Afghanistan’s Beautiful Link to Da Vinci’s $450 Million ‘Salvator Mundi’ - Suleiman Wali

It is difficult to imagine that the Renaissance-era painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was recently auctioned in New York for $450 million has any kind of relationship with Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. On the same day that the jaw-dropping Christie’s sale of Salvator Mundi (Italian for Savior of the World) shattered world records — and went for more than seven million times as much as it sold for in 1958 ($60!) — it was reported that Afghanistan’s opium production, unfortunately, also hit a record high of its own, rising 87 percent from last year.

However, it is not in the statistics, but in the aesthetics where an incredibly intimate connection can be made.

The predominant color in the mesmerizing Salvator Mundi — the celestial, vivid blue that clothes Jesus Christ himself — hails from the rich and forbidding caves of the Sar-e-Sang valley in Afghanistan’s mountainous Badakhshan province. The source of this blue is the country’s lapis lazuli, a semiprecious gemstone that was once more expensive per ounce than gold.

In his famous Book of the Arts, written around 1400, the Italian painter Cennino Cennini says of the lapis lazuli pigment: “A noble color, beautiful, the most perfect of all colors.”

Lapis is the Latin word for “stone,” and lazuli is derived from “lajaward,” which is the rock’s name in Farsi. The word for “blue” in several languages was derived from lazuli:azure in English; azur in French; azzurro in Italian and azul in Spanish.

Once ground and turned into a powder, or pigment, this azure stone, then mixed with liquefying substances, became known as ultramarine, which literally means “over the sea,” a romantic reference to its passage from Afghanistan to Venice.

The first known use of ultramarine as a pigment actually goes back to the fifth and sixth centuries in Buddhist cave temples in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, according to Hamid Naweed, a leading Afghan art historian and author of Art Through The Ages in Afghanistan.

The lapis lazuli pigment emerged in Europe around the 14th century. During the Renaissance, ultramarine was the ultimate color used in frescoes and oil paintings, most notably because of its inability to fade or change color and, of course, for its captivating qualities, making it one of the most important pigments in Western fine art history.

“The Egyptian Book of the Dead recognizes lapis lazuli, carved in the shape of an eye and set in gold, as an amulet of inestimable power,” writes Mangla, perhaps making them history’s first evil-eye talismans. “Cleopatra, in common lore, wore powdered lapis lazuli as eye shadow.”

Throughout the centuries, caravans traveling along what would be called the Silk Road transported their precious blue cargo West to northern Africa and Europe and East to China. Marco Polo referred to the region’s lapis mines in 1271. In the Muslim era, prayer beads were made from the azure gemstones and exquisitely designed Qur’ans were garnished with its dark blue paint.

“This was a history of myth, legend and relics of our world cultures revealed clearly. Many languages spoke of lapis lazuli,” writes Lailee McNair Bakhtiar in Afghanistan’s Blue Treasure: Lapis Lazuli. “A consistent desire to create for the sacred churches, temples and memories of aspiration and adoration of God and the earth, was at the heart of the artistic expression as it came to be for this decorative gemstone of Afghanistan.”

In the 19th century, even as ultramarine was replaced by a synthetic paint called “French ultramarine,” the original lapis lazuli stone still captivated European writers. William Butler Yeats wrote a poem titled Lapis Lazuli, after being gifted an intricately carved Chinese artwork that was made from the azure rock. Robert Browning penned a poem about a fictional bishop who, on his deathbed, instructs his heirs that a lump of hidden lapis should be used to beautify his memorial: “All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope my villas!”

Within Afghanistan, intricate lapis jewelry and artwork have adorned the bodies and homes of everyone from tribal villagers to royal families, and all of those in between, for centuries. They continue to be sold online, as well as in markets within the country and worldwide.

Despite lapis lazuli mines having been discovered in other parts of the world, none has been able to compare to the quality, beauty and abundance of the blue treasure densely packed within the Afghan mountains. - Read More
Afghanistan’s Beautiful Link To Da Vinci’s $450 Million ‘Salvator Mundi’ - Huffingtonpost

What Is Afghan Culture? [Book Excerpt] -  Suleiman Wali