TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT 307
and polished. Stainless steel is now frequently used for non-corroding qualities. A
few other materials have appeared in the history of pen making—tortoise shell
and glass—but they have never had great use as drawing instruments.
Pen Case. This minor piece of equipment seems to have had no currency during
the last century or more, and was probably limited, for the most part, to the time
when the scribe was a special and somewhat itinerant craftsman. The case proper
was a long, usually tubular, container made frequently of leather or of horn and
attached with thongs to the scribe's belt where it hung along with the ink-horn
(figure 14, c). During the later Renaissance, painters evidently took up this kind
of case for carrying brushes, and artists* colormen still show boxes of a similar size,
ordinarily of metal, in which brushes can be carried along with other sketching
materials.
Pestle, an elongated piece of hard material, usually stone, for grinding pig-
ments or other materials in a mortar.
Poona Brush. This name indicated a shape and utility of brush rather than
any particular hair. It was ordinarily a rather small implement of bristle, some-
times of badger, and was blunt-ended and round in cross section. It appears in
catalogues of artists' colormen chiefly during the middle of the XIX century.
As shown there, it was mounted in a quill and bound around with thread. Prob-
ably the stencilling brush has largely taken its place.
Portcrayon or Porte-Crayon (see Crayon Holder).
Portfolio, a protecting and carrying cover for drawings and similar works on
paper. It is usually made with two sheets of board, covered and hinged at one of
the long sides. The other three sides are provided with tapes for tying the port-
folio shut, and flaps are sometimes attached for protecting the edges of the
contents.
Pounce Bag, any loosely meshed cloth through which a colored powder could
sift, has been used over pricked drawings as a means of transferring these to
another surface. This has been done for duplication of drawings or for the transfer
of the design to a ground suitable for painting. The antiquity of the method is
indefinite. Stein (Serindia, I,484) found what he considered to be a pounce bag at
Miran Fort, occupied by Tibetans at the end of the VIII and during all of the IX
centuries A.D. This was a felt pad stitched around the edge and filled with
powdered charcoal. He thought it might have been used for transferring designs
to fabrics before painting or embroidering.
Pouncing Apparatus (see Tracing Apparatus).
Press, Oil. Before the time when oils were regularly prepared and sold by
apothecaries, the oil press and similar heavy equipment for preparing and cooking
this medium were the usual properties of the artist's studio. Little is left to show
what the oil press may have been. Laurie (The Painter's Methods and Materials,
p. 25) translates a comment from the MS. of Theophilus, c 1200, to the effect