Royal Windsor (not Meghan and Harry), Leonardo Da Vinci and Ancient Mexico (via China and Syria)

In case you were wondering, Jan and I are not monarchists, nor are we all agog about Meghan and Harry. A much more interesting royal topic is our visit a year or two ago to Windsor Castle with a friend and former author Ralph Larmann, and his wife Ella Combs, from Evansville, Indiana. The castle houses the Royal collection of prints and drawings, one of the finest in the world.

 

Dürer, Holy Family

Leonardo, Man Tricked by Gypsies

In preparation for our visit we were required to pass a security check and to state what we would like to see. Ralph and Ella asked for Dürer prints and Leonardo drawings. Once the security office had issued our passes, we were able to enter the castle without paying the usual charge and (since we were early) to wander into St George’s Chapel for some free sightseeing.

St George's Chapel, Windsor

At the appointed time we rang the bell at a door which took us into an area where a police officer checked our passes. Our companion during our visit was a young Italian art historian, who asked who would volunteer to handle the book of Dürer prints. Ralph volunteered and was taken away to wash his hands (no gloves required). We four constituted a group, which meant that we had exclusive access to the collection for one hour and forty minutes.

 

Dürer, Virgin and Child with an Angel Playing a Viol

The Dürer prints are kept in large bound books. Many are on religious themes: The holy Family, the Virgin and Child with an Angel Playing a Viol, The Apocalypse.

Dürer, Apocalypse

But there were also subjects such as A Knight, Death and the Devil, The Bath House. The expressiveness and the fine detail of the prints is quite extraordinary: one landscape featured a tiny goat, depicted in great detail sitting on top of a remote hill.

 

Dürer, A Bath House

Not even Ralph with his washed hands was allowed to handle the Leonardos, which were brought to us by the Italian lady. She had selected a range of works for us: landscapes, anatomical studies, designs for military devices and statues, studies for paintings, grotesques.

Leonardo, Storm Over a Hilly Landscape

I remember particularly a small study of a storm over a town in a landscape, drawn seemingly a great speed to convey the feeling of wind and rain. There was a design for a commission for an equestrian monument, which Leonardo apparently never completed. He was not good at customer service. There was a wonderfully evocative drawing of a man being tricked by evil-looking gypsies. My favourite was a gorgeous study of the Virgin and child for the painting in the National Gallery, The Virgin of the Rocks, and almost as beautiful study of a head of Leda.

Leonardo, Head of Leda

As a former publisher, I was struck by the variety of sizes and textures of paper. Leonardo clearly did not carry around with him an A4 sketchbook. So, before writing this I contacted my friend and great expert on the history of paper, Jonathan Bloom. In Renaissance Italy paper was made from linen rags of varying quality, textures and cleanliness, which meant that sheets could vary in colour and texture. The rags were soaked in water and beaten into pulp by hammers, usually in water-powered mills. Then a mould was dipped in a vat of wet pulp, shaken to distribute the fibres evenly and left to dry. Thus, sheets were individually made, and the process required plentiful raw materials (rags), plenty of clean water, a good deal of manual labour, and time to dry the paper. Large sheets were difficult to make since they required large moulds which were heavy and difficult to handle. This made paper expensive. However, the alternatives were papyrus made in Egypt from reeds, which provided an inferior writing surface, or parchment which was expensive because an animal had to be killed to provide the raw material (skin).

Jonathan tells me that paper was made to standard sizes quite early on. There was a specification of paper sizes in Bologna in the 14^th century. Leonardo evidently had his eye on cost. He bought large sheets of cheap paper for his cartoons (designs for frescoes) but more expensive smaller sheets for other purposes. Therefore, he probably bought sheets of standard sizes. Perhaps the variety of sizes of Leonardo’s drawings was the result of cutting sheets to the size required so as not to waste an expensive surface.

Paper was invented in China where it was made from a variety of plant materials. Buddhist monks carried the technology to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and probably to India. Paper making spread to the arid lands of Central Asia where the plants used in East Asia did not grow. Rags were a more suitable and available raw material. Paper manufacture reached Syria around 800AD. Muslim papermakers used both plant raw materials and recycled textiles to make paper. They spread the technology around the Mediterranean. Paper making using rags was established in the Iberian Peninsula by the 12^th century. Such was the strategic importance of rags that King Jaume of Aragón (who reigned from 1213-1276) banned its export. Manufacture in England began around 1500, but a decline of linen production because of the Civil War in the early 1640s temporarily interrupted paper making. Here too the government acted to preserve strategic rags: the dead could be buried only in woollen clothing or shrouds.

The peoples of ancient Mexico were already “peoples of the book” centuries before the Spaniards introduced their own paper. Mexican paper was made from fig bark using a beater to hammer it flat. Paper was used for recording taxes and for general administrative purposes to manage society and government. It was also used to document the history and genealogy of ruling elites and to  record religious texts. Paper also had sacred uses and was therefore highly prized. Mexican did not bind sheets of paper to make books of the kind we are accustomed to. They glued sheets together to make long folding paper “screens” (known as códices) that could be unfolded one page at a time or displayed opened to full length to be read or recited. The Mayans had an elaborate writing system, but in Central Mexico pictographic writing predominated. Scribes were experts in the meanings of pictographs and also served as expert readers and well as writers.

 

The Mixtec Codex Nuttall, British Museum, made before the 1519-1521 Conquest

We are accustomed to think of printing as the first revolutionary information technology, but Jonathan points out that paper existed long before printing. Paper and its use for drawing and writing was the first global “disrupter” technology. The arrival of paper stimulated the great flowering of Medieval Islamic literatures and learning. The Spaniards used paper as the instrument through which they administered a vast empire that spanned three continents. A government official sent to Mexico to inspect the work of a senior official could use almost 50,000 sheets of paper.

 

The Mixtec Codex Selden or Codex Añute, Mexico after 1556, Bodleian Library, Oxford

In Mexico, the paper-based culture of the Spaniards met another society for which paper was an essential technology. The indigenous people started producing their own documents on European (as well as Mexican) paper within a few years of the Conquest of 1519-1521. Scribes still wrote pictographically, but now added glosses in Náhuatl (the Aztec lingua franca) and Spanish, for use dealing with royal officials or in the courts. The Spanish legal system officially recognized these pinturas (“paintings”). In the hands of a resourceful indigenous leader (or in less than a century the odd Indian lawyer) paper became a tool to protect the community and resist abuses.

I wonder what Leonard would have made of the books of ancient Mexico.

If you would like to learn more about paper an excellent place to start would be Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print, The History and Impact of paper in the Islamic World, Yale University Press, 2001.