Photo By Renae Blum
A r t i sans h i p
From Fibers to Faces: Papermaking in Fabriano B y R enae B lum Claudia Crocetti stands in a darkened room, stamping her feet. Around her are emptylooking white boxes arranged on the walls, in display cases. “We can’t do anything without light,” she mutters. After several more seconds, lights in the ceiling snap on and the room jumps to life. The ghostly boxes fill with warm yellow light, revealing hidden images in paper: the Virgin Mary, Mussolini, Botticelli’s Venus. They are watermarks, some old and others new, the work of Italian filigranisti who create invisible designs on banknotes and official documents. Fabriano is the home of the watermark, an elaborate hidden design created by pressing a special screen to the paper. Artisans here developed the technique in the 1200s, to protect their paper from imitators.
Urbino View ‘10-’11
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Fabriano artists also created the first waterproof paper, by developing and applying an animal gelatin. And they built the first hydraulic hammer mills to pulp paper, a relief to artists theretofore used to strenuous pulping with mortar and pestle. Downstairs, visitors watch master papermaker Micella Luigi and several students create this same watermarked paper using the methods of 13th century lavorente, or laborers. It’s a day like any other at the Museum of Paper and Watermarks (the Museo della Carta e Filigranisti) in Fabriano, a city known worldwide for its innovations in papermaking. The traditional steps Luigi and his students follow look simple, but take apprentices six to seven years to master. First, rags are placed in a series of hammer mills, noisy contraptions that pound the cloth into a finer and finer pisto. The ground-up fiber goes into a vat of water. A lavorente stands above the vat, lifting a wire frame out of the dun-colored water. If one is creating watermarked paper, the frame will have a design sewn into it, into which the paper will form.