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

AT8100-W211_11 AT8100-W211_13
Piccard-Online Nr. 085729 (1361) AT8100-W211_11 / Piccard-Online Nr. 085729
Ill. 8
behind the choice of chancellery documents appears to be understandable:
since the early 1950s Piccard had been interested
in the time period between the production of paper and its
use, which he attempted to establish with the help of watermarks
in chancellery records, since such offices were continually
run and their records are clearly dated.
Gerhard Piccard made direct pencil tracings, which, upon
his return to Stuttgart in the winter months, he drew true
to scale in black drawing ink onto standardized acid-free index
cards by means of tracing, and filed them into his card
index. Tracing watermarks with pencil onto transparent paper,
a simple and inexpensive method, is still quite common.
The tracing should only include what can actually be
seen; what cannot be seen may not be added, even if the
figure is then incomplete. According to his own records,
Piccard made 130,000 such tracings, and in his collection,
he refers to the exactitude of his depictions: “It can be taken
as given that the watermarks have been drawn with the
greatest precision possible. Any variances from the originals
do not go beyond the limits of potential differences that occur
because of ordinary pressure on the paper. Numerous
comparisons have shown that occasionally, in the transfer
onto the tracing paper or because the tracing or drawing
was done twice, small differences from the original can be
found. These are within the limits of the normal “width of
a line”, and thus it is possible to speak of copies that are
true to the original.” (Piccard, Wasserzeichenkartei V, p. 9).
There have gradually begun to be reservations about the
method of copying watermarks by tracing since much more
accurate methods such as beta-radiography have been de-
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