Lapis lazuli, lazurite, ultramarine ‘blue’, and the colour term ‘azure’ up to the 13th century

Abstract

The social man creates or borrows practical procedures, and with them specific phrases. Unfortunately present literature often separates these phrases from the techniques in which the same phrases are used. This is the case of the colour term ‘azure’ and ‘lapis lazuli’ that denotes today an aggregate of minerals from which the pigment ultramarine ‘blue’ was extracted in the course of the Middle Ages. The present work collects well-established pieces of information from a multidisciplinary standpoint with the aim of highlighting the various social utilisations of ground lapis lazuli, or better, its ‘blue’ mineral called lazurite. New data is extracted from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and Medieval Latin manuscripts (MSS) devoted to colour making. The oldest Western use of the pigment ultramarine ‘blue’ preceded of about seven centuries the first three 13th-14th century recipes, which describe the production of the pigment from lapis lazuli. This enormous time gap requires a new interpretation of the social mechanisms that transmit practical arts. Available chemical data refutes the hypothesis of a single mining supply source for archaeological findings of lapis lazuli, and new evidence demonstrates also that the phrase ultramarine ‘blue’ is strongly misleading. The term ‘blue’ became a basic colour term most likely in the early 15th century England. Instead, the Medieval Latin word ‘lazurum’ and the corresponding Vernacular terms drew from lazurin, a 9th century A.D. transliteration of the Greek λαζούρ (lazour), attested since the 4th century A.D. The latter stemmed from the Persian colour term lājvard, which denoted lapis lazuli and other ‘blue’ substances. This study paves the way for the study of the intricate social utilisations of an ‘azure’ pigment that was successively called ultramarine ‘blue’, and on the first linguistic evidence of the term ‘azure’.