A DRESS FOR THE CARNIVAL.
To make a beautiful dress cut it in thin cloth and give it an odoriferous varnish, made of oil of turpentine and of varnish in grain, with a pierced stencil, which must be wetted, that it may not stick to the cloth; and this stencil may be made in a pattern of knots which afterwards may be filled up with black and the ground with white millet.[Footnote 7: The grains of black and white millet would stick to the varnish and look like embroidery.]
[Footnote: Ser Giuliano, da Vinci the painter’s brother, had been commissioned, with some others, to order and to execute the garments of the Allegorical figures for the Carnival at Florence in 1515—16; VASARI however is incorrect in saying of the Florentine Carnival of 1513: “equelli che feciono ed ordinarono gli abiti delle figure furono Ser Piero da Vinci, padre di Lonardo, e Bernardino di Giordano, bellissimi ingegni” (See MILANESI’S ed. Voi. VI, pg. 251.)]
Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.