Artful Magazine 12/2024

The first issue of Artful Magazine is partly inspired by the colours and flavours of the festive season and follows a trail of pigments and spices from the colour sellers of early modern Venice, to the gingerbread bakers of medieval Germany. 

It starts with an article on the art of marbling. Marbling is a process in which mesmerising colourful patterns are created on the surface of water and then transferred to paper. A version of this craft was practised in the far East over 1,000 years ago, but it also flourished in Persia and Turkey during the later middle ages and it was from here that travellers from the west returned home with examples of marbled papers. The Europeans were quickly enamoured of it and began to import marbled papers e.g. for use in bookbinding before learning and mastering the technique of marbling themselves. 

The pigments and necessary for crafts such as marbling were often imported from overseas and trading centres like Venice developed communities of merchants who dealt in and processed pigments arriving from all over the known world. In Venice they were called the “Vendecolori”, and in the December issue we’ll see where they worked and be introduced to one prominent colour seller.

The issue also features an article about the Silk Roads exhibition currently running at the British Museum in London.

As this issue was released in December, we also have a nod to winter festivities with a journey into the history of gingerbread, and an explanation and analysis of a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Census at Bethlehem.

You can read some of the articles from the December 2024 issue on the blog section of this website, along with extra articles published only online.

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