Listening Section 4: Note & Table Completion: Question 9

Transcript-based practice (no audio).

Lecturer: This morning I want to trace the story of one particular pigment, ultramarine, because its history tells us as much about trade and economics as it does about art.

Ultramarine is made by grinding lapis lazuli, a deep blue semi-precious stone. For most of history, essentially all of the world's usable lapis lazuli came from a single source: a cluster of mines in a remote valley in what is now northeastern Afghanistan, known as the Sar-e-Sang mines.

Getting the raw stone from those mountains to a European workshop involved a journey of thousands of miles along overland trade routes, which is really why the pigment carries its name. "ultramarine" literally means "beyond the sea," referring to the sea it had to cross to reach Europe.

Extracting a usable pigment from the raw stone was also remarkably laborious. Simply grinding the rock produces a dull grey powder, because the blue mineral, lazurite, is mixed with impurities. To purify it, workshops developed a technique of kneading the powder into a paste of wax, oil and resin, then repeatedly working that paste in a dilute lye solution, a process painters at the time called "walking" the pigment, until the pure blue particles separated out.

Because of the cost of the raw material and the labour of this purification process, by the fourteenth century, ultramarine had become, ounce for ounce, more expensive than gold. Painters and their patrons treated it accordingly: contracts for altarpieces frequently specified, in writing, exactly which figures were permitted to be painted in ultramarine, almost always reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary, as a mark of her importance.

This changed dramatically in the nineteenth century. In 1824, a French scientific society, the Société d'Encouragement, offered a cash prize to anyone who could produce a synthetic version of the pigment at a fraction of the natural cost. Two years later, in 1826, a French chemist named Jean-Baptiste Guimet succeeded, and claimed the prize.

Synthetic ultramarine was chemically almost identical to the natural pigment but could be manufactured cheaply and in bulk. Within a generation, the price of the natural, stone-ground version collapsed, and by the end of the century it had all but disappeared from working artists' studios, surviving mainly as a historical curiosity used by a handful of conservators restoring older paintings.

So what began as one of the rarest and most expensive materials available to a painter ended up, within fifty years, as one of the cheapest. A striking reminder of how a single laboratory discovery can reshape an entire artistic tradition.

Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

ULTRAMARINE: LECTURE NOTES

Source

• Made by grinding 1 __________, a semi-precious stone
• Main historical source: the Sar-e-Sang mines in 2 __________

Name & trade

• Name means "beyond the 3 __________"

Purification

• Raw grinding alone produces a dull 4 __________ powder
• Powder purified by kneading into a paste of wax, oil and 5 __________
• This purification process was known as 6 __________ the pigment

Cost & status

• By the 14th century, more expensive than 7 __________ by weight
• Almost always reserved for the robes of 8 __________

The synthetic breakthrough

• Prize offered by the Société d'Encouragement in 9 __________ (year)
• Synthetic version successfully produced by chemist 10 __________ in 1826