{"id":653,"date":"2022-02-22T16:47:11","date_gmt":"2022-02-22T16:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/?page_id=653"},"modified":"2022-02-22T20:24:02","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T20:24:02","slug":"the-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/the-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The marbled page in Tristram Shandy, <\/em>volume 3. Image by Author for the Motley Emblem. University of Pennsylvania, shelfmark Day 20.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Smack in the middle of Laurence Sterne’s 18th<\/sup>-century novel Tristram Shandy<\/em> is a single leaf of marbled paper.\u00a0 Sterne’s waggish narrator, whose “life and opinions” the novel is, calls that leaf “the motley emblem of my work.”\u00a0 That is where this project gets its name and its inspiration; the purpose of the Motley Emblem is to recreate that page, well enough that it could (almost) pass for an original.\u00a0 I say “almost” because there’s no intent to make it pass for genuine; the Motley Emblem isn’t a forger’s shop!\u00a0 The point is to meet the marbled leaf at its own level, gathering the knowledge it took to make it.\u00a0 This means making (at least) one.\u00a0 Since it was a mass-produced object designed for a book, it probably means making several hundred, in the proto-production line conditions of the British cottage system of manufacturing.<\/p>\n

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Diderot, “Marbruer de Papier,” detail.\u00a0 Image from ARTFL Encyclop\u00e9die online (click to link).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the first place, then, marbling the motley emblem means learning the art of marbling, as it was practiced in London in the eighteenth-century.\u00a0 Marbling is done by preparing a liquid medium, called “size,” from water and a gelatinous gum that originates in Anatolia.\u00a0 Then liquid pigments are spattered on the size in droplets.\u00a0 A sheet is laid gently on the surface, and when that sheet is drawn away, it takes the colors with it.\u00a0 Sterne’s page adds the additional complexity that each sheet must be carefully folded to preserve the margins in their unmarbled state; also, both sides of the leaf must be marbled, by reversing the folds and repeating the marbling procedure. \u00a0Every sheet will of course be unique, even if the procedure for successive pages is the same, since the slightest differences in the distribution of droplets or the mixture of the pigments produces a different arrangement of color.<\/p>\n

But the simplicity of the process, which is almost all an acquired knack of getting the correct consistencies and then flicking them dexterously with a brush, belies the huge body of knowledge and labor that precedes the moment when paper meets pigments.\u00a0 The colors were made by the “color-men,” and the brushed wound by the brush-makers, and reagents made by metallurgists or extracted by dyers\u2014and so on.\u00a0 The body of labor in the marbled page is not the work of one pair of hands; it took an empire and an emerging design tradition to manage it.<\/p>\n

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A palette bearing colors set by Joshua Reynolds. It’s likely that not a single one of the pigments present here are to be found on Sterne’s page. \u00a9 Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So: in the second place, the colors must be made.\u00a0 Since the pigments of on Sterne’s marbled page were everyday pigments made prior to the revolution in synthetic colors of the late 19th<\/sup> century, it is not possible simply to buy them, as Sterne’s marbler undoubtedly did.\u00a0 They must be made from scratch, following the clues and surviving directions of eighteenth-century chemists.\u00a0 This means learning the practical chemistry of eighteenth-century colors, in order actually to extract dyestuffs from plant-matter and transforming them to pigments, or synthesizing colors directly from minerals.\u00a0 Much of the labor of the motley emblem, that is, happens in the laboratory.<\/p>\n

Yet more, mastering Sterne’s marbled page has meant understanding the eighteenth-century arts of design, including the place of marbling in a history of British aesthetic criticism.\u00a0 Partly because of the complex war playing out between England and France, and partly because of the maturing of English manufactories, 1760 is often named as the moment when England’s design tradition first emerged as a competitor for European manufactures.\u00a0 Marbled paper was a part of this set of developments, one of the handful of commodities singled out for English manufacture, which implicates it in a tradition of thinking about aesthetic experience. \u00a0While it would be technically possible to recreate an instance of the motley emblem without understanding its place in this discourse, a full accounting of the page in its place means recovering the reasons for its popularity, including what people might have admired when they viewed it.\u00a0 This means archival work, recovering an emerging design tradition and its place in aesthetic criticism.<\/p>\n

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The Motley Lab: better living through chymistry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So: there is laboratory work, and archival work, and labor in the workshop\u2014in addition to other trades, like carpentry and brush-making.\u00a0 \u00a0It’s a big task for such a little page.\u00a0 But there are reasons to believe that it isn’t hopeless.\u00a0 For one thing, Sterne’s marblers themselves were learning to marble while making the original marbled leaves, so their work is within reach of someone also learning the craft.\u00a0 What is more, the best account of eighteenth-century marbling was composed by an industrial chemist who was learning the trade alongside Sterne’s marblers\u2014possibly from Sterne’s marblers themselves.\u00a0 That is, the description we have of eighteenth-century marbling is a description of the techniques employed by the creators of the original motley emblem.<\/p>\n

Finally, it helps that the historical art of marbling, in the way that Sterne’s marblers practiced it, is still practiced in places in the Levant and the Near East.\u00a0 There, it is possible to study it from living masters, as, for instance, in the cool stone recesses of the Cafera\u011fa Madresesi<\/a>, where works T\u00fczin Tirkyaki<\/a> as part of women’s collective of cultural artisans.\u00a0 While recovering historical pigments and an historical aesthetic still means work in the archive and in the laboratory, the living knowledge of Sterne’s marblers still exists, passed down not in the archive, but the repertoire.<\/p>\n

The goal of the Motley Emblem is a page indistinguishable from the original.\u00a0 But it is also a book, which will take the marbled page as its emblem and its title.\u00a0 In this book, as in Tristram Shandy<\/em>, the marbled page will be an emblem for work.\u00a0 But this work will no longer be limited to Sterne’s labor in penning the novel, but of the work of the whole loosely reticulated network of persons, crafts, and things that brought the page into being\u2014of which Sterne was just the vanishingly small spark who thought to commission it in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Smack in the middle of Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy is a single leaf of marbled paper.\u00a0 Sterne’s waggish narrator, whose “life and opinions” the novel is, calls that … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-653","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Project - The Motley Emblem<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/the-project\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Project - The Motley Emblem\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Smack in the middle of Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy is a single leaf of marbled paper.\u00a0 Sterne’s waggish narrator, whose “life and opinions” the novel is, calls that … Read More\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/the-project\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Motley Emblem\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-02-22T20:24:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/02\/TS-1760-168-169.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/the-project\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/the-project\/\",\"name\":\"The Project - 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