The 4th and 5th issues - general introduction

I decided to insert the fourth and fifth issues together because in essence we are dealing with the same identical stamps that differ only for the perforation and some other detail like color shades or paper quality; it would have been not useful to repeat twice technical considerations, characteristics etc..

The Lombardy-Venetia fourth issue was issued July 1st 1863 and comprehended five stamps:

Identical is the composition also for the following set, the fifth one that came to light between 1864 and 1865 to substitute the previous values while the stock was getting fully utilized. At the beginning also the values of 50 Soldi and 1 Fiorino were supposed to be made but they were never created. Both sets represent the Austrian eagle embossed in relief in a double oval frame with similar graphic composition as per the third issue. The engraver was Josef Tautenhayn. They were printed in sheets of 400 parts divided in 4 groups of 100 each on machine made paper. While for the fourth issue the paper was without watermark, for the fifth one a different paper with at the center of each group of 100 parts the watermark "BRIEF-MARKEN", written with characters height of 2.5 centimeters, was used. The fourth issue block perforation had a pitch of 14 making use of the same perforation tools of the previous issue (and in fact we can find the same variety of stamps with different heights mentioned in the third issue), while the fifth set was perforated in block but with pitch 9.5.
The validity ended in August 1866, when came to use definitively the Italian stamps. They stayed in use in Levant until August 1869.
Unknown the number of parts printed, as for all the issues of Lombardy-Venetia. Also for these values the interesting varieties are not missing as offsets, albino printings, perforation varieties, etc. and also on these issues we can find occasionally the marks of the edgings of the typographic composition as for the third issue (see for details).
Some official reprints of the issue perforated 14 were made in 1884 and 1887.