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Lapis Lazuli, The Blue Road: Seeking the sources of the longest trade
Establishing the origin of the lapis lazuli used in ancient artefacts has long been beyond the reach of science. Now an innovative technique has revealed, in a non-invasive way, where the precious stone was coming from. Alessandro Lo Giudice, Alessandro Re, Laura Guidorzi, Marta Magalini, Norman Hammond, Randall Law, Guy Clutterbuck, and Georgina Herrmann guide us from a laboratory in Italy to a remote mine.
The semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, has been prized for its bright blue colour from at least as early as the 5th millennium BC, and is still valued today. However, apart from its colour and its long popularity, what is of particular importance about this stone is that it is only found in a few places in the world, including Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan and Chile in South America. Today, lapis lazuli is best known for its use as a pigment in Renaissance Italy, where it was ground up and purified to form deep, true-blue ultramarine, one of the costliest and most precious of painting materials. Even so, lapis lazuli was valued for its colour and its perceived ability to protect its o
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