Brass rubbing was originally a British mania for reproducing "brasses" -- commemorative embossed brass reliefs found in church memorials from the 14th and 15th centuries -- onto paper. The concept of recording textures of things is more generally called making a rubbing. What distinguishes rubbings from frottage is that rubbings are meant to reproduce the form of something being transferred, whereas frottage just desires to use rubbing to grab a random texture.
Brass rubbings are created by laying a sheet of paper on top of a brass and rubbing the paper with graphite, wax, or chalk
References
- Monumental Brasses as Art and History ed. Jerome Bertram, published by Alan Sutton.
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