The Art of Fabriano Papermaking — Process and Technique

Origins in the Marche

The earliest confirmed records of paper production in Fabriano date to the latter part of the thirteenth century. The town sits in the Esino river valley, where fast-moving water provided consistent power to mill wheels — a prerequisite for the continuous beating of fibre that papermaking requires. By the early fourteenth century, Fabriano's mills were supplying sheets to notaries, merchants and administrators across the Italian peninsula.

What distinguished Fabriano from earlier Arab-influenced production centres in Iberia and Sicily was a cluster of innovations developed or standardised there. Three in particular became foundational: wire-wove moulds for sheet formation, animal-glue surface sizing, and watermarks impressed during formation. Each addressed a different limitation of imported methods.

Key innovations attributed to Fabriano

Wire-mould screens — woven from drawn metal wire rather than woven grass or bamboo, giving sheets a more uniform surface and greater dimensional stability.

Animal-glue sizing — a gelatin bath applied after drying, which sealed the sheet surface against feathering of ink. This made Fabriano paper suitable for the iron-gall inks used in European scribal practice.

Watermarks — wire forms attached to the mould that left translucent impressions, used to identify mills and track production across trade routes.

The stamping mill

Before the Hollander beater arrived in the eighteenth century, fibre preparation relied on stamping mills: heavy wooden hammers lifted by a cam shaft and dropped onto wet rags in stone mortars. Fabriano's mills positioned these along the Giano and Sentino tributaries, where the gradient was sufficient to maintain reliable power through most of the year.

The stamping process separated and softened individual cellulose fibres without cutting them as short as later mechanical methods. The resulting pulp retained longer fibres, which produced sheets with higher tear resistance — a property valued in documents intended for long-term storage and in printing papers where stress from the press was significant.

Water-powered machinery used in early Fabriano paper production — Water-powered equipment at the Fabriano mills. Hydraulic power drove all primary production stages through most of the pre-industrial period. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Museo della Carta e della Filigrana.

Vat formation and couching

Once the pulp reached the correct consistency — typically described by papermakers as resembling dilute oatmeal — it was transferred to large stone or wooden vats. The vatman lowered a framed mould into the suspension and drew it upward in a level motion, allowing fibres to settle across the wire surface as water drained through.

The mould was then passed to the coucher, who pressed the wet sheet onto a felt and stacked multiple post-sheets for pressing. The layered post went through a wooden screw press to expel further water before the sheets were separated, hung to dry on horsehair ropes, and later sized.

The role of sizing

Animal-glue sizing was prepared from hide scraps and bones boiled to produce a gelatin solution. Dried sheets were immersed in the warm bath and then re-dried under tension. The gelatin formed a continuous film across the surface, closing micropores in the fibre mat and creating a writing surface that held ink without spreading.

This step separated Fabriano-type production from unsized sheets used for wrapping or packaging. Sized sheets commanded significantly higher prices in trade, and the quality of sizing became a distinguishing factor among competing mills.

Transition to machine production

The Fourdrinier continuous paper machine, developed in France and Britain in the early nineteenth century, reached Italian mills during the decades following unification. Cartiere Miliani in Fabriano adopted mechanical production methods progressively, running hand-vat and machine production in parallel for a period before hand production was reduced to specialty and artistic grades.

The transition altered the fibre preparation stage most substantially. Hollander beaters replaced stamping mills, reducing processing time from several days to hours. The shorter fibre lengths that resulted were adequate for machine-formed sheets but differed measurably from the long-fibre characteristics of vat-made paper.

Contemporary conservation literature frequently distinguishes between machine-made paper and laid-chain mould paper on the basis of formation pattern and fibre alignment, both of which reflect the forming method rather than the fibre type alone.

Surviving hand-production methods

Hand-sheet production in Fabriano was not entirely discontinued. The Museo della Carta e della Filigrana operates demonstration vats where traditional formation methods can be observed, and a small number of specialist producers in the Marche region continue producing mould-made and hand-made sheets for conservation, printmaking, and archival applications.

The wire moulds used in these operations are often reproductions of historical designs, with watermarks recreated from documents in museum collections. Some moulds are made by wire workers following methods that have changed little from those documented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.