Vivante Drawings

The reason so many old master drawings remain, and in a good state of preservation, is that they were kept in albums. Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574), sometimes considered the first collector of drawings, kept his drawings in what is known as his “Libro de’ Disegni.” The Libro had at least five volumes.  It must have seemed quite natural to keep drawings in albums. So many drawings were bound together to form model books and precious illuminations were integral to bound manuscripts. For artists, portable books of drawings would have been great assets to bring to commission sites.

It is very rare to see drawings, the objects themselves, in paintings before the 17th century. An occasional St. Luke can be seen working on a portrait of the Virgin, sometimes in drawing, but usually in painting. Lorenzo Lotto’s Lucretia (1530-32) shows a woman holding a drawing of her namesake, not because she was a collector of drawings, but as a way of likening her to that virtuous Roman heroine, who killed herself rather than live with the shame of being raped by the Etruscan enemy.

Lorenzo Lotto | Lucretia | Oil on Canvas| 1530 -32 | National Gallery | London

It wasn’t until the 17th century that non-artists started collecting drawings in significant numbers and we start seeing the display of drawings in kunstkammer paintings. In this example of Frans II Francken drawings are displayed, mostly unframed, alongside paintings, sculptures, and natural history specimens.

Frans II Francken | Collector's Room | Oil on Wood | 1620-25 | Kunsthistorisches Museum | Vienna

Once drawings started being displayed on walls, great losses started to occur. Sunlight hitting, with flies and dust landing at will, contributed to losses. Fortunately, collecting drawings became so engrossing and many collectors so avid that they would have to find space saving methods of storage, including passepartouts, portfolios, boxes, and albums for their growing collections. Probably the greatest losses came from casual collections that had but few drawings.

Flax Plant (Linum Usitatissimum), Univ. della Tuscia Botanical Garden, Viterbo

The flax plant, or linum usitatissimum, is a key plant for the fine arts: linen rags to produce paper, linen canvas for paintings, and linseed oil as a medium for oil paints.

Flax was one of the first plants to be cultivated and easily adapts to different climates. (Archaeologists have recently found dyed wild flax fibers in Georgia that are about 34,000 years old. Here is NYT link.) Russia is now the largest producer of flax. Other countries with favorable cool climates where flax grows well are Belgium (known for the finest linen and artists’ canvas), France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. But, Egypt and Italy also produce linen and have for thousands of years. Turin’s Egyptian Museum has many beautifully preserved lengths of linen as well as the linen wraps of mummies.

Ancient Linen at Torino's Museo Egizio

The longest Etruscan text, the Liber Linteus Zagrabensis, is also the only example of an ancient linen codex. It dates to 250 BC and although Etruscan has not been deciphered, it seems the book is a liturgical calendar.  It’s thought that it was made near Chiusi, in Etruria, and from there somehow traveled to Egypt. It survived as mummy wrappings and has been reconstructed to its original form, an accordion folded codex. Both the codex and the mummy are in Zagreb’s archaeological museum.

Linen, the textile, as well as the paper made from linen rags, is exceptionally strong, very supple, and folds remarkably well. Although supple, it retains its shape, being inelastic. It has the ability to absorb water and still feel dry.   These characteristics, at least partly, explain why centuries old drawings can be so well preserved.

US banknotes are made from linen and cotton rags. Their lifespan, about 20 abuse-filled months (it’s estimated that a dollar bill can be folded 4,000 times before tearing), is a good deal longer than that of other currencies. Linen becomes stronger in water than when dry, and bills accidentally left in pockets launder perfectly.

Flax grows thigh high and has pretty blue to almost white flowers with five petals.  The plant reaches maturity in about 100 days. In Italy, it is planted in the early spring and harvested in June. In colder climates, it’s planted later. Egypt’s warmer climate would make flax a winter crop.

Flax in Flower (Linum Usitatissimum) at the Univ. della Tuscia's Botanical Garden, Viterbo

Once mature, the whole plant, with the roots, is lifted from the ground. The process in readying the fiber for weaving is very involved and it is hard to imagine that for millennia nearly all families grew flax, retted it, scutched it, spun it, wove it, and then created garments. By the Middle Ages, Viterbo, a city in Northern Lazio, had a thriving flax industry.  The area’s thermal springs originally attracted the Etruscans, and the Romans built elaborate baths there. Bullicame, the name of the springs and shallow pools closest to the city, those where prostitutes bathed according to Dante, were also used to rett or macerate flax stems. Retting frees the fibers from the woody center of the stem. The heat of the water accelerated the retting process.

Bullicame's 55°C Water Was Used to Rett Flax

Where water is unavailable, flax is allowed to rett in the field, the dew and rain act to release the fibers, just more slowly. After this the flax is allowed to dry and then it is scutched, or beaten. In the process the precious flax strands are separated from the tow, the shorter fibers.  I realized how right the terms “tow-headed” and “flaxen-haired”  were when I saw this photograph of Egyptian flax in the ad of an Egyptian online flax merchant.

Advanced Group Ad for Egyptian Flax

Some Known and Some Approximate Dates:

One of my favorite passages in Eric Hebborn’s memoir “Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger” is where he fills a hole in one of his faked drawings by chewing on a piece of paper, breaking up the fiber, and then pushes the pulp into the hole and flattens it. This is paper making at its simplest.

Fiber, water, and netting to catch the fiber are the three essentials of paper. Wool felt to absorb water, a flattening press, and gelatinous glue to size the paper are important refinements.

At Fabriano, in the region of the Marche, paper has been produced since at least the 13th century, and there is a wonderful museum called the “Museo della Carta e della Filigrana” or Paper and Watermark Museum. It is operated by the City of Fabriano and Cartiere Miliani, Fabriano’s huge mill which produces a range of papers, from high quality art papers to photocopy paper, and also is one of the five European mills that produces paper for the euro. The earliest piece of paper at the museum is a 1293 paper with a watermark of the Arabic figure 8, written horizontally.

1293 Paper Fragment, Horizontal Figure 8, Fabriano City Archive, on loan to Paper Museum

The earliest European paper was made from rags, rags made from linen or hemp cloth. Linen is an ideal fiber since it is at its strongest when wet. Cotton was not used until the 18th century, when machines capable of processing cotton were introduced and supplies of cotton from warmer countries, including America, became more plentiful. (Cotton had been grown in Sicily, as was papyrus, but Sicily’s temperatures were not reliably warm.) Paper from trees was introduced in 1870. The availability of plant materials and rags has driven the history of paper. From the didactic film shown at the museum, we know that when the plague was raging, there would be shortages of rags and paper, because the clothes and bedclothes of the sick and dead would be burned, rather than sold.

The museum has exhibits, machines, and master paper makers demonstrating the making of paper. Rags were carefully sorted, washed, bleached, and then cut into small pieces. There are large wooden machines, once powered by water action, but now electrically, that pound the rag bits into pulp.

18th cent. Paper Making Machine, Fabriano, Photo by Lucas Miller

The most fascinating part of the visit comes from seeing the master paper maker scoop up the pulpy broth and with expert movements control and catch just the right amount of fiber for a sheet of paper. The tour guide said that it takes about six years for a person to learn this skill. The mold is a frame with chain wires and laid wires and it is never very large, never longer than a man’s arm, since that would make it very difficult to maneuver. (When artists needed large paper, as for preparatory cartoons, they would fasten pieces of paper together with glue.) Over time chain and laid wires and also watermark wires bend and degrade. This movement of the wires makes it difficult to study watermarks. Here is an early piece of paper at the Fabriano museum showing how wires can move.

1311 CRESSCE M Paper, Fabriano City Archive, on loan to Museum, Photo by Lucas Miller

After being molded, the paper is allowed to dry between wool felt slabs and then there are places for it to be hung to dry. Sometimes the sheets would be left in the fields to dry. It would then be sized by dipping the paper into a glue made from animal skins and allowed to dry again. The paper would then be pressed and finally burnished before it was sold.

Lascaux Cave, Det. Hall of the Bulls, France, c. 16,000 BC

Lascaux’s Caves with their earth colored images of cattle and stags;  white-ground lekythoi with their spare and elegant mourning figures; the bronze mirrors of all over the ancient world, incised with contour or outline drawings are all beautiful examples of drawing, but not what we now commonly think of as drawings.  When we think of drawings, we usually think of works on paper.

Inscription Painter. Attic 470-460 BC. Madrid Archeological Museum Inv. 19497. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen

The history of drawing and writing are closely linked. The very earliest writing is image based, drawn images give way to symbols and symbols to letters. The materials used in writing and in drawing are also mostly the same. Papyrus, parchment, paper, pen, brush, ink, paint are shared by writing and drawing.

The word paper comes from the word papyrus. Papyrus plants are aquatic and were cultivated along the Nile for their use as a support for writing (scrolls and later codices), as well as for building materials, sailcloth, fuel etc. The plant’s stem is made up of fibrous white interior which is easily cut into strips. Strips are fastened together by overlapping and pounding the damp pieces of papyrus to form sheets and then long scrolls.  The more expensively produced scrolls would have had the papyrus buffed to a smooth finish, would have had carved wood and bone rollers, might have been illustrated, and maybe housed in protective boxes. Reading a scroll must be very much like scrolling on a computer. A couple of differences are that with scrolls one reads sideways, rather than longitudinally,  and no “find” command. The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, named because of the large library of papyrus scrolls found there, contained some 1,785 scrolls and is the only ancient library to remain intact (Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 AD insured that the scrolls were preserved, though carbonized). The Villa dei Papiri belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus,  Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The ancient world’s largest library was at Alexandria and had some 700,000 papyri.