The Lost Art of Splitting Paper: Recreating the Interventions of an Eighteenth-Century Collector Mulshine, ANAGPIC 2017, 1
Shannon Mulshine Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU Supervisors: Margaret H. Ellis, Giada Damen, Lyndsey Tyne The Lost Art of Splitting Paper: Recreating the interventions of an eighteenth-century collector Mulshine, ANAGPIC 2017, 1 Introduction Splitting Paper & Paper Splitting: Origins and Brief History Splitting paper is a procedure by which one makes two sheets from one. Rather than cutting the top half from the bottom half, or performing any other variation of simple dismemberment, splitting separates the recto from the verso by dividing a sheet through its thickness. The product is two thinner sheets of the same dimensions (l/w). Historically, paper was split for many reasons. The earliest paper splitting was probably undertaken for the discrete addition of margins to trimmed prints. Pierre-Jean Mariette, an eighteenth-century collector and connoisseur of prints and drawings, may have been the first to apply the technique to entire drawings (Smentek, 2008, 48). Splitting drawings has historically been undertaken by some collector-dealers to increase profit by selling multiples; for Mariette, however, this was rather a solution to the visual limitations of mounting double-sided drawings (De la Chapelle, 2015, 40). Unlike contemporaries who mounted drawings in albums, in which double-sided drawings could be set within windows cut out of pages and thereby viewed from both sides, Mariette’s practice of mounting overall to boards could not accommodate such windows. Some have suggested that Mariette even split papers to preserve their appearance, by preventing iron gall ink migration from one side to the other (Smentek, 2008, 50). By the 20th c., paper splitting had become Mulshine, ANAGPIC 2017, 2 common knowledge among restorers, and eventually, descriptions of the previously concealed process were published (Brückle and Dambrogio, 2000; Schweidler, 1938, 104-5).
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