The Woman Who Licked Her Paintbrush

It is the blue of blues, the ultra-blue or ultramarine. It is "a color illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colors," wrote Cennino D’Andrea Cennini in Il Libro dell’Arte in the early 1400s.

And for that reason, it is the blue of the Virgin Mary's gown in medieval manuscripts like this one, from the Cloisters Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MS54.1.1 Folio 30r).

The color was made by grinding lapis lazuli, a brilliant blue stone mined in only one place in the world--Afghanistan. The powder was mixed with pine rosin, gum mastic, and wax, kneaded by hands greased with linseed oil, dissolved into lye, then dried and packed into leather purses. If of the best quality, one ounce of ultramine blue was worth an ounce of gold.

It was so costly that only the finest luxury books contain it--and only scribes "of exceptional skill would have been entrusted with its use," writes Anita Radini and her colleagues in a 2019 paper in Science Advances.

So how did bits of ultramarine end up stuck between the teeth of a middle-aged woman buried sometime before 1162 beside a German church?

Most likely, she was an artist who licked her brush.

It's a pretty common thing for artists to do, to get a finer line. It's common especially for an artist illustrating a medieval manuscript, in which the images are often tiny. Except for one problem: "It has long been assumed that monks, rather than nuns, were the primary producers of books throughout the Middle Ages," the researchers write.

Why would a mere woman be trusted with the blue of blues?

Radini and her colleagues weren't expecting to get into the gender politics of art history when they examined the skeletons buried beside the ruins of a 9th- to 14th-century church and monastery at Dalheim, Germany. They were looking for plant particles stuck in dental calculus--the cement-like stuff your dental hygienist spends her time picking out from the backs of your teeth. They were hoping to find out what the people ate.

It took a while, and some creative scientific analyses, for them to realize the blue bits they'd found in this skeleton's teeth were particles of lapis lazuli. Even longer to figure out how a stone from Afghanistan ended up in a medieval woman's mouth.

The simplest answer is that she was an artist of exceptional skill who produced luxury books using ultramarine and that she was in the habit of licking her paintbrush. Repeatedly, over many years.

And yes, the researchers DNA-tested the skeleton to make sure this artist really was female.

Why has it "long been assumed that monks, rather than nuns, were the primary producers of books throughout the Middle Ages"? Why do most medievalists assume that men could be scribes and artists, but women could not? Before the 15th century, scribes and illuminators rarely signed their work, but the names we do have skew strongly masculine.

To me, that proves only that men were more likely to sign their work--not that men were more likely to create it.

Indeed, recent research has identified work by women scribes and illuminators from as early as the 8th century. By the 12th century, several convents and nunneries were busily producing luxury books. One female scribe who lived in the monastery of Wessobrunn in Bavaria in the 1100s, for example, is known to have produced more than 40 books, including a richly illustrated gospel book. Her name was Diemut. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, when "record-keeping in Germany is more complete," Radini and her colleagues note, "more than 4,000 books attributed to over 400 women scribes have been identified."

The mention of record-keeping is key.

The 45- to 60-year-old woman who licked her paintbrush and was buried beside the church in Dalheim in the 1100s was lost to history--along with her sisters and all of the books they may have produced--when the church and the convent beside it burned down "following a series of 14th-century battles." Their cemetary was unmarked. Their graves were rediscovered by the Westphalian Museum of Archaeology, during excavations around the church ruins from 1988 to 1991, and their bones were put into storage until this research team in the 21st century had the idea of cleaning their teeth.

The bits of blue they discovered embedded there change our picture of women's status in the Middle Ages.

As Radini and her colleagues conclude, "As was the case for many early women's religious communities, Dalheim has left very few traces in the historical record. No books survive from the monastery, either from its libraries or in any other surviving works. Nearly invisible in the historical record, the women of Dalheim are known to us today nearly exclusively through the archaeological record and a handful of brief textual references. The case of Dalheim raises questions as to how many other early women's communities in Germany, including communities engaged in book production, have been similarly erased from history."

To learn about other medieval women whose lives have left few traces in the historical record, check out my new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. Read about it on this blog (click here) or on my page at Macmillan.com.

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