Page 126 - Copper and Bronze in Art: Corrosion, Colorants, Getty Museum Conservation, By David Scott

azurite have been found in Chinese texts dating to about 400 B.C.E. (Needham 1974). Azurite
was used in wall paintings of the Song (96O-1279) and Ming (1368-I644) dynasties and remains
a commonly used pigment in Chinese art today.
Azurite was the most important blue pigment in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages, par­
ticularly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. In easel painting, azurite was often
used as an underpainting for natural ultramarine. Germany was the principal supplier of azu­
rite during the sixteenth century, with mines in Saxony, Tyrol, and Saarland; the last source
was known from Roman times (Burmester and Krekel 1998). Laurie (1914) identified many
examples of azurite use on manuscripts from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth cen­
tury, such as the Luttrell Psalter manuscript, East Anglia, England, which dates to 1340. At this
time, azurite became more commonly used as a pigment than ultramarine, but after the mid-
fourteenth century, ultramarine reasserted itself. The Culross manuscript of 1470, which is
thought to have originated in Scotland, was found to contain natural green malachite and a very
bright blue azurite that was distinctly different in color from the azurite found on manuscripts
from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Laurie (1914) claims that this represents the first
appearance of this bright blue azurite, which is characteristic of late-fifteenth-century manu­
scripts and continued to be used for this purpose through the early seventeenth century.
One of the principal sources of azurite during the medieval period was Hungary. As
reported by Laurie (i9i4), the art writer Francisco Pacheco (i564-i644) 7 noted that supplies of
this important pigment had been seriously disrupted in the fourteenth century due to the inva­
sion of Hungary by the Turks and that some azurite, possibly from a different source, was then
obtained from Venice.
Mactaggart and Mactaggart (i988) discovered that azurite had been used to paint
seventeenth-century harpsichord soundboards, as well as being used as a general blue pigment
for buildings and works of art. After this period, the popularity of the pigment waned in Europe,
while in the East, both malachite and azurite were much more extensively used and were still
being employed by Japanese artists after World War I (Mactaggart and Mactaggart 1988).
I
In North America, azurite was used by the Indian peoples of the American Southwest
for wall paintings and possibly also for body painting. In South America and Mesoamerica,
azurite was used in numerous wall paintings, especially those from the Maya culture, and
acquired special importance during the Mesoamerican classic period (300-900). Azurite,
along with so-called Mayan blue, has been found at many Maya sites of that period in Mexico,
8
including Bonampak, Chiapas; Chichen Itza, Yucatan; Ichmac, Campeche; and Xulen, Quin­
tana Roo. Good-quality mineral azurite can be found in deposits of the Central Altiplano, Mex­
ico; and the murals of Teotihuacán show frequent use of azurite pigment (Magaloni 1996). The
tradition of azurite pigment use continued during the Spanish colonial period, especially for
paintings in missions and churches.

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