Inside this category of manufactures enclose three major types of support materials for writing, drawing and painting: paper, parchment and papyrus. They are materials of biological origin, highly perishable, they hold a great importance especially in the case of precious documents, codes and books kept in libraries and archives, evidence of civilization. Besides these should be considered the numerous drawings, watercolors, tempera, engravings produced by great artists.
The diagnostic research are finalized primarily to the identification of possible biological risk factors: organisms such as fungi and bacteria can degrade the structure of the material without being detected by a visual inspection, while insects and rodents can devastate entire collections. Therefore, are very important both the analyses performed on the same artworks, such as microbiological tests or measurements of oxygen concentration for the detection of fungi, controls in the environments where they are conserved, for both the revealing of traces of insects and animals, both for the definition of the thermo-hygrometric conditions.

Other non-destructive analyses are aimed to obtaining historical-artistic data on the materials used (category of paper or parchment, executed production, inks, pigments): photography, NIR reflectography, UV fluorescence photography, , grazing light photography and radiography can be used to show up the writings and the drawings and bring to light the palimpsests, while the pigments can be determined by the mobile X-ray fluorescence and by Raman spectroscopy.