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Paper-based works of art and documents of cultural importance kept in museums and libraries can show notorious signs of deterioration, including foxing stains, caused by fungal colonization. Some of the main chromophore agents of fungal origin that deteriorate paper and therefore affect paper cultural heritage both aesthetically and structurally are the group of pigments called melanins. Thus, knowledge of the diversity and features of fungal melanins and of the melanization pathways of fungi growing on paper is key to removing these pigments from paper-based works of cultural importance. This review provides an approach about the current knowledge of melanins synthesized by paper-colonizing fungi, their localization in the fungal structures, and their role in the deterioration of paper. This knowledge might contribute to developing new, effective, and sustainable strategies of restoration and conservation of historical documents and works of art based on paper.

The bomb-peak signal preserved in the Arches® cotton paper was used to detect art forgeries imitating the work of Chinese artist T’ang Haywen (1927–1991). The dating of seven legitimate T’ang Haywen art pieces showed that the timing of the paper production was consistent with the artist’s use of Arches® paper starting in the early 1980s. The measured F14C of the paper from the 14 suspected forged paintings shows that the support material was produced in the last decade (2008–2011), therefore the art pieces could not be genuine T’ang Haywen works.

The paper deals with the phenomenon of popular piety in the eighteenth century and its reflections in art media through several prints made by the Serbian engraver Zaharija Orfelin. Paper icons, the cheapest means of meeting the spiritual needs of Orthodox Serbs in Hungary in the eighteenth century, were mass produced and easy to transport to remotest places. As they were the main channels of expressing piety, it is not unexpected that some artists-entrepreneurs such as Orfelin started such a lucrative production. Orfelin shaped the iconography of those images, combining the traditional Orthodox heritage and contemporary Baroque models that had migrated from Central European religious art. His imagery included particular national saints and their patriotic cults, dogmatic and doctrinal views of the church, as well as images of the Mother of God.

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Washi is paper made by hand from the bark of native Japanese shrubs. Washi is a common medium used for printmaking and paper crafts. Artists who have studied nagashi-zuki, a sheet-forming method un...

Purpose This paper aims to present the components' characterization and condition assessment of an important deteriorated Mamluk-illuminated paper manuscript housed in Al-Azhar Library, Egypt. Design/methodology/approach Different analytical techniques used in this study were the portable digital optical microscope, stereomicroscope, scanning electron microscope with EDX (SEM.EDX), portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), pH measurement and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Findings The results obtained by different microscopes showed that the gilding in the surface of illuminated paper sheets was performed with gold leaves. Additionally, these microscopes revealed that the illuminated paper manuscript has different aspects of deterioration such as adhered dirt, staining, some micro-cracks, cracks and detachment of some parts in some illuminated areas. The results of elemental analysis by EDX, portable XRF and XRD analysis showed that the orange red pigment is red lead (Pb3O4), blue pigment is azurite (2CuCo3.Cu (OH)2), and the gold layer is has consisted of brass alloy (Cu-Zn) with a small amount of gold element (Au). The pH measurement stated that the historical paper in the acidity level. The ATR-FTIR analysis also revealed the oxidation of cellulose. Moreover, it was found from ATR-FTIR that Arabic gum was used as a binder for the pigments. Originality/value This study presents the important results of analytical methods used for condition assessment and identification of the components of an important Mamluk-illuminated paper manuscript, where these results referred that the studied paper manuscript had different aspects of deterioration. The conservation steps either conservation treatment or preventive conservation are urgently needed in future studies.

The article deals with matla‘ (first she‘r – two-line couplet – in a ghazal) of the first ghazal in the Divan by Mirza Asadulla-khan Ghalib (1792–1869) written in Urdu. One of the items usually commented there is the garment made of paper (kāġhażī peirahan). It used to be worn in ancient times by the complainers who appealed to the ruler. The range of complaints in the poetry of Ghalib as well as by other Urdu and Persian poets was wide, however, stable. “Wearing paper clothes”, the petitioner complained about the Almighty, the ill fate, a cruel girl, a lack of understanding of the petitioner’s poetry and the poor remuneration, and finally, about the poet himself, who “dressed” his poems in the paper. Тhese diverse situations form the elements of the literary motif as well as its context and are common in the Persian verses by the predecessors of Ghalib and also himself. Its analysis helps to understand all levels of meaning inherent in one of the most difficult-to-interpret texts by Ghalib.

Amulet paper in Chinese culture is known as hu / fu 符paper. It can serve as a means of healing. This amulet paper can mean healing because it is changed from something ordinary or profane to sacred through a ceremony performed by a spirit medium (tangsin). When God enters the body of the spirit medium through trance, the spirit medium performs a ritual such as slash the tongue. With the spirit medium's blood, he wrote this amulet paper. The paper then has a sacred function as medicine. This research is an ethnographic study with a case study at Hok Lay Kiong Bekasi temple during the Capgomeh ceremony and the God's birthday ceremony. The hu paper has so far been better known as a means of obtaining good fortune and luck. Through this paper, we can see Hian Thian Siang Tee’s amulet paper at Hok Lay Kiong Temple as a medium healing in Chinese society and see the changing function from something profane to sacred thing.

For almost 40 years, the British jurist and Fellow of the Royal Society Taylor White (1701–1772) actively engaged in commissioning artists to paint plants and animals for his ‘paper museum’. White amassed a collection of almost 1000 drawings of birds, mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles, acquired by McGill University in 1927. His first recorded purchase was a watercolour by George Edwards (1694–1773). He also acquired works from Eleazar Albin ( fl. 1690– ca 1742) and Jacob van Huysum ( ca 1687–1740), but the majority of the watercolours were painted by two artists, Charles Collins ( ca 1680–1744) and Peter Paillou ( ca 1712–1782). In 2018 a research group at McGill University Library received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the project ‘Undescrib'd: Taylor White's paper museum’. The project produced a complete catalogue of the White collection, including attribution of all unsigned works, and digitized all paintings and notes. This paper documents the process surrounding the original creation of the collection, reviewing the careers of the artists and White's relationship with them, the value of the commissions and the challenges of painting natural history subjects. It also describes the mechanics of painting, including pigments, papers used and artists' techniques.

The three oil sketches on paper forming the basis of this study—all of elderly, male sitters—are attributed to unknown sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Bolognese artists: painters associated with the Carracci family and their Academia degli Incaminati. This context was notable for its near-constant examination of the world around it through consistent drawing and painting, and for its success in exporting its negotiations of the contemporary religious landscape beyond Bologna, to Rome and further afield. A brief overview of the original intention, forms and early functions of these works is given, before focus turns to traditions of ownership and collection in the generations immediately after their creation. The British contexts that the sketches entered during the eighteenth century—collections at Stourhead House, Saltram House and General John Guise's bequest to Christ Church—are then explored through consideration of the social and artistic milieux in which these works were acquired. All three sketches have been mounted on to canvas or panel supports: this conservation history sheds light on how these works have been altered structurally, aesthetically and in functionality as they moved from an early didactic purpose to that of display in the eighteenth century.

A Japanese painting paper is sized with an aqueous solution of alum and animal glue followed by brushing with a mixture of pigments of various colours and aqueous animal glue solution. Subsequently...

Authors of the paper are writing about a wonderful person, scientist, Professor Mateev Musa Asypbekovich and his contribution to the plastic and reconstructive surgery.

As reflected through the highly imaginative storyteller of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper” (1892), this article underlines how secret diaries kept in mind expose the inner worlds of individuals who expose what they have in their consciousness. As both a work of feminist literature and a work of psychological fiction, the target one indicates a fragmented female mind of the secretive narrator kept behind the wallpaper. Recording her thoughts about the wallpaper implies that the narrator, named as Jane or not Jane, is the stereotype representing such kind of women in society and keeps most of her thoughts behind the wallpaper. To illustrate, she has some conflicts existing between her and her husband so that she manifests them in her diary kept in mind through her writings. Although her husband seems to love his wife, yet, he does not understand the negative impact he has on her that indicates their alienation. Reflecting the existence of a strong inner/outer world distance in this short story, this article highlights that as the narrator alienates herself from the outer world, she comprehends her inner world realities better in her loneliness. In this case, the narrator has a great psychological suffering. She has great imagination and identifies herself as the trapped woman behind the wallpaper. In this case, she has an obssession of marginalizing herself with the wallpaper.

Recycling a book's pages as waste paper was a literary commonplace in Antiquity and the early modern period, a way of imagining literary and physical mortality, but it was also a material practice. This article explores the material and the textual culture of the motif in sixteenth-century France, focusing on the printed page as material object. The underlying preoccupations of the motif – waste, copiousness, and materiality – offer ways of analysing the relationship between the material book and the immaterial text and how Renaissance writers conceived of the book and its recycling.

This article reads Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity”, an ethical and esthetic stance that values impeding comprehension. This novel’s opacity arises from various limiting mechanisms – linguistic, translational, and formal – which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper and Glissant’s thought together shows how Plascencia’s text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so increases the esthetic purchase of the novel. The People of Paper both invites and deflects the idea that esthetic experience might offer a route to understanding the social or that it provides the foundation of a more ethical relation with others. In parallel, Plascencia’s innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant’s theory, by incorporating the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics.

Paper photography and paper money share a common history, especially in the context of the USA in the 1860s, a commonality explored by this article. The interconnection of the two media was first a...

The first impression is a delicate paper city with a river. Homes and blocks of houses formed from printed pages. The buildings are open at the top, the words and the text fragments unfold inside, ...

To understand the degradation behaviour of rolled hanging scrolls for future conservation treatments, we evaluated the degradation–position profiles of naturally aged hanging scrolls and their mode...