89g Hand-Carved Fluorite Skull – Thousand Peaks

In the year 1113, an eighteen-year-old painter named Wang Ximeng completed at the court of Song Emperor Huizong a horizontal scroll nearly twelve meters long: “Thousand Li Rivers and Mountains.” The emperor is said to have personally tutored him. Peak after peak is lined up, countless blue and green tones composed from ground azurite and malachite. So painted with stone. It remained his only surviving work, for Wang Ximeng is said to have died only a few years later. The scroll today ranks among the greatest treasures of the Palace Museum in Beijing. On the right half of this skull, the stone itself has painted its own mountains. A gray, finely crystalline zone rises there like a mountain range of thousands of tiny peaks, as if one looked from a great height over an entire land. The rest of the skull belongs to color: from delicate pink to garnet red it flows into deep violet, pierced by varying semi-transparency and soft transitions. Fluorite owes its range of colors to so-called color centers. These are tiny defects in the crystal lattice that arise through natural radiation and, depending on the type, absorb different fractions of light. At the same time, fluorite gave a whole phenomenon its name: when physicist George Gabriel Stokes described the luminescence of certain substances under ultraviolet light in 1852, he named it “fluorescence” after this mineral. Material: Fluorite (calcium fluoride, CaF₂) Origin: Brazil Dimensions: 4.8 x 3.4 x 3.1 cm Weight: 89 g Special features: Gray, finely crystalline zone on the right half of the skull with a mountainous relief; intense color transitions from pink to garnet red to deep violet with varying semi-transparency; fluorite can fluoresce under UV light (depends on the piece)

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