Down the rabbit hole

Started reading about illuminated manuscripts for my art history class this morning. Innocent enough, right? Just needed to understand the context for one assignment.

Down the rabbit hole

Fast forward three hours and I’m deep into Byzantine iconoclasm, the politics of religious imagery, and somehow reading about ancient pigment trade routes. My coffee went cold somewhere around the section on lapis lazuli mining in Afghanistan. Jake came home from his shift to find me surrounded by every art book I could pull from the library, frantically scribbling notes about gold leaf techniques.

The research zone in full effect.

This is why I can never just do the minimum required reading. One question leads to five more, and suddenly I’m an expert on 9th century monastery scriptoriums. My nursing prerequisites are definitely building my research stamina, but sometimes I wonder if my brain just needs to wander down these random paths to stay happy.

At least I’ll ace that assignment on medieval manuscript traditions. And I learned that Byzantine artists had to smuggle certain blue pigments across three continents. Totally worth the three-hour detour.