« We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us. »
... during this period are committed to the preservation
of this support dear to me ...
It's not a photographic technique.
not surprisingly coinciding of my stay in Ireland :))) ...
I spent my teenage years, lying on the grass in this College Park under a muffled sun...
reading writers that lived inside ;)
Oscar Wilde-Jonathan Swift-Bram Stoker-Sheridan Le Fanu-Edmund Burke-James Joyce-W.B.Yeats etc...
 |
| I'm working on a restoration of the natural ink on Vellum. |
bla bla bla!!! from Wikipedia; Encyclopedia popular.
Vellum is derived from the Latin
word "vitulinum" meaning "made from calf", leading to Old French "vélin" ("calfskin"). The term often
refers to a parchment made from
calf skin, as opposed to that from other animals. It is prepared
for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices or books. The term is sometimes used with a more
general meaning referring to finer-quality parchments made from a variety of
animal skins.
Vellum is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations
depending on preparation and the quality of the skin. The manufacture involves
the cleaning, bleaching, stretching on a frame (a "herse"), and scraping of the
skin with a crescent shaped knife (a "lunarium" or "lunellum"). To create
tension, scraping is alternated with wetting and drying. A final finish may be
achieved by abrading the surface with pumice, and treating with a preparation of lime or chalk
to make it accept writing or printing ink.
Modern "paper vellum" (vegetable vellum) is a quite different synthetic
material, used for a variety of purposes, including plans, technical drawings,
and blueprints.
In Europe, from Roman times, the term vellum was used for the best quality of
prepared skin, regardless of the animal from which the hide was obtained,
calf,
sheep, and
goat all being commonly used (other
animals, including pig, deer, donkey, horse, or camel have been used). Although
the term derives from the French for "calf", except for
Muslim or
Jewish use, animal vellum can include hide from
virtually any other mammal. The best quality, "uterine vellum", was said to be
made from the skins of
stillborn
or unborn animals, although the term was also applied to fine quality skins made
from young animals. Many libraries and museums increasingly use only the safe if
confusing term "membrane"; depending on factors such as the method of
preparation it may be very hard to determine the animal involved (let alone the
age of the animal) without using a laboratory, and the term avoids the need to
distinguish between vellum and parchment.
French sources, closer to the original etymology, tend to define
velin
as from calf only, while the
British Standards Institution
defines parchment as made from the split skin of several species, and vellum
from the unsplit skin. In the usage of
modern practitioners of the artistic crafts of writing, illuminating, lettering,
and bookbinding, "vellum" is normally reserved for calfskin, while any other
skin is called "parchment".
Vellum is a translucent material produced from the skin, often split, of a
young animal. The skin is washed with water and lime (
Calcium hydroxide),
but not together. It is then soaked in lime for several days to soften and
remove the hair. Once clear, the two
sides of the skin are distinct: the side facing inside the animal and the hair
side. The "inside body side" of the skin is the usually lighter and more refined
of the two. The hair follicles may be visible on the outer side, together with
any scarring, made while the animal was alive. The membrane can also show the
pattern of the animal's vein network called the "veining" of the sheet.
Any remaining hair is removed ("scudding") and the skin is dried by attaching
it to a frame (a "herse"). The skin is
attached at points around the circumference with cords; to prevent tearing, the
maker wraps the area of the skin to which the cord is to be attached around a
pebble (a "pippin"). The maker then
uses a crescent shaped knife, (a "lunarium" or "lunellum"), to clean off any
remaining hairs. Once the skin is completely dry, it is thoroughly cleaned and
processed into sheets. The number of sheets extracted from the piece of skin
depends on the size of the skin and the given dimensions requested by the order.
For example, the average calfskin can provide three and half medium sheets of
writing material. This can be doubled when it is folded into two conjoint
leaves, also known as a bifolium. Historians have found evidence of manuscripts
where the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern
membrane makers. The membrane
is then rubbed with a round, flat object ("pouncing") to ensure that the ink
would adhere well.
Once the vellum is prepared, traditionally a "quire" "is formed of group of
several sheets. Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham point out, in "Introduction
to Manuscript Studies", that "the quire was the scribe's basic writing unit
throughout the Middle Ages". Guidelines are
then made on the membrane. They note "'pricking' is the process of making holes
in a sheet of parchment (or membrane) in preparation of its ruling. The lines
were then made by ruling between the prick marks...The process of entering ruled
lines on the page to serve as a guide for entering text. Most manuscripts were
ruled with horizontal lines that served as the baselines on which the text was
entered and with vertical bounding lines that marked the boundaries of the
columns".
... Most of the finer sort of medieval manuscripts, whether
illuminated or not, were written on
vellum. Some
Gandharan Buddhist texts were written
on vellum, and all
Sifrei Torah (Hebrew: ספר תורה ; plural: ספרי
תורה, Sifrei Torah) are written on
kosher klaf or
vellum.
A quarter of the 180 copy edition of
Johannes Gutenberg's first
Bible printed in 1455
with
movable type was also
printed on vellum, presumably because his market expected this for a
high-quality book. Paper was used for most book-printing, as it was cheaper and
easier to process through a
printing press and
bind.
In art, vellum was used for paintings, especially if they needed to be sent
long distances, before
canvas became
widely used in about 1500, and continued to be used for drawings, and
watercolours.
Old master prints
were sometimes printed on vellum, especially for presentation copies, until at
least the seventeenth century.
Limp
vellum or limp-parchment bindings were used frequently in the 16th and 17th
centuries, and were sometimes
gilt but
were also often not
embellished. In later centuries vellum has been
more commonly used like leather, that is, as the covering for stiff board
bindings. Vellum can be stained virtually any color but seldom is, as a great
part of its beauty and appeal rests in its faint grain and hair markings, as
well as its warmth and simplicity.
True vellum is typically stored in a stable environment with constant
temperature and 30% (± 5%)
relative humidity. If vellum is stored in an
environment with less than 11% relative humidity, it becomes fragile, brittle,
and susceptible to
mechanical stresses; if it is stored in an
environment with greater than 40% relative humidity, it becomes vulnerable to
gelation and to
mold or
fungus growth. The optimal
temperature for the preservation of vellum is 20 ± 1.5 °C (68 ± 2.7 °F).
to be continued ...
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