fol. 7r
 

Also, you shall clean the vellum with crumbs of rye bread; over this should be lime or chalk, but no varnish, for such a thing interrupts the tooth in gilding. Then, when you have cleaned it and outlined it, smooth it with a tooth, so that the hairs on the vellum lie down smoothly. Also you shall always put in the gold ground into the checkered background with a pen and not with a brush and the colors in the background also with a pen. But you shall heighten the background with a brush. In this way you may develop many backgrounds out of the background with a different distribution of the colors. The chessboard background you shall outline and draw in with gold ground and gild it, as you see it in these two circles.

Then take dark rose, which is pure, and temper it with gum water, so that it flows readily from the pen; and then paint in one row diagonally, and after two rows one again diagonally, so that two diagonal rows are always left empty, and after that one row is filled and again two empty, and again one filled, up to the end, as is clearly shown here in the first of the following circles; and in the same way in the circle next to it, you will find there one diagonal row filled with rose, and two rows are left open; and having done this

 

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Source: Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, The Göttingen Model Book. Columbia 2nd ed. 1978