pigments	165
Ultramarine is today quite widely used as an artist's pigment, and is known
to many as * French ultramarine/ presumably because of its discovery and long
production in France. Just when artificial ultramarine was first used for pictures
has not been definitely established, but the date must have been about 1830 or
soon after. Laurie says (New Light on Old Masters, p. 44) that Turner used it.
In color, quality, and brilliance, it was superior to Prussian blue and indigo, which
were the only other readily available blue pigments in the first part of the XIX
century.
Ultramarine Blue, natural (lapis lazuli). Genuine ultramarine blue pigment is
from the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, which is a mixture of the blue mineral,
lazurite, with calcspar, and iron pyrites. (For a complete mineralogical and cry-
stallographic treatment of lapis lazuli, see W. C. Broger and H. Backstrom, * Die
Mineralien der Granatgruppe,' Zeitschrift fur Krystallographie und Mineralogie,
XVIII [1890], pp. 209-276.) Various ancient sources have been ascribed to this
stone, including Persia, Tibet, and China, but the most reliable information
indicates that the lapis lazuli which was brought to Europe in mediaeval times
originated in mines which were located in Badakshan, now a province of north-
east Afghanistan. The Badakshan mines, lying in a most inaccessible region at
the headwaters of the Oxus, on the north side of the Hindu Kush near Firgamu,
appear to have been worked very early and possibly they were the source of the
lapis lazuli used in Mesopotamia and in classical times. They were visited by
Marco Polo in 1271, and were described by Capt. John Wood of the Indian Navy
(A Journey to the Source of the River Oxus [London, 1872], pp. 169-172), who
saw them in 1838. Lapis lazuli was probably an important article of trade over the
caravan routes that led to the Mediterranean and thence to Europe, during the
Middle Ages. It was probably imported into Italy through Venice, a terminal for
Oriental commerce. Its present name, ultramarine, derives from azurrum ultra-
marinum or azurro oltramarino which formerly served to distinguish it from azurite
which was variously called azurrum citramarinum, azurro della magma, or azurro
del? Alemagna (see Merrifield, p. ccxi, and Beckmann, I, 474). Significant, also, is
the fact that the blue pigment made from this stone was at one time known in
Spain as atzur cPAcre (see J. Gudiol, La Pintura Mig Eval Catalana\ JJ, Els
Trescentistes [Barcelona: S. Babra, 1924], p. 89).
Although lapis lazuli was used throughout the East in remote antiquity and
classical times for lapidary purposes, there is no evidence, as yet, that it was used •
for a pigment until some centuries after the beginning of the Christian Era. Lucas
(p. 286) finds no evidence for it as a pigment among the ancient Egyptians, al-
though the stone was imported into Egypt as early as predynastic times. It first
became a pigment, apparently, in the region of its origin, in Afghanistan, and
adjacent countries. Gettens has reported its occurrence in VI and VII century
wall paintings in the cave temples at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. It was also in con-
temporary wall paintings at Kizil in Chinese Turkestan. Laurie says (* Materials