What are the seven stages of a 14th century painting?
I don’t know what the “seven stages” of a tempera painting are. Maybe it’s distilled from Cennino Cennini’s “Il Libro dell’Arte”, which is available from Dover books in translation by Daniel V. Thompson (An interesting how-to book from the early 15th century). A medieval painting starts with a wooden panel, usually poplar or pear or some other smooth, fine-grained wood. The wood is sanded smooth, then sealed with a glue made from animal skins, usually rabbit these days, but you can also use sheep- or goatskin parchment (I have done. It smells nastier than rabbit.). The panel is primed with two grades of chalk gesso: “gesso grosso” is coarser, and lays a solid grounding for the “gesso sottile”, a fine-grained, smooth surface. The gesso is smoothed and polished, Cennini says, until it is like milk. If there is a large area of gold on the painting, where it is to be is outlined and painted with bole, a kind of red clay which takes a high polish, mixed with animal-skin glue. The bole is po
