The Secrets of the Art Workshop

A practical manual between gilding, bole and glazes

It is around 1860. Italy has just been united into a nation. In the silence of an old-fashioned workshop, amid the scent of boiled oil, animal glue and dust of umber earth, the master carpenter artisans, Eugenio and Massimiliano Ferrari, guarded a precious knowledge, made of measured gestures, intuitive chemical formulas and tricks passed down from generation to generation.

This heritage of manual wisdom reappears intact from the pages of an extraordinary handwritten notebook, a workshop document that combines the rigorous technique of gilding and wood decoration with a profound family history.

The manuscript presents itself as a true technical handbook, where each phase of the artistic and decorative work is described with surgical precision. Among the pages emerge the secrets of water gilding and mission gilding, fundamental techniques for embellishing frames, furniture and art objects:

• The preparation of the grounds: From the skillful use of plaster and glue to the application of bole (yellow, red or white), the clay ground essential for receiving the gold leaf and allowing subsequent burnishing with agate or bloodstone stones.
• The tricks of decorative painting: Unusual but ingenious recipes, such as adding soap to pigments to make them polishable with stone, or using fish skin to smooth the wood and remove every trace of fuzz before applying stains.
• Glazes and chromatic illusions: Extraordinary are the sections dedicated to the simulation of precious materials, such as the technique for veiling silver with meua or Venice varnish to make it look like gold, or the use of dragon's blood and saffron to create transparent reds of extraordinary depth.

Empirical chemistry and workshop safety

Strikingly, when leafing through the notebook, the level of chemical awareness of the ancient artisans stands out. The recipes for the most resistant spirit varnishes – based on shellac gum, amber (careba) and copal gum – were cooked with caution using ash baths or exploiting the heat of the summer sun in long-necked flasks.

Nor are there lacking notes of unusually modern prudence: as when, introducing the use of sugar of lead (lead acetate) as a drier for oil black, the author explicitly warns to handle it carefully because "it is poisonous".

A family history that spans the centuries

Beyond the technical-artistic value, the manuscript guards a profoundly intimate soul. The ownership notes and signatures affixed over time tell of the passing of this knowledge from father to son, between the brothers Massimiliano and Eugenio Ferrari, until the devoted custody of Amilcare in 1915.

The cover itself, embellished with the philosophical maxim "Gnothi seauton" (Know thyself) accompanied by the comment "It is difficult to know oneself" and signed by Aurelio Ferrari, transforms this notebook into something more than a simple formulary. It is the spiritual and professional testament of a lineage of artisans, a tangible bridge between the craftsmanship of the past and the memory of a family that chose to entrust to paper the eternity of its knowledge.