Chapter XXXIII What You Do When You Wish to Leave Bare the Silver in Certain Places
When you have cleaned up the parts where the gold is not to stick, you take some flour dust, such as you may gather on the walls and cornices of mills, & we in Florence call fuscello, and you mix it with water to the consistency of a paste, and with a (camel’s) hair brush lay it thick on the parts not to be gilded, after which you dry it well before a slow fire, and can gild safely.
Another way, too, may be employed where the flour dust is not used. You take gesso in the cake,190 such as the shoemakers use, pound it up well, and make a paste of it either with stag glue,191 or better with fish glue,192 but mind that either glue be well mixed with water, so that it does not get too stiff. And inasmuch as I want to omit nothing, I bid you note that this gesso is best employed when you merely want to gild and leave the silver white, whereas the flour dust method is best used when you want in addition to colour the gold as above described. This is as much as you need know about such matters.
Now though, of a truth, the prime merit of every craft is your being well able to practise it yourself, yet none the less it were better to leave these processes of gilding to those who are specialists, for it is as I said very unhealthy193 to practise. Know how it’s done, that’s all.
Footnotes
190 Gesso in pane.
191 Colla cervona. Probably a glue made of stags’ skins or chippings. In ‘Cennino Cennini’ is a footnote on glues, quoting from ‘Dioscorides’ a glue, colla taurina, hence possibly ‘cervona’ from ‘cervo.’
192 Colla di pesce.
193 Perniziossima.