Artists Died For Their Art (In The 9th Century)

Analysis of art on stucco fragments painted in Iraq in th 9th Century shows they were laced with arsenic. “People died young until a couple of centuries ago, and I guess other illnesses were causing artists to die before they got poisoned to death by the materials they were using. What happened to their apprentices, who ground and prepared the pigments on a routine basis, I don’t know.”