The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas

The material study of works of art is increasingly accepted as a field of investigation promising new directions for research in art history. Art historians share with scientists, curators, archivists, conservators, and scholars in other disciplines common concerns directed at an increasingly refined understanding of the physical object – its material components, creative process, history, and reception. Besides allowing scholars to probe the successive states of an object, the material study can situate it within a rich cultural context. From one or more artifacts the investigation moves outward, beyond the boundaries of one’s own specialized knowledge, revealing connections among people, processes, and forms of inquiry. The title, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, may suggest that this book, by the art historian Caroline Fowler, is a history of paper. According to the blurb on the book’s back cover, the author approaches historical paper “culturally rather than technically,” as a significant cultural influence and embodiment of global changes in the late medieval and early modern periods. Its focus is praised as “highly original.” The close reading of paper artifacts to illuminate historical cultural and social issues is, however, not new. Recent examples include Brendan Dooley’s Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy (2016), Alexandra Halasz’s “Strange Food, Paper,” Early Modern Literary Studies (2018), and Working with Paper (2019), edited by Carla Bittel et al. The following comments are less a comprehensive review of The Art of Paper than the observations of a concerned paper conservator. Materials and techniques need to be approached with precision and respect and their use based in solid facts, properly comprehended. In “The Materiality of Medieval Parchment: A Response to ‘The Animal Turn’,” Revista Hispánica Moderna (2018), Nancy Turner has demonstrated with force and brilliance the pitfalls that await scholarship which invokes the material life of an artifact, seeking to reveal its fuller significance, while failing to engage meaningfully (and accurately) with those materials. According to Caroline Fowler, “Paper is the material on which the image is impressed, captured, or cast, but it is not the object of representation. The success of other media demands that it remain transparent, denied its own capability to convey a message” (p. 2). She continues,