Marbling is the art of creating colorful patterns by sprinkling and brushing color pigments on a pan of oily water and then transforming this pattern to paper. The special tools of the trade are brushes of horsehair bound to straight rose twigs, a deep tray made of unknotted pinewood, natural earth pigments, cattle gall and tragacanth. It is believed to be invented in the thirteenth century Turkistan. This decorative art then spread to China, India and Persia and Anatolia. Seljuk and Ottoman calligraphers and artists used marbling to decorate books, imperial decrees, official correspondence and documents. New forms and techniques were perfected in the process and Turkey remained the center of marbling for many centuries. Up until the 1920's, marblers had workshops in the Beyazit district of Istanbul, creating for both the local and European market, where it is known as Turkish marble paper.

Performance of the Art

Marbling begins first with the dissolving in water of tragacanth, a white material derived from a plant which grows in Anatolia. A type of gum, tragacanth gives the water a degree of viscosity. A vessel with the approximate dimensions of the paper to be marbled is filled with this liquid to depth of about six centimeters. At the same time, earth-based dyes in various colors are thoroughly crushed with a specially-shaped pestle on a marble slab and are reduced to powder. Each of these dyes is placed in a separate glass jar and mixed with a small amount of water. Into each is added five ten drops of ox bile (previously boiled to prevent it from spoiling). When added to the water of the dyes, this material spreads on the surface (not unlike olive oil) and it ensures that the dyes superimposed on one another do not become mixed. These liquefied dyes are removed from their jars one after another by means of special coarse horsehair brushes and sprinkled onto the tragacanth solution. Each of the dyes added spread one onto the other producing attractive figures. With the marbling vessel, a sheet of an appropriate absorbent paper with exactly the same dimensions as the vessel is placed, and an image of the all the dyes on the surface of the water is absorbed by the paper. Next the paper is removed and left to dry, while the vessel is ready for another marbling. In this way, hundreds of marblings may be made, but with time the dyes in the vessel slowly become grainy, at this point, dyes (mostly blue ones) prepared with turbot bile rather than ox bile are added in the exact center of the vessel until they have spread over the entire surface. From this one obtains the final output of the vessel: "Sand Marbling" or "Fishbone Marbling".

Ebrî : cloud
Abrû : water surface

Source: Antika, The Turkish Journal Of Collectable Art, May1986 Issue:14
By : Isik Yazan

Reference: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey