Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 100. (Budapest, 2004)
URBACH, ZSUZSA: Ein flämischer ikonographischer Bildtypus im italienischen Quattrocento. Bemerkungen zur Studie von Éva Eszláry
the photographs preceding restoration bear witness. As to the original order of the sheets, for lack of a better solution, the sharp or broad folds of the parchment sheets, the traces of the stick-holes, the flaws inflicted by mould - these all informed and provided clues. Thus, for my own work, I employed the black-and-white photographs preceding the restoration, and these I reproduce here. Parchment versus paper Up until the conquest of good quality, inexpensive paper, for workshop drawings parchment was employed almost exclusively. 10 Albeit durable, smooth-textured and ivory-coloured parchment was intended for daily use, it proved to be ideal for highdetailed and well-finished model-book drawings, with its principal disadvantage being its high price. Jacopo Bellini's parchment drawing-book bound of 100 leaves had required the skins of more than fifty goats, but comparatively, a large-scale representative codex might have demanded even an entire flock. 11 Moreover, from time to time, parchment was not even accessible in adequate quantities: natural scourges and widespread cattle-plague resulted in shorter or longer constrained lapses in the parchment market. However high quality and durable a material parchment was, what truly came into play in its long-time decisive role as exclusive material was that for quite some time, there was simply no valid alternative. In the second half of the twelfth century, parchment's true competitor arrived on the scene in Europe: paper. Paper production soon developed in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century, and a bit later in the northern territories of Europe as a thriving industrial sector. 12 Although at the outset paper had seemed to be an expensive and unreliable material, from the mid-fifteenth century, due to the printing of books on a mass scale, its quality improved perceptibly and its price also decreased. Nevertheless, while high quality paper by the end of the fifteenth century was some six times cheaper than parchment, this does not imply for a moment that paper, in the current sense, was regarded as cheap. At the time of publication of Marsilio 10 On the making and history of parchment, see D. V. Thompson, "Medieval Parchment Making," Library, 4th ser., 16 (1936), 439-43; R. Reed, The Nature and Making of Parchments, Leeds 1975; L. Gottscher, "Ancient Methods of Parchment-Making: Discussion on Recipes and Experimental Essays," in Ancient and Medieval Book Materials and Techniques, eds. M. Maniaci and P. F. Munafó, Vatican 1993, vol. 1,41-56. On the codicological aspects of parchment, see J. Lemaire, Introduction à la codicologie, Louvain-la-Neuve 1989, 11-25. 11 Elen, op. cit. (n. 8), 466. 12 On the production and history of paper, see D. Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed., New York 1947 (and newer eds.); E. J. Labarre, Dictionary and Encyclopaedia of Paper and Paper-making, Amsterdam 1952.
