In October 1972 Raycho Marinov was digging a utility ditch with his tractor outside the eastern Bulgarian town of Varna when he turned up some unusual metallic objects. He picked up a few, squirrelled them away in a shoebox and kept them for a week until his day off, when he brought them to his former history teacher. Only then, in brushing off the dirt that coated them, did they realize that the objects were made of pure gold.
Among the accidental finds of ‘buried treasure’, this was one of the most dramatic. Another impressive one occurred in 2014, when a California couple out for a walk in their back yard chanced upon $10 million in 1890s coins. In 1990 on the island of Java, workers digging an irrigation ditch were shocked when their picks uncovered three terracotta jars containing several thousand gold and silver objects, likely the treasure room of part of the royal family buried by a volcanic eruption in the tenth century CE. (The treasure trove also included the earliest evidence of a currency system in Java.1) And in 1992 a farmer in Suffolk, England who was searching for a missing hammer got the surprise of his life: his metal detector alerted him to what turned out to be a wooden chest full of Roman gold and silver coins and jewellery that was likely buried in the fourth century CE, when Roman rule was collapsing in Britain and the Anglo-Saxons were making their first raids on the island.
While these were spectacular finds, the objects Marinov uncovered were about five millennia older than the Roman hoard: what he had stumbled upon was a Copper Age gravesite that would come to be known as the Varna Necropolis. Its earliest graves date to around 4600 BCE.2 While some early pieces of worked gold have been found at other sites – gold objects may have been produced in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) at a similarly early date – Varna possesses the largest and most sophisticated cache of gold objects yet found from this earliest period of human goldworking. It also presents the earliest evidence of human beings wearing gold for adornment – wearing it, that is, after death.
A grave in the Varna Necropolis, Bulgaria, with the world’s oldest gold jewellery yet discovered, c. 4600 BCE.
The oldest graves of the Varna Necropolis (dated by familiar types of pottery and other artefacts found in them) yielded hammered gold ornaments that could be sewn onto clothing or worn directly on the body: chest plates, armbands, finger rings and earrings, beads, diadems for the forehead, appliqués to be attached to garments and other forms of bodily adornment, decorated with geometric and figural (generally zoomorphic, meaning animal-shaped) designs. This gold was not mined, but likely came from local surface deposits and the earth and gravel of riverbeds. The artisans who created the designs employed the techniques of engraving (cutting lines with a sharp tool) and repoussé work (hammering from the reverse of a sheet of gold in order to ornament it with relief designs).
Humans have made use of gold in many ways, but coinage and adornment are the two most substantial and consistent uses. The archaeological record – at Varna and elsewhere – suggests that adornment came first, and it continues to be one of gold’s most widespread uses. Today the world consumption of newly mined gold is divided about evenly into use as jewellery and as a financial investment – with 10 per cent being used in industry, including dental uses.3 Throughout history people all over the world have decked themselves out in gold. Forms of wearable gold include crowns, earrings, nose-rings, diadems and other facial decorations, necklaces, bracelets and armbands, pectoral plates and finger-rings. Before the arrival of Europeans the indigenous peoples of the Americas used it primarily for bodily adornment, and not at all for coinage, despite having access to large quantities. In many cultures gold might be understood as one material within an array of types of brilliant materials – other metals, mica, crystals, gems – associated with light, the sun and the divine. The wearing of gold may have indicated beliefs about the metal’s talismanic properties – protecting or perfecting the body, making it more desirable or imposing – in the same way that people believed eating and drinking from golden vessels ensured they would not be poisoned. In monetary systems that use gold, its display, of course, carries additional meanings. In contemporary culture it is ‘bling’, a word which has extended its reach beyond its original hip-hop context. It’s a way of showing off one’s wealth. But gold jewellery historically has not only been about display, but about holding value close to the body. As humans developed the ability to encase the body entirely in gold, whether that meant using numerous pieces of gold jewellery in royal and imperial courts or gold lamé in the movies, it could also carry an aura of otherworldliness.
On the basis of objects like those found at Varna, it is tempting to imagine the use of gold adornments by the living as well as the dead. But as a gravesite from a culture that left no written records, the necropolis provides little information about whether people wore gold while they were alive. What we know is that some specific individuals were adorned with gold in death. Scholars believe that the abundance of gold in certain graves – but not in others – reflects the social status of their occupants while alive.4 Varna’s gold would thus provide evidence of the early development of social hierarchy based on gender and rank. The grave of an elder ‘elite male’ found there contains a gold penis covering along with numerous other gold ornaments, while, for example, the only gold in other graves might be a pair of earrings or a ring or amulet, along with some stone tools and clay vessels.5 Male and female bodies also seem to have been buried in different positions that might mark status differences. But while most people were buried with a relatively simple array of goods, the most lavishly endowed ‘graves’ were not those of human beings at all. They were, instead, symbolic burials of gold-adorned effigies whose social status is difficult to define: we may resort to the assumption that more gold equals higher status, but that does not actually tell us much. Gold could not have been a self-evident marker of status the very first time it was used as adornment: its relationship to social status had to be developed. And whether the establishment of a goldworking industry preceded or followed the desire to mark status remains in question. We should be cautious about projecting backward values that derive from a monetary system in which gold constitutes an absolute form of value.
So why were some of the dead dressed in gold and others not? The idea of a gold ‘skin’ for the dead came to be a frequent practice in many of the ancient cultures that clustered around the eastern Mediterranean. (The Varna culture, referred to as Gumelnita, was located on the Black Sea and had trade relations with other eastern Mediterranean cultures, as evidenced by the presence of shells and other artefacts from the Mediterranean.) In pharaonic Egypt gold was equated with the skin of the gods, and in particular that of Ra, the sun god. Pharaohs were considered divine: one inscription describes a pharaoh as ‘a mountain of gold that brightens all the lands’.6 Royal mummies were bedecked with golden masks and other adornments – bracelets, pectorals, sandals, ornamental weapons and their scabbards – to guarantee their immortal status, and in the lavish tomb of Tutankhamun, the pharaoh’s remains were placed in a coffin of solid gold.
The innermost coffin of the king, from the tomb of Tutankhamun, New Kingdom (c. 1370–52 BCE), gold inlaid with semi-precious stones.
Impressive gold funerary masks from the second millennium BCE were also found at Mycenae in Greece. The most spectacular, the so-called ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ unearthed by the famous German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, has become an iconic gold object that may, however, be a forgery planted by Schliemann, who was no stranger to questionable methods and claims.7 Schliemann’s label for the mask (like his claim of the discovery of what he called ‘Priam’s Treasure’ at a location that may or may not be Troy) was certainly inaccurate. But the site does boast plenty of gold objects, including gold funerary masks, whose authenticity is not in question. Golden burials were not unique to sedentary cultures, but were also practised by nomadic tribes: a Scythian nobleman, the ‘Golden Man’, was buried in a nearly complete suit of gold in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan in the fourth or fifth century BCE. The Jesuit missionary Bernabé Cobo reported that the Inca similarly placed silver and gold ‘in [the] mouth, hands, and bosom, or other places’ of deceased individuals.8 Burying gold with the dead implies that people need it more in the afterlife than they do while alive, or suggests a ceremonial use of gold that outstrips its economic value, or both. In this regard medieval France had it both ways, endowing the honoured dead ceremonially with golden cloth but then keeping it for the living: the golden funeral canopies draped over dead kings were repeatedly the object of heated disputes between pallbearers and the monks of the church of St Denis where the kings were buried – each group thought the cloth was theirs by right.9
As we suggested above, one of the key features of the Varna site is the presence of ‘symbolic graves’ in which the ‘dead’ are anthropomorphic figures of clay or stone, not human remains at all. Many of these figures are clothed in gold much more thoroughly and richly than the human remains in graves. Whether they refer to an actual individual or not is a mystery. The practice might relate to something mentioned in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh orders a statue made depicting his dead friend Enkidu: ‘of lapis lazuli is your chest, of gold your body!’10 In these cases we can understand the use of gold to establish honour that effectively marks social status even as its central purpose is religious. We will consider the use of gold for practices of worship in the next chapter. For now, as we explore the idea of gold for dress and adornment, the Varna graves can tell us that adornment of the dead was a key feature of the earliest human use of gold.
Mask of Agamemnon, hammered gold, c. 1550–1500 BCE(?).
Reconstruction of a 5th-century BCE warrior costume made of thousands of pieces of gold. Scythian ‘Golden Man’, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
How did living people wear gold in the distant past? This is harder to tell. Few of the many gold objects that were in use by the living in the Americas survived the Conquest and its aftermath. The encounter of these two cultures was also an encounter of two radically different systems of valuation where gold was concerned. In the Americas it was used for adornment and carried symbolic social and religious value, but melted down, it was not valuable in a raw economic sense. For Europeans it was quite the contrary. Almost every single seized gold object the conquistadors took back with them to Europe was, sooner or later, melted down. In part this fate was the result of the brute force of economics. It also reflected European anxieties about what they saw as dangerous pagan idolatry – a motivation that is hard to separate from the conquerors’ intentional destruction of local cultural memory. Disrespect for the aesthetic value of pre-Columbian objects did not end with the Conquest; in the mid-nineteenth century, the Bank of England was still, every year, liquidating ancient American gold objects worth thousands of pounds.11
While the ancient American gold we can now see on display in museums (such as the Museo del Oro del Banco de la República in Bogotá, Colombia) was, therefore, almost entirely found more recently in tombs, gold was also worn by the living. Spanish accounts make this clear, and so do the objects themselves. Mixtec artisans – who worked for the Aztecs, producing some of the very finest gold adornments in the Americas – crafted breastplates, masks, headdresses, face ornaments and earpieces and other kinds of adornments with great care, to withstand the movements of a living body. As André Emmerich put it, ‘Mixtec ornaments . . . for all their delicate preciousness . . . are never too fragile for their intended use.’12
For most people in the modern world, gold as a material to wear is most closely associated with much simpler adornments – rings and, in particular, wedding bands. The exchange of rings in marriage ceremonies seems to have derived from ancient Roman practices, but the wearing of rings is even older. In the third millennium BCE goldsmiths in Egypt and in the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) developed sophisticated techniques of annealing (heating metal to enhance its ductility for hammering), wire-making, soldering and casting. It was in this period that rings (for the living as well as the dead) became a key product of the goldsmith’s art.
A golden Mixtec pectoral made by lost-wax casting, depicting the Aztec god Xiuhtecuhtli, c. 1500 CE.
Gold ring with Aphrodite and Eros on the intaglio, 400–370 BCE.
These rings had functional value. Even when they are found (as they are, often abundantly) in graves, we can tell they did not simply adorn the dead because documents and wear on the actual objects show they were used for practical purposes by the living. A chief function of rings was as seals, known today as ‘signet’ rings. In its simplest form the seal consisted of a flat, widened piece of the band, engraved with images or words and known as the ‘intaglio’, allowing the bearer to fix his or her identity officially in wax or clay to a document or other object. Other rings carried gems that were themselves engraved (‘intaglio gems’) and served as the seal. These rings served as markers of identity and particularly of identity within a social life comprised of agreements and exchanges. They may also have been used to indicate religious devotion, as when particular gods are illustrated on the intaglio, or as amulets possessing magical properties. In some cases, the engraved gem of a ring was carved in a scarab shape, with a rounded upper side expressing the humped shape and wings of the scarab beetle and a hidden, engraved flat side designed to rotate in the setting. Thus the seal or amuletic text could be worn hidden from view but touching the body, and rotated to allow for the image to be stamped in clay or wax.
A Phoenician scarab signet ring made of gold and jasper, showing a figure seated on a throne, 8th–3rd century BCE.
Rings were made of many different metals, and their use in connection with personal identity was widespread in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman society. Clearly gold was the preferred material, one that was also used for other amuletic purposes (for example, thin sheets of gold were inscribed with magic spells, rolled up and kept in special containers). Many of the amuletic ring types are associated with love and fertility, which suggests the key function of rings that developed in Roman times and came to be closely associated with the gold ring as cultural symbol: that is, its role in marriage.
The exchange of rings as part of marriage ceremonies seems to have developed from Roman betrothal practices; later, in the European Middle Ages, the custom of giving rings not only for betrothal but for the marriage itself emerged. Pliny complained in the first century CE that gold rings had replaced plain iron bands for these ceremonies, which involved an exchange of rings marking the promise to wed. He wrote rather hyperbolically that ‘the worst crime against man’s life was committed by the person who first put gold on his fingers.’13 To him, this excessive luxury marked the decadence into which imperial Rome had fallen. (About a century after Pliny, the Christian writer Tertullian complained that the only gold women used to know – in contrast to the excessive luxury seen in the adornments of his time – was the nuptial band.14)
Today we generally think of marriage as an enduring bond created between more or less equal and loving partners. This view is not entirely novel; it has coexisted for a very long time with the more typical view of marriage as an alliance of families and an arrangement for the disposition of wealth. In the latter understanding, which held true historically in Western Europe until the modern period, the bride is essentially one more piece of property. (Indeed, some have argued that the use of a ring in marriage proceedings derives ultimately from the chains in which the bride was led to her husband’s abode.) This did not mean that women had no role to play other than childbearing. Some Roman betrothal rings contained the image or shape of a key, signifying the bride’s future role of protecting the husband’s household and possessions. Gold rings thus straddle the divide between marriage as a personal bond and marriage as an economic arrangement. The ring marks a connection, the agreement between two individuals (one that might derive from the older function of the ring as a guarantor of personal identity), even an expression of love. But it also, particularly when the material is precious, speaks of the economic function of marriage exchange.
A ring made of gold is unobtrusive when compared to the lavish bodily adornments of European courts of the early modern period, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century CE. Glittering spectacle was a way of expressing power and establishing fame (like the parade of celebrities at today’s Academy Award ceremonies). In a time before television, in which printers produced editions of books numbering in the low thousands and pamphlets and broadsides might not be much more, rulers communicated their authority to their subjects in person. In coronations, weddings and ceremonial ‘entries’ into cities royalty paraded with an extensive entourage of nobles, servants and subjects, many of them clad in gold (which they were not otherwise allowed to wear) for the occasion. The Renaissance kings of France wore golden spurs in their sacre (the religious anointing that accompanied coronation) that are now part of the treasury of the royal church of St-Denis. European royalty are not the only rulers in history to clothe their bodies so lavishly in gold, but their performances are especially well documented. Books published to record these events provide obsessive accounts of the differences between costume of each rank and profession (a little like the coverage of the Academy Awards, in fact), demonstrating the importance of fine-grained distinctions – at least to the books’ authors, for we do not know how legible these differences were to the typical viewer.
But certainly, the golden raiment of aristocrats was intended to make clear their difference from the common person. The Siete Partidas, the thirteenth-century law code of Castile, makes the case for the wearing of gold by rulers in particularly concrete ways. The code explains that luxury garments make immediately visible the status and uniqueness of the wearer and facilitate the ruler’s recognition by subjects.15 Again, without mass media, the faces of rulers were not necessarily familiar. Interestingly it was also a Spaniard, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who observed of New World (specifically Panamanian) chiefs that ‘it was the custom in those parts for the chiefs and important men to bring to battle some gold jewel on their chests or head or arms in order to be known to their own men and also by their enemies.’16 Golden brilliance might not only suggest difference but even construct a kind of divine status for chiefs or rulers. It is easy to assume that gold might have this function in the case of early civilizations (for example, the association of gold with the pharaohs of Egypt reflects the divine status of both), but it seems a little more surprising in the case of Europeans who were ostensibly monotheistic. The resurgence of interest in pagan antiquity in early modern Europe, however, seems to have brought with it new resources for royal mythmakers: a seventeenth-century French treatise on royal marriage refers casually to kings and queens of France as ‘demigods’.17
The golden spurs of St-Denis, 12th century, with 16th- and 19th-century additions. Gold, copper, garnet, fabric.
British School (formerly attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger), Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1545, oil on canvas.
When the English king Henry VIII ceremonially encountered the French king Francis I on a field near Calais in 1520, so much gold was worn that the event was dubbed ‘the Field of the Cloth of Gold’. Pavilions were draped in gold. The kings and their entourages wore cloths of gold, gold chains and gold belts; steeds sported gold spangles, tassels and bells.18 Lesser nobles were temporarily allowed finer cloths than usual in order to enhance the spectacle. Liveried servants, far too low-ranking to wear such fabric on their own account, wore gold as extensions of the magnificence of the royal personage.
By that time, in the early sixteenth century, cloth of gold was being produced in the French city of Tours, but the cities in Europe most famous for their cloth of gold were the Italian centres of silk production (Lucca, Venice, Florence and Milan) that emerged after the Crusades. The gold thread that was the basis for cloth of gold was formed around threads of silk, which, though it had been produced in Europe for almost a millennium by this time, was still associated with its origins in China. Silk in general and golden textiles in particular were still associated with the aura of Eastern brilliance; patterned textiles made in Europe still mimicked Persian and Chinese models (Europeans distinguished only with difficulty among the different ‘easts’), and some types of cloth still bear names that speak of their Middle Eastern places of origin, like damask, from Damascus, or baldaquin, from Baghdad.
The story of how gold cloth made its way to Europe involves a bit of intrigue. First, it is worth pointing out that gold, while valued in China, did not hold the special status there that it had in Europe; as precious materials, jade and bronze were more highly prized. Rather than the golden funerary apparel we saw in the ancient Mediterranean, Han dynasty emperors were interred in jade suits – sewn together, however, with gold thread! This thread was made by wrapping hammered gold foil around a core of silk. The same foil was used to adorn wooden, bronze and ceramic objects. Along with its use in sewing funerary suits, gold thread was used for embroidery and to create gold-woven silks (that is, cloth woven with a combination of plain silk thread and gold thread). Beginning in the second century BCE, trade along the Silk Road brought Chinese commodities including silk and gold thread to western Asia, Alexandria and Syria. Sassanid Persia in particular became especially famous for its polychrome and gold-woven silks.19
The Deposition, from the Thessaloniki Epitaph, 14th century. Embroidery, gold wire on purple silk cloth. This lavish altar frontal demonstrates the Byzantines’ continued interest in gold-embroidered cloth many centuries after they acquired the technique.
Chinese producers jealously guarded their knowledge of silkworm cultivation to maintain a monopoly on silk and its production techniques, of which gold thread was just a subset. Until the sixth century CE, Europeans not only lacked the necessary raw materials – silkworms and mulberry trees – necessary to spin silk thread, but thought it came from India, not China. Impetus to establish local silk farming in Europe came when the Sassanid Empire, situated in a pivotal location along the trade route, flexed its muscles in the waning years of the Roman Empire, and the imperial weaving workshops in the eastern Roman capital of Constantinople found it increasingly difficult to get enough raw silk to meet both local demand and the demand of western lands. It was at that point that two Byzantine (or possibly Persian Christian) monks travelled to China and while there managed to observe silk cultivation. According to the Byzantine chronicler Procopius, they reported on their discoveries to the emperor Justinian I and received his support to make another trip.20 On that journey they managed to smuggle out of China the makings of a silk industry: young silkworms and small, potted mulberry plants that they managed to keep alive on the long journey back.
The weaving of golden fabrics and the use of gold thread in embroidery flourished in the Byzantine Empire, as the state workshops supplied not only their own emperors and church dignitaries but the Western European tribes that succeeded the Roman Empire. These industries also flourished in Persia, Baghdad and Islamic Iberia. Along with gold-wrapped silk and plain gold wire, another type of gold yarn for weaving was made in the Islamic world by wrapping gilt vellum (thin strips of sheepskin) around wool. Characteristic Islamic designs for gold brocade became popular in Christian Europe and can be seen in numerous late medieval religious paintings, such as the sixteenth-century portrait of Edward IV on the next page.
Responding to the demand for luxury cloths, European goldsmiths in the twelfth century perfected the process of gilding silver thread, which allowed for the extensive production of ‘cloth of gold’ from silver-gilt thread, and more recently had established the technique of drawing gold wire to the necessary thinness for use in textiles. The single surviving sixteenth-century ‘banc d’orfèvre’ or ‘goldsmith’s bench’ made for wire-drawing (shown on pages 54–5) is a luxury object in its own right. At 4.4 metres (14.4 feet), its length demonstrates well its function of pulling a stubby piece of gold wire into a very long, thin one.
These developments enabled European royalty to perform their magnificence all the more hyperbolically. But they also facilitated the wearing of luxury textiles by those of less elevated stations – those to whom it was forbidden by a system of law on the consumption of luxury items, which we now refer to as sumptuary laws. The regulation of cloth of gold (along with cloth of silver, silk and other materials used in clothing) was a key feature of medieval sumptuary laws. These laws restricting the personal display of wealth began to be enacted in the thirteenth century and developed over the years into a system of fine distinctions by rank that inspected dress down to minor details. (In seventeenth-century France, for example, regulations dictated the width of embroidery on the edge of a velvet cloak – no more than a finger’s width – alongside prohibitions on gold buttons and the gilding of coaches.21) Sumptuary laws often present themselves as a defence of morality in a disordered world. Historians have tended to view these claims cynically, interpreting such laws as a strategy for maintaining social distinction in feudal societies. But the golden age of sumptuary laws in Europe was not the ‘feudal’ Middle Ages, it was the early modern period, when many of the distinctions of rank were becoming less grounded in economic realities. As a matter of policy, when types of expenditure are broken down by income, we have a clue that a sumptuary regulation was intended by royalty to maintain a certain level of ready cash among subjects, especially richer subjects who could be taxed to help support costly wars. Some laws specifically protected local industries from foreign incursions. Generally they responded to social mobility, and especially to the increasing anonymity of urban life. Sumptuary laws dealing with dress enforced the visual recognizability of rank, gender and profession. Legal systems also required particular distinguishing marks to be worn by Jews, the poor and foreigners, and differentiated the status of women (as nubile, married, widowed or prostitutes).
Unknown, Anglo-Flemish School, portrait of Edward IV Plantagenet, c. 1520.
Sumptuary laws, however, seem rarely to have worked very well at their ostensible function. They were routinely disregarded; indeed, publishing them may have even served to provide the information that allowed them to be flouted, teaching members of ‘lower’ social ranks just what their material aspirations should look like and thus spurring consumption.22 As Michel de Montaigne put it, ‘to enact, that none but princes shall eat turbot, shall wear velvet, or gold lace, and to interdict these things to the people, what is it but to bring them into a greater esteem and to set everyone agog to eat, and wear them?’23 Could these laws in fact have been designed with the understanding that they would be broken, with the more cynical goal of supporting the development of luxury industries?
In special events like the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the king allowed exceptions to the normal sumptuary regulations; displays of wealth that might otherwise be forbidden were accepted, even encouraged, as part of the overall royal spectacle. Contemporary commentators charged that all the courtiers were bankrupting themselves as they competed to wear the most dazzling outfits. In their comments we can hear echoes of the language of sumptuary laws, directed, however, not at social climbers in particular but at society as a whole and its systems of value. The chronicler Martin du Bellay, for example, complained that attendees were ‘wearing their forests, their mills, and their fields on their backs’.24 He meant that they were misusing their property and the associated natural resources that constituted their real wealth. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, preached a sermon in which he pointed out that all the finery was not only earthly but earthy: silk was made ‘from the entrails of worms’; the dyes that coloured it came from ‘right vile creatures’; and gold was nothing but earth.25
Leonhard Danner (1497–1585), workbench of a goldsmith, made in Dresden for August the Great, Elector of Saxony (1526–1586), c. 1565, carved and inlaid wood.
Throughout the history of human uses of gold, one key technique for goldsmiths has been to ‘clothe’ objects of all sorts in gold by gilding them. Gold works well as a surface adornment, for it is readily hammered into thin sheets that can be used for gilding. Metalworkers gild silver in many cultures (and the resulting objects are called silver-gilt) but Chinese goldsmiths gilded wooden, stone, clay and bronze objects. As we saw above, silver-gilt thread was an important development in the production of cloth of gold in the European Renaissance. Adding gold to the surface of other materials allows for the more economical use of the precious metal, whether for functional objects, jewellery or textiles. Gilding also, however, carries with it some additional moral objections that echo those we have heard above. ‘Gilding the lily’ suggests excess, perhaps an affront to natural beauty, while the ‘Gilded Age’ of late nineteenth-century America was a term coined to suggest that the period’s outward displays of wealth masked the widening gap between rich and poor, the development of urban ghettos, the hardening of legal racism and other social problems with a thin veneer of gold. It should come as no surprise that the Gilded Age also spawned a critical theory of consumption, Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. For Renaissance kings, the wearing of gold, while a display of status and magnificence, was still a means of saving as much as it was spending. Gold jewellery and cloth could readily be melted down for their material value; the artisans who made them were so poorly paid that the labour cost was essentially expendable. But nineteenth-century couturiers made a high art form out of crafting glittering costumes for the newly wealthy, whose ever-changing wardrobes defined ‘conspicuous consumption’, the term coined by Veblen.
Their creations also inherited the Orientalism of earlier European views of gold. For example, the haute couture designer Paul Poiret created gold lamé party costumes based on Asian and Middle Eastern motifs – notably, this also allowed him, at the turn of the twentieth century, to champion a straighter, looser silhouette for women, dispensing with corsets; it would be popularized with the flapper look in the 1920s. His contemporary Mariano Fortuny was also known for exotic use of gold lamé.26 Marcel Proust described a Fortuny gown ‘overrun, like Venice, with Arab ornamentation, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of pierced stone . . . [it] transformed itself into malleable gold by virtue of those same transformations which, before an advancing gondola, change into dazzling metal the azure of the Grand Canal’.27
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hollywood developed a taste for gold lamé gowns worn for their sheer glamour. Crystal Allen, the vixen played by Joan Crawford in The Women (1939), suggests a hint of scandal with her midriff-baring gold evening gown. In 1939’s Midnight Claudette Colbert is a down-on-her-luck American showgirl stranded in Paris with a gold lamé evening gown and little else. After masquerading as a hapless tourist, Joan Bennett reveals her true colours as an American heiress in glorious gold lamé in Artists and Models Abroad (1938). Ironically the gold colour of this lamé was not visible to viewers. Gold lamé was used in black-and-white films because it photographed well, producing a flowing, liquid sheen, but viewers (who were, after all, living through the Great Depression) had to content themselves with imagined luxury. Then, in the 1940s, the government rationed fabric for movie studios and designers took a break from precious metal fabrics.
In the post-war period, gold was back, and Technicolor allowed it to glow with its characteristic yellow sheen. Gold represented both glamour and exoticism in the costume that Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cleopatra (1963). Made of 24-carat gold thread, the gown cost $130,000 (in 1963 dollars) to make.28 The film was a massive flop. One certainly cannot attribute its failure to the appearance of Taylor’s gown, but one might wonder whether Technicolor made the gold costume look excessive or even a little trashy. Could this be the reason that one of the key costume design uses of gold in post-war film wasn’t for luxury but for science fiction – for spacesuits and, especially, for the costumes and skin of aliens and androids? Maria, Fritz Lang’s original film robot Metropolis (1927), was gold, though like the gold lamé screen goddesses of the 1930s she appeared in black and white. More recently, gold clothed the Romulans of the original Star Trek; Ornella Muti’s Princess Aura in Flash Gordon; Joanna Cassidy’s Zhora in Blade Runner; and, perhaps, most famously, C-3PO in Star Wars.
The gold at Varna and other ancient sites indicates its association not just with power and wealth but with the afterlife: one kind of alternate reality. In using it to express glamour, exoticism and futuristic or alien worlds, Hollywood has clothed characters in gold to suggest otherworldliness of other kinds. In retrospect gold can appear vulgar or campy. Even in its own time, classic Hollywood glitter oscillated between a beguiling transport into the celestial realm of the ‘star’ and a vulgar-seeming attachment to material riches. But that very vulgarity can also be a way to transgress norms and counter histories of oppression. In hip-hop culture, ‘bling’ (whether real or fake) can serve as a form of ‘guerrilla capitalism’, enabling artists to construct their self-image through an excess of shine.29 In the next chapter, we address the confluence of material and spiritual power that gold represents in religious and political contexts. As much as people try, these functions are hard to separate from one another.
Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963).
Statue of the Buddha, covered in gold foil. Wat Saket (Golden Mount) Bangkok.
