The context was a two-day symposium about marble as a material and an image held within the Gallerie Borghese in Rome where a complete catalogue of the marbles used to decorated and structure the interior has just been completed. I was one of two artists invited to speak to a group of art and architectural historians, curators and specialist in the material science of marble. I gave an illustrated talk about my work as an artist growing from my 2022 nine-month Ampersand Fellowship at the British School in Rome. The talk addressed the re-use of historic images in contemporary art. In my case this has involved 3D scanning myself posing as a figure from a Goya painting of 1798 and using the silhouette and 3D scan of a copy of a British Roman figure of Venus from Verulamium St.Albans. The process of imaginative immersion in a character with which one may feel an affinity is in contrast with the way a material or abstract image such as a sheet of marbled paper may evoke some sensation of bodily affinity with its organic structures. I spoke of the way in which making marbled paper both reveals and contradicts something of the structure of actual marble which is coloured by mineral impurities and formed through heat and pressure capturing its movement from a molten to a solid state in the forms of the stone itself. I ended with an image of the marbled page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a notebook from 1699 with carefully preserved scraps of marbled paper. The lack of information about the history of this craft and the movement of the techniques throughout the world echoes that of the movement of marble, techniques of book matching marble and the trade routes now being researched in other fields.