Art Terms: Vellum

Vellum (from the Old French Vélin, for “calfskin”) is mammal skin prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices or books. It's generally smooth and durable, although there are excellent variations depending on preparation, the caliber of your skin as well as the kind of animal used. The manufacture involves the cleaning, bleaching, stretching over a frame, and scraping on the skin having a hemispherical knife. To create tension, scraping is alternated by wetting and drying. A final finish might be achieved by abrading the outer lining with pumice, and treating using a preparation of lime or chalk to really make it accept writing or printing ink. Modern “paper vellum” (vegetable vellum) can be used to get a number of purposes, especially for plans, technical drawings, and blueprints.


Material and manufacture

There is some confusion concerning the relationship between the words vellum and parchment. In Europe, from Roman times, the word vellum was used to find the best quality of prepared skin, regardless of the animal where the hide was obtained, calf, sheep, and goat all being widely used (other animals, including pig, deer, donkey, horse, or camel have been used). Although the term derives from your French for “calf”, with the exception of Muslim or Jewish use, animal vellum can include hide from almost any other mammal. The highest quality, “uterine vellum”, was considered produced from the skins of stillborn or unborn animals, even though the term seemed to be placed on fine quality skins created from young animals.

Vellum is really a translucent material produced from your skin, often split, of a young animal that has been soaked, limed, and scudded (a depilatory process), and dried at normal temperature under tension, usually on the wooden device known as a stretching frame. The excellence between vellum and parchment has been created in many different ways, with no one definition can be viewed correct, but vellum has always denoted the higher quality. French sources, nearer to the first etymology, tend to define velin as from calf only, as the British Standards Institution defines parchment as made from the split skin of countless species, and vellum from the unsplit skin. The key distinction between vellum (or parchment) and leather would be that the former isn't processed using tanning.

Manuscripts


Most of the finer type of medieval manuscripts, whether illuminated or not, were written on vellum. Some Gandharan Buddhist texts were written on vellum, and all Sifrei Torah are written on kosher klaf or vellum.

A quarter from the 180 copy edition of Johannes Gutenberg’s first Bible printed in 1455 with movable type have also been printed on vellum, presumably because his market expected this for any high-quality book. Paper, however, was always useful for most book-printing with rare exceptions, since it was cheaper and simpler to process via a printing-press and bind.

In art, vellum was used for painting techniques, especially if they needed to be sent long distances, before canvas became popular within 1500, and always been useful for drawings, and watercolors. Techniques of Old master prints were sometimes printed on vellum, particularly for presentation copies, until no less than the seventeenth century.

Limp vellum or limp-parchment bindings were utilized frequently inside the 16th and 17th centuries, and were sometimes gilt but were regularly not embellished. In later centuries vellum may be more commonly used like leather, that's, as the covering for stiff board bindings. Vellum can be stained virtually any color but seldom is, like a great part of its beauty and appeal rests in their faint grain and hair markings, along with its warmth and simplicity.

Lasting more than 1,000 years-Gregory the fantastic, Pastoral Care (Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 504), for instance dates from about 600 and it is in excellent condition-animal vellum could be much more durable than paper. Because of this, many important documents are written on animal vellum, such as diplomas. Referring to a diploma being a “sheepskin” alludes towards the time when diplomas were written on vellum created from animal hides.

An example of a document written on vellum is the Faddan More Psalter, discovered in July 2006 in the bog in Ireland  that has been written over 1,000 in years past.