Bull's Head and Mermaid - The Bernstein Project - Österreichische ...

Introduction
When dealing with paper one deals with watermarks. From
the beginning of paper production in Europe, probably as
long ago as the twelfth century, watermarks have been
used to indicate a paper’s origin or quality. They indicate the
town and the factory, or at first the paper mill, where the
paper was made. In modern terms, one might speak of watermarks
quasi as “labels”, as a designation of origin or certification
of quality. However, watermarks are not immediately
visible, but only when paper is held up to light.
The best known contemporary use of watermarks is in
paper currency. When backlit, the new Euro banknotes
have a watermark that is visible from both sides in the area
that is not printed. The bill’s architectural motif and its value
can be seen. As has always been the case, the watermark is
generated directly during the production of the paper
through variations in the paper’s thickness. It serves here –
as for bank notes in general – primarily as proof of the bill’s
authenticity and to safeguard against counterfeiting.
In the Middle Ages watermarks were typical in the production
of paper. They have been preserved for the most
part in the paper manuscripts, prints and drawings that are
now held and displayed by libraries, archives and museums.
After gradually replacing the more expensive parchment as
a material to write on – which occurred in Central Europe in
the fifteenth century, in the Mediterranean regions earlier,
and in northern and eastern Europe later – paper has remained
the most important carrier of writing until our time.
Of course the way paper is made has changed considerably,
especially since the nineteenth century and the development
of machine production, and the importance of watermarks
– with the exception of banknotes – has become
largely negligible. And today, the importance of paper is
gradually being reduced by the transformations in communication
structures through electronic media. Electronic
storage by means of various types of data carriers has already
replaced much printing on paper, although its capacity
for long-term “durability” cannot yet be foreseen.
Paper from the Middle Ages, together with its watermarks,
usually presents no conservation difficulties when
stored professionally and handled properly. Correspondingly,
the study of paper and watermarks has a long tradition
and has been undertaken in many places for centuries. Naturally,
contemporaries were already aware of the use and
function of watermarks in the production of paper, as can
be seen in the early treatise by Bartolus de Saxoferrato.
I Watermarks of the Middle Ages
The interest of modern paper historians and scholars doing
research on manuscripts and incunabula who deal with
watermarks centres primarily on the methodological possibilities
that watermarks provide for dating, apart from the
historical economic and technical aspects of paper production
as well as its trade and distribution. The watermark collections
and research of major scholars like Charles-Moïse
Briquet and Gerhard Piccard have demonstrated the special
value watermarks hold for dating undated manuscripts and
prints. As a rule, by comparing and finding identical watermarks,
they can be accurately dated to within a few years.
This is of particular scholarly importance especially for early
examples from the fourteenth to sixteenth century. A prerequisite
for dating by means of watermarks is, accordingly,
a large number of dated watermarks. The watermark catalogues
published by Briquet and Piccard were the first collections
to provide such information. Numerous later watermark
collections augment this material, and it is thus likely
that now most watermarks of the Middle Ages have been
recorded.
In the last few years the large watermark collections have
also been digitally recorded. The entire collection of Gerhard
Piccard in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, with approximately
92,000 samples of watermarks, is already available
on the internet.
It is also planned to fuse the large data banks WZMA (Vienna)
and WILC (The Hague), which are currently the main
sources for the European Union-funded project “Bernstein
– the memory of paper”, and to present them as a joint
“watermark portal” on the internet. It is clear that common
terminology in watermark nomenclature plays an important
role here. As the use of many languages is mandatory for
Ill. 1: Banknote with watermark
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