[News Culture] Raphael gets the credit for The School of Athens. The assistants who ground his pigments, prepared his walls and kept his workshop running have largely disappeared from history. In Ultramarine, Korean writer Oh Jin-sook turns their absence into a time-slip mystery about the lives and labor behind one of the Renaissance’s most celebrated paintings.
At the center of the novel is lapis lazuli, the mineral once valued more highly than gold and used to produce ultramarine pigment. For 20 years, Deodato has worked in Raphael’s studio grinding colors. Every spring, a mysterious pouch arrives for him containing a few copper coins, one silver coin and a piece of lapis lazuli the size of a chestnut. The bitter, fishy smell of lye clinging to the fabric is the only clue to its sender.
Deodato was abandoned as an infant in a foundling wheel and given a name meaning “given by God.” The people in the workshop know him as Brother Toto. With no knowledge of his parents, he imagines that the annual gift might come from a cardinal in a red hat or a noblewoman behind a black veil. He fails to see the person who has quietly watched over him for years, lending his search for an illustrious benefactor a note of loneliness and irony.
His life changes after he leaves a nearly invisible mark on The School of Athens. While the fresco is being painted in the pope’s library, Deodato adds an unauthorized eye to a white-robed figure. The moment he meets its gaze, he awakens in Rome 500 years later.
Modern visitors photograph the fresco with smartphones, while artificial intelligence can generate images in seconds. Both are bewildering to a man accustomed to grinding minerals by hand and preparing colors one batch at a time. More troubling is the discovery that the eye he painted has vanished from the wall.
The contrast between Raphael’s workshop and the modern art world gives the novel its central tension. The methods of producing and viewing art have changed beyond recognition, yet the historical record remains selective. Artists and masterpieces retain their names, while the people who prepared materials and carried out the physical work behind them often survive only as scattered traces.
Deodato’s search moves through old account books and restoration reports. One name appears unchanged across two decades of records, while an unexplained patch of paint no larger than a grain of rice offers another clue. His effort to identify the sender of the pouch gradually becomes a broader investigation into the people who helped make the fresco but were left out of its history.
The title Ultramarine carries much of the novel’s meaning. Producing the prized blue required far more than an artist’s brush. Lapis lazuli had to be mined, transported, crushed and carefully processed before it could become pigment. Every blue surface admired by a museum visitor therefore contains the work of people whose hands rarely entered the official account of the painting’s creation.
Oh places this labor beside a contemporary world in which images can be produced almost instantly. The novel is less interested in declaring one method superior than in asking what disappears when attention is fixed solely on the finished image. Whether a work is made in a Renaissance studio or generated on a screen, the conditions of its production can easily be pushed out of sight.
Structured in three parts and eight chapters, the story moves between Rome in 1511, present-day Rome and the Camino de Santiago before returning to the Renaissance. Its combination of time travel and mystery keeps the plot moving as the origins of the lapis lazuli and the details of Deodato’s past gradually come into focus.
By placing a workshop friar rather than Raphael at the center of the story, Oh gives literary form to people the surviving record barely acknowledges. The novel does not diminish Raphael’s achievement. It expands the frame around it, showing that even the most celebrated work of individual genius depended on materials, knowledge and labor supplied by many others.
The secret surrounding a single piece of lapis lazuli eventually reaches beyond Deodato’s identity. It raises a larger question about how art history decides whose names matter. A signature may identify the artist, but it cannot account for every hand that helped bring a masterpiece into being.
In Ultramarine, the blue of The School of Athens becomes a way of looking beyond the fresco itself. Embedded in that color are the journeys of rare minerals, the repetitive labor of pigment makers and the lives of assistants who left no signatures behind. Oh Jin-sook’s most resonant gesture is to return those forgotten figures to the story of art—not as footnotes, but as people without whom the masterpiece could not have existed.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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