The Blue Path of the Silk Road
The Gardiner Museum brings together people of all ages and backgrounds through the shared values of creativity, wonder, and community that clay and ceramic traditions inspire.
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The Blue Path of the Silk Road
March 25, 2021 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Bell Lecture
Part of the Gardiner Signature Lecture Series
Speaker: Moujan Matin
This free online lecture will trace the history of cobalt blue in Middle Eastern and Chinese ceramics during the Abbasid/Tang and the Mongol Ilkhanid/Yuan dynasties. Moujan Matin will discuss the development of cobalt-decorated ceramics in the context of dynamic interactions across the Silk Road, drawing from Chinese and Persian textual accounts, surveys of historical cobalt mines, and chemical compositional data on ceramic blue pigments.
About the Speaker
Moujan Matin holds a doctorate and master’s degree in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the history of technology and art, with a particular focus on the developments in ceramics, pigments, and glass production in the Near and Middle East, Central Asia, and China. Over the past few years, she has been researching and experimenting on the use of cobalt pigment in historical ceramic glazes and has travelled widely, including to the porcelain-making city of Jingdezhen, China, and the historical cobalt mining site in Kashan, Iran.
Header image: Dish, Yuan Dynasty, c. 1330-1368. Jingdezhen, China, porcelain. The British Museum, 1951,1012.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum
