what un-mistakingly signals the divine is less their corporeal representation than the striking materiality – the preciousness of materials used – covering Christ’s body with a mantle of gold and precious […]