LAZURITE AT NOVGOROD: TECHNIQUES, MIXTURES, PROVENANCE|LAZURIT NOVGORODBAN: TECHNIKÁK, KEVERÉKEK, SZÁRMAZÁS

An extensive collection of wall-painting fragments that in the 19th century was removed from the walls and buried under the floor of the Cathedral of St. George was collected during the 2013-2023 architectural and archaeological excavations on the area of the St. George’s Monastery at Veliky Novgorod (Russia), conducted by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Among the pigments there were different kinds of blue, but the most common was rather pure lapis lazuli (lazurite), identified with XRF, SEM-EDS and XRD. Lazurite was the most valuable and expensive ancient pigment, as it was extracted and imported from few deposits, the most important of which was that of Sar-e-Sang in the Afghanistan region of Badakhshan.