TO PREPARE A PANEL FOR PAINTING ON.
The panel should be cypress or pear or service-tree or walnut. You must coat it over with mastic and turpentine twice distilled and white or, if you like, lime, and put it in a frame so that it may expand and shrink according to its moisture and dryness. Then give it [a coat] of aqua vitae in which you have dissolved arsenic or [corrosive] sublimate, 2 or 3 times. Then apply boiled linseed oil in such a way as that it may penetrate every part, and before it is cold rub it well with a cloth to dry it. Over this apply liquid varnish and white with a stick, then wash it with urine when it is dry, and dry it again. Then pounce and outline your drawing finely and over it lay a priming of 30 parts of verdigris with one of verdigris with two of yellow.
[Footnote: M. RAVAISSON’S reading varies from mine in the following passages:
1.opero allor [?] bo [alloro?] = “ou bien de [laurier].”
6. fregalo bene con un panno. He reads pane for panno and renders it. “Frotte le bien avec un pain de facon [jusqu’a ce] qu’il” etc.
7. colla stecca po laua. He reads “polacca” = “avec le couteau de bois [?] polonais [?].”]
Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.