The use of gold in worship is an ancient practice that has continued into modern times. In present-day Thai Buddhism, devotees ‘make merit’ by buying small squares of gold foil – the proceeds help to maintain the temple – and applying them to Buddha statues. This often takes place in annual temple fairs colloquially known as ngarn pid thong phra, the ‘festival to put gold on the Buddha [statues]’.1 At these and other occasions, the faithful apply gold leaf to Buddha statues and to other sacred objects (including the Buddha’s footprint). Some worshippers choose to place their gold leaf on the statue’s body in a spot corresponding to an illness they wish to have healed. This uneven application of gold leaf produces striking visual effects as pieces of gold foil accumulate in areas of greater intensity or sometimes come partly unstuck and sway in the wind. To an outsider these surfaces give the appearance of ancient gilding that has worn off through the centuries; to devotees they are signs not of decay but of the statues’ continuing life.
Making merit is a personal, spiritual act. By performing good deeds, devotees accumulate merit that they can carry with them to their next incarnation as they seek the purified state of nirvana. But making merit can also be a social act, visible to the community. The idea that some merit-makers are more concerned with what their neighbours think than they are with their spiritual life is a root assumption of a Thai phrase, bpìt tong lăng prá. This means to do a good deed secretly, without expecting thanks: ‘to gild the back of the Buddha’, the part that is not seen. Running alongside the sacred uses of gold has been, of course – and for a very long time – its economic function. And thus the use of gold for religious purposes – especially its public use, as in this Thai example – seems to risk running counter to the purpose of giving honour to the deity, as if the donor is claiming honour by ostentatiously showing off the wealth she can afford to give up.
Gold is associated with a shining, otherworldly character attributed to the gods in the religions of many different cultures. It is sometimes a very bodily association: in the ancient Americas, for example, the Aztecs described gold as the ‘excrement of the gods’, while the Inca thought of it as the ‘sweat of the sun’. In ancient Egypt gold was considered, somewhat more decorously, the blood or flesh of the gods (in particular the gods Ra and Osiris and the goddess Hathor – who was sometimes equated with gold itself).2 In Hindu texts gold derives from the shattered body of the god Viśvarūpa, is emitted from the heat of Prajāpati and serves to generate Brahmā (from a ‘golden egg’ produced by the union of water and the seed of Agni, the fire god); the god Siva (Shiva) is said to be fluid gold. In the Rāmāyana, gold (and all the metals) are generated in the earth’s body through the seed of Agni.3 As a substance, thus, gold often has a divine character of its own, and this makes it, so the thinking goes, an appropriate way to give honour to deities. Objects and implements associated with sacrificial rituals in ancient Indian religion were frequently made of gold. Gold adorns the exterior of many houses of worship in South and Southeast Asia: the towering golden stupa of Shwedagon Pagoda, a Buddhist temple in Rangoon; the Golden Rock or Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, a temple perched atop a gilded boulder (also in Burma); and the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar in India, an important Sikh temple. The richest temple in the world, Padmanabhaswamy Temple, is also in India, in Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala state, but its gold artefacts (valued in the billions of U.S. dollars) are hidden inside. Gold glimmers likewise on other temple interiors around the world: the mosaics of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, made from golden tesserae (tiny square tiles), and the monumental, gold leaf-encased Altar of Kings in the Cathedral of Mexico City. Little material evidence remains of golden Inca temples ravaged by the Spanish, but the temple of the sun, Coricancha (Golden Enclosure), perhaps the most dazzling temple ever built, is said to have been clothed in sheets of gold inside and out and filled with golden ornaments.
Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Myanmar, 6th century CE.
The Harmandir Sahib, commonly known as the Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, 16th–17th century CE. |
Alongside sites like Coricancha, the Inca kings also possessed gold and silver regalia, such as sceptres, spears and halberds, that expressed their divine origins; the ruling elites were considered the offspring of the sun and moon.4 Egyptian temples and tombs of Egyptian kings often had bas-reliefs and cladding in gold leaf, and the royal dead were equipped with golden grave goods and their cases decorated in gold. In Christian Europe the golden crown jewels of monarchs often incorporated crosses that established the relationship between spiritual and political power. Similar stories of sacred golden regalia exist for other elites whose power was held to be divinely ordained and who sometimes held priestly functions. According to Herodotus, the Scythians believed that golden instruments (a cup, an axe, a yoke and a plough) had fallen from heaven to indicate the heavenly ordination of their rulers.5 Herodotus could not have known about the real events that brought gold to the Ordos culture of Inner Mongolia, but his story sounds like a mythical embroidering of them. These pastoral people of the Eurasian steppes – indeed part of the larger group known as Scythians to the Greeks – herded livestock and made strikingly beautiful adornments in tin-encrusted bronze, which they prized above other materials. But in the fourth century BCE nomadic peoples who practised mounted warfare and apparently valued gold disrupted their way of life; quickly the pastoral people took up horseback riding and a nomadic existence, and established a hierarchy of metals with gold at the top. They did not produce golden objects, though – the dazzling belt buckles and bridle accoutrements with which they festooned their horses were manufactured in China specifically for export to their northern neighbours. Sixteen centuries later, the descendants of those newly mounted warriors conquered the descendants of the Chinese exporters when Kublai Khan conquered China and founded the Yuan Dynasty.6
Close-up showing Christ on the Byzantine Deesis mosaic in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey. Gold and glass mosaic, 9th century (before 867 CE).
Detail of the Altar of Kings, Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. |
Like the Scythian royal implements, the Asante Golden Stool, a symbol of the nationhood of the Asante of west Africa, was also believed to have fallen from heaven. Asante is part of modern Ghana, part of the region formerly known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. The stool – Sika Dwa Kofi, the ‘golden stool born on Friday’ – is held to have fallen into the lap of the first Asante king, Osei Tutu, in 1701. On it are a number of bells: one to call people together, two that announce the arrival of the stool when it is carried in procession, and a series of human-shaped bells that symbolize defeated enemies of the Asante kings.7 For the Asante, gold was and is a key element in court display. Other golden artefacts worn by the Asante king and courtiers include rings, beads, caps and ceremonial sword ornaments. Slaves or servants charged with cleansing the king’s soul of the moral effects of state violence wear the akrafokonmu (soul washer’s disc). The king’s spokesman carries the kyeame poma (a ‘linguist’s staff’ with a golden finial). Another sign of gold’s important symbolic status in the Asante kingdom comes in objects not made of gold at all: gold weights, generally made of brass, that attained elaborate ornamental and representational forms beginning in the seventeenth century. The golden stool has such sacred status that even the king does not sit on it, and when it is (rarely) seen it is displayed on a European-style chair of its own. When the colonial governor Sir Frederick Hodgson, installed in what was at the time one of Britain’s newest colonies, haughtily demanded to sit on the stool in 1900, the Asante rebelled at the affront, besieging the British at Kumasi in the War of the Golden Stool (notably, a war that pitted two queens against one another: Queen Victoria and Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa). Although the Asante eventually lost control of their territory to the British, they kept the stool, and it is still used as a symbol of traditional Asante power in Ghana.
The Asantehene, the Asante king, and the Golden Stool, Accra, Gold Coast, British West Africa, December 1946. |
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Soul Disc Pendant (akrafokonmu, ‘soul washer’s disc’), Ghana, 19th century. Cast gold, hammered. |
In a secular vein, rulers throughout history have also possessed the prerogative of awarding golden tokens, such as rings, cups or medals, to their favourites and servitors; this practice underlies the idea of the ‘gold medal’ as a contest prize, which developed in early modern Europe and blossomed around 1900 into the system of inscribed metallic medals (gold, silver, bronze) used in the modern Olympic Games.
Gold tablet with an Orphic inscription, 3rd–2nd century BCE Greece.
One special use of gold in religious contexts is as a surface for writing or a substance with which to write. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, claimed to have received from an angel named Moroni the ‘golden plates’ on which he found the text that he translated and published as the Book of Mormon in 1830. In the ancient Mediterranean, people prepared inscribed thin sheets of gold, called lamellae or Orphic gold tablets, to use as ‘passports’ on their journey to the next life after death. They were sometimes cut to particular shapes and rolled as a phylactery (a magical amulet), inscribed with words of comfort and admonition to the deceased, giving guidance on what they will see as they proceed on their journey to the netherworld. Some seem to have been used by the living, with magical intent: for protection, for victory or as love charms. Some individuals in many early European cultures had gold coins placed on their tongues or accompanying their bodies in burial – in Greece this was called ‘Charon’s obol’, the coin necessary to pay the ferryman for passage across the River Styx. In more modest contexts these ‘coins’ were actually thin gold leaf impressed with images of human or mythological figures.
Whether or not the sacred value of gold preceded its use as currency in any given culture, many cultures face the problem of establishing a relationship between the divine and the worldly significance of gold. Gold has often held a paradoxical place in religious practice. Is it an inherently noble metal or is its value a purely human convention, like money itself? Is it a good way of giving honour to God or does its materiality distract from its spiritual force? Along with its economic character, the very ‘dazzlingness’ of gold might make it suspect from certain moral perspectives.
The Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament) contains some of the most vivid accounts of the uses of gold in worship, and in that context gold occupies a decidedly ambivalent place. Gold first appears in a negative light, as the material of the Golden Calf (see page eight). In Exodus, as Moses is scaling Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Law – the Ten Commandments – the Israelites tire of waiting, and ask Moses’ brother Aaron to make gods for them:
Aaron answered them, ‘Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.’ So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ (32:2–4)
The making of the Golden Calf directly contravenes several of the commandments: the first identifying statement ‘I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of Egypt’; the prohibition on worshipping other gods; and the prohibition on making graven images. Whether it is altogether fair that the Israelites are punished for breaking commandments they don’t know about yet is certainly a question! But in the intention attached to the making of the idol, the account also resonates with later arguments about idolatry in European religious debates. Although the lines quoted above make clear that the calf is Aaron’s handiwork, when Moses later asks Aaron how the idol came to be, he says ‘they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’ One might wonder whether Aaron has actually forgotten his own act of making, or is just ashamed and trying to hide it. This parallels the concern – one that recurs over the centuries – that human beings make religious images only to forget or conceal the fact that these objects are made by human hands. To attribute divine presence to human artefacts, to worship them, is the key act of idolatry. A corollary often mentioned in biblical critiques of idolatry is the idea that idolaters render themselves like the substances they worship – humans become thing-like when they attribute liveness to dead matter.
This characteristic is not particular to gold or even to precious metal – wood is often mentioned, perhaps because the word for wood in Greek, hule, was also a general word for matter. But gold has a particular place in biblical discussions of idolatry. The idea of idols as ‘made of silver and gold’ appears in the Psalms and the books of Hosea and Isaiah. In the Acts of the Apostles, in the New Testament, Paul echoes these earlier statements: ‘we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill.’ And yet the Bible also provides fodder for thinking about gold as an especially good way to honour God or to represent heavenly things. Moses broke the tablets of the law in vexation over the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf, but those same broken tablets came to rest in a sanctuary – the Holy of Holies – which King Solomon supposedly furnished with gold objects and covered completely in gold. According to the Bible, King David, his father, gave him 100,000 talents of gold to do so. A talent was a unit of weight, and we don’t know exactly how much gold it represented, but since one talent of silver could pay the crew of a trireme for a month, we can guess that 100,000 talents of gold was worth quite a lot. Along with Solomon’s temple, the New Jerusalem in John’s vision in Revelation – unquestionably a heavenly place – is a city built and paved with pure gold.
Master of the Munich Boccaccio, Construction of the Temple of Jerusalem by King Solomon’s order, 15th century CE, pigment and gold on parchment. |
Thus biblical texts provided fodder for thinking about gold in both negative and positive lights. And Christian theology – as it was formulated under the Roman Empire and beyond, in medieval Europe and Byzantium – likewise both embraced the material world and expressed hostility toward it. In Western Europe Christianity began as a hidden cult practised by people of modest means and became the Roman Empire’s official state religion; the emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 brought to the church the trappings of imperial splendour. From this point on, as Christian churches were built as permanent and public structures, they were gilt on the exterior or adorned on the interior with glittering gold foil and mosaics set with golden tesserae.8 In the fourth century CE these ‘gold’ mosaic pieces (made with a thin sheet of gold encased in glass) began to be used en masse as the background in pictorial church apses and other locations to create the impression of a solid gold ground.9
As we have seen, gold as material substance expressed otherworldly splendour but sometimes seemed to be in conflict with it. Interpreters of the Bible who explained the meaning of gold in the ancient texts generally emphasized symbolic interpretations: gold implied moral excellence rather than luxury.10 Writing in the early years of Christianity, St Jerome criticized the fashion for luxury Gospel manuscripts made with purple parchment written in gold (a practice known as chrysography), suggesting in the preface to his translation of the Book of Job that some people cared more for the luxury of a book than for the correctness of its texts. In one of his letters he writes, ‘Parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted for lettering, manuscripts are decked with jewels: and Christ lies at their door naked and dying.’11 Jerome’s critique did not stop wealthy patrons from commissioning luxurious books written and illustrated in gold ink and gold leaf. The Codex Palatinus and Sinope Gospels are Latin and Greek examples of fine vellum dyed purple and then inscribed in gold.
Mosaic of the Chapel of St Zeno in the Church of Santa Prassede, 9th century CE, Rome, Italy.
In Islam as well, prohibitions on the use of gold script and other embellishments for the Qur’an coexisted with richly illuminated examples that seem to directly contradict the rules.12 Gold is attested eight times in the Qur’an itself, four referring to the pleasures and luxuries that believers will have in paradise. Qur’an 43:71 says that golden platters in paradise contain ‘whatever the souls desire’ – but prohibitions on gold accessories mean that drinking from silver and golden cups in this life will make you feel the fire of hell in your stomach. It may have been in imitation of Christian practices that Islamic manuscript illuminators made such examples as the ‘Blue Qur’an’, written in Tunisia in the late ninth or early tenth century CE in gold on vellum that was dyed with indigo. In the earliest mosques gold lettering composed of mosaic tesserae was used for holy inscriptions. The script known as Kufic, which arose at the turn of the eighth century for handwritten texts of the Qur’an, developed from this gold mosaic lettering.13 A lavish example of a manuscript copy of the Qur’an written in gold Kufic script, which appears opposite, displays its luxuriousness by including only a few words per page. Gold could also provide the ground on which to write, as in a Qur’an manuscript from the Seljuk empire (page 76) written in black Kufic letters on gold ground.
Gold calligraphy in Islamic manuscripts was routinely used as a highlight – for the names of God, or for chapter headings. But sometimes gold served an illustrative function in manuscript painting, representing prophetic fire or divine essence, as in the mystical episode of the prophet Muhammad’s ascension to heaven. The story was retold many times. In the Miraculous Journey of Muhammad, the Mirâj Nâmeh, the prophet is transported by the angel Gabriel from the mosque at Mecca to the ‘Far-off Mosque’ of Jerusalem. He reaches the heavens and finally contemplates the divine at the Throne of God. In manuscripts the episode was often illustrated with gold to indicate the prophetic flame that envelops Muhammad and the elements of celestial scenery that he encounters. The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris possesses an especially lavish fifteenth-century manuscript of the Mirâj Nâmeh written in Uighur script in a royal Timurid workshop. It travelled to France after being acquired in 1673 in Constantinople by Antoine Galland, the translator of the Thousand and One Nights. On the page that represents Muhammad’s encounter with divine essence, he is engulfed in rivulets of golden flame. The episode was a popular one in manuscript illumination. The same episode appears in the Book of Wisdom attributed to Iskandar (Alexander) in a luxurious sixteenth-century Safavid Persian illuminated manuscript of Jami’s Haft Awrang. Here Muhammad’s face is covered in a white veil, a convention of respect, and he rides his human steed surrounded by tongues of golden flame and attended by angels.
Qur’an folio in gold Kufic script, c. 9th–10th century CE, gold and ink on parchment.
Folio from a Qur’an manuscript, c. 1180, Seljuk empire (eastern Iran or present-day Afghanistan), ink, opaque watercolour and gold on paper.
Gold was widely used in medieval manuscripts in Europe as well. Charlemagne and his successors carried on the tradition of lavish gospel books written in gold, such as the Gospels of Saint-Médard de Soissons, written in gold on vellum dyed purple in the early ninth century CE. But gold came to be quite a routine form of adornment for manuscripts in the later Middle Ages. Technically, for a manuscript to be considered ‘illuminated’, it must have gold or silver decoration. Originally artists painted with powdered gold mixed with a painting medium so that it could be applied with a brush (as with other pigments). This ‘shell gold’ – stored, like other pigments, in mussel shells – was made by grinding gold with salt or honey so that it crumbled into a powder, rather than just forming a thin sheet of gold leaf, as pounded gold by itself would tend to do. Beginning in the twelfth century, illuminators began using gold leaf applied to selected spots on the page. It was used for lettering (particularly for headings or nomina sacra, holy names), in borders and ornamental designs, and within representational images as a background or a highlight. The use of gold in manuscript production boomed after around 1200 CE; the supply of gold in Europe increased with an expanding West African gold trade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by European crusaders.14 In addition the growth of a book industry in urban settings in the later Middle Ages contributed to the use of gold leaf. Professional illuminators who worked in specialized workshops were better equipped to use gold leaf – which is difficult to manipulate and requires a workspace completely sheltered from wind – than monastic scribes who often worked in cubicles adjoining open-air cloisters. One of the most popular types of books made by these professional illuminators was the Book of Hours. These were private prayer books commissioned by wealthy patrons or made on spec for the market, and regularly sported gold illumination. An example that harks back to the earlier fashion for chrysography on purple vellum is the ‘Black Hours’ in the collection of the Morgan Library in New York, a manuscript written in gold and silver on black-dyed vellum.
The Miraj of the Prophet. Folio from Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones) by the Persian poet Jami (1414–1492), probably written in the Safavid period, 1556–65, opaque watercolour, ink and gold on paper.
St Mark the Evangelist, from the Gospels of Saint-Médard de Soissons, 9th century CE. |
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‘Black Hours’, an edition of the Book of Hours written and illuminated on stained or painted black vellum with golden text. Bruges, Belgium, c. 1470.
As Christian thinking developed over time, the extent to which material things could serve as a vehicle for access to the divine was, in particular, a subject for debate. From the neo-Platonic perspective that inspired many medieval theologians, the cosmos constituted a hierarchy emanating from the divine, of which the material world served as a more or less distant manifestation. The neo-Platonic writer Proclus, who wrote in the fifth century CE, used gold as an example; as the classicist Peter Struck describes it,
One ray, or chain, leaves the transcendent heights of the One and manifests itself, very near its source, as the traditional Greek god Apollo. When this same ray continues downward and enters the realm of Nous, it brings into being the Platonic Form of the sun . . . Next, as it enters the outer limits of the material level, the beam brings into being the actual physical sun that we see in the sky. The beam does not stop there, however, but continues down to the lower substrata of material reality, into the plant level, where it manifests the heliotrope, and to the mineral level, where it appears as gold.15
This way of thinking allowed gold to be seen, depending on one’s perspective, as a mineral (one of the lowest of the low among substances), or as linked in a tight chain to the very highest manifestations of divinity – or both. To be sure, gold was prominently mentioned in the Bible in the holiest contexts. Gold in churches recreated Solomon’s temple and provided the faithful with a shimmering, seductive vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Abbot Suger, in describing the work he oversaw on the twelfth-century Basilica of St-Denis, the first church built in the Gothic style, repeatedly emphasizes the brilliant golden ornamentation of the church in its vessels, crosses, tapestries, gilt inscriptions, wall paintings and altars. In particular gold serves as an especially appropriate substance for housing the Eucharist and the remains of the saints. Its glitter brings the saints, he says, ‘to the visitors’ glances in more glorious and conspicuous manner’. The living, he proposes, ‘should deem it worth our effort to cover the most sacred ashes of those whose venerable spirits, radiant as the sun, attend upon Almighty God with the most precious material we possibly can: with refined gold and a profusion of hyacinths, emeralds and other precious stones’.16
Suger points to a key religious use of gold: as the material of reliquaries that hold the bodily remains, or relics, of holy figures, clothing them in brilliant light. The largest Christian reliquary in Europe, the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne cathedral, is made of gold. This reliquary, measuring more than 2 metres (6 feet) long, was created by Nicholas of Verdun in the twelfth century to house relics of the Magi. The Magi were also responsible for a relic that was itself made of gold: a gold solidus coin from the fifth-century rule of the Byzantine emperor Zeno was worshiped in Milan as a ducato dei tre magi, that is, a ducat of the Three Magi, ostensibly among the offerings of gold that the Magi brought to the infant Jesus.17 But most relics were bones and other bodily fragments, material evidence of the physical lives of saints. In fact they represented them in a more than merely symbolic way. They were the saints, still present (living, even) among the faithful. And yet these aged, dirty, broken bits of bone – whether genuine or not – were often quite unimpressive to look at. Luxuriously fashioned reliquaries redressed this concern by lending the beauty of gold and other precious materials to express how important these objects actually were and to suggest the shining purity of the saint. Indeed this function was quite explicitly understood by proponents of relics. Thiofrid of Echternach justifies golden containers for the saints as a way of preventing ‘horrified’ responses to the material remains.18 The saintly body is to be understood as a shining body, whatever the physical remains might look like. This special golden status appears in paintings, too, with the use of the halo and sometimes floating crowns or shining robes of gold.
Nicholas of Verdun (c. 1150–1205), Shrine of the Three Kings, begun 1181. Gold, enamel, precious stones, cameos, antique gems.
The type of reliquary called ‘speaking’ or ‘image’ reliquaries expressed in fuller form the fragment’s identity as body part. Thus a piece of skull might be encased in a life-sized head fashioned from precious metal, like the reliquary head of St Eustace at the British Museum. A simple object relic might be encased in a more lavish version of itself, such as the bell-shaped shrine with gold filigree (fine wire soldered onto the surface in patterns) that houses the much simpler bell of St Patrick. As the art historian Cynthia Hahn writes of the St Eustace head (and the description can apply to many others): ‘It is as if one sees . . . the human figure giving off light, a stunning and oversaturated sensory experience.’19
Reliquary head of St Eustace, c. 1210, from Basel, Switzerland. Silver-gilt repoussé head surrounding wooden core with gem-set filigree circlet.
One of the most famous Christian reliquaries made of gold is that of Ste-Foy (St Faith) at the church of Ste-Foy de Conques, a ninth-century statue just under 90 cm (3 feet) high. Seated in majesty, set with numerous gems, the statue incorporates an earlier head, possibly an imperial portrait from the later Roman Empire, with an impassive masklike face and disconcertingly staring eyes. In the flickering light of candles in the medieval church, one can imagine the shining surface coming to appear mobile, animating the figure. In the eleventh century Bernard of Angers, writing an account of Ste-Foy’s miracles, first doubts the statue, comparing it to a pagan idol that would receive sacrifices to Jupiter or Mars. He finally concludes that ‘the holy image is consulted not as an idol that requires sacrifices, but because it commemorates a martyr’,20 and goes on to collect accounts of the many miracles performed by the saint.
Would we be wrong to think Bernard’s change of heart not altogether justified? Whether the statue ‘required’ sacrifices or not, it accumulated countless votive offerings as thanks for these miracles. Indeed, like an idol, the statue sometimes punished those who failed to supply them. And surely the distance between divine or semi-divine being and lifeless image was not always obvious to believers. This slippage would result in vehement critiques – sometimes physical acts of destruction – during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, when concerns arose both about the possibility that worshippers were giving their adoration to material things and also about the excessive wealth of the Catholic Church, embodied in costly ornamentation. The worry that golden objects of worship give priority to the economic value of gold did not emerge suddenly in the sixteenth century, however. It is a basic assumption of inscriptions sometimes found on medieval objects. On the back of a golden altar at the church of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, an inscription cautions that ‘more potent than all its gold is the treasure with which it is endowed by virtue of the holy bones within it.’21 Similarly, a Bible commissioned by Theodulf, author of the Opus Caroli, contains a dedication noting that the cover of the book shines ‘through precious stones, gold and purpure’ but that ‘its radiance within is even stronger . . . on account of its great glory.’22 A gilded altar frontal in Denmark is inscribed: ‘More than with the golden radiance by which you see it shine, this work shines by virtue of the knowledge it conveys about sacred history. Indeed, it unveils the marvelous story of Christ, whose glory surpasses gold.’23 Here the gold is clearly prized as material, which makes all the more wondrous the fact that it is so decisively surpassed by divine glory.
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The shrine of St Patrick’s bell, a reliquary made to hold the bell which had originally been placed in St Patrick’s tomb, 1091–1105. Bronze with gold, silver and precious stones. |
Reliquary of Ste-Foy, 9th century CE, with Gothic additions. Gilded silver, copper, enamel, rock crystal and precious stones, cameos, wooden core. |
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One of the world’s oldest and most impressive golden reliquaries is the Bimaran reliquary, an early Buddhist reliquary found in Afghanistan. On this golden casket adorned with sophisticated repoussé figures, the Buddha appears surrounded by the Indian gods Brahma and Sakra, each filling a niche with a pointed arch. The technique suggests Scythian goldsmithery, whereas the style is Hellenistic (the Greek style that developed after the classical period of the fifth century BCE). The dating of the object was long debated, but evidence suggests it was made around the time of the birth of Christ. If this is true, the object would be the earliest surviving artistic representation of the Buddha and precede any Christian visual imagery – an important point, since Buddhist art has sometimes been thought to have been created following the model of early Christian art.
Along with small casket reliquaries like that of Bimaran, the stupas (usually a large tower in a temple complex, shaped like a mound, bulb or bell, and often topped with a tapering pinnacle) of Buddhist temples can also be considered reliquaries: their function is to house funerary remains of the Buddha or monks. In East and Southeast Asia stupas have often been gilded. Although ancient China generally valued bronze and jade more highly than gold, the introduction of Buddhism to China seems to have opened the door to a new view of gold as a substance laden with meaning; it was during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the peak of Buddhist influence in China, that an indigenous goldworking industry began to flourish. One of the legends that explain Buddhism’s arrival directly mobilizes the significance of gold: after seeing a vision of a giant, golden god, the Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han dynasty (who reigned in the first century CE) sent to India for representatives of the new religion and soon began constructing gilded temples. The sixth-century CE Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Lo-Yang (Luoyang, one of the ancient capital cities of China) tells of thousands of golden stupas. It also describes many golden statues of the Buddha, and temples adorned with many types of golden ornaments: bells, door knockers, nails, jars, plates. The Record claims that this dazzling display profoundly impressed Bodhidharma, a monk who arrived in China from Persia in the fifth century CE and became the founder of Zen Buddhism.24
The Bimaran reliquary, a cylindrical relic container of gold set with almandine garnets, from the monument Stupa 2 at Bimaran, Gandhara (in modern Afghanistan), 1st century CE.
Chinese visitors to India, such as the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang, were also impressed by the golden statues of the Buddha they saw there.25 Most Buddha statues that appear gold are actually made of other substances that have been gilt. As with the skin of the ancient Egyptian gods, it makes sense that Buddhists would also gild Buddha statues, for one of the 32 marks of the Buddha is that his skin is the colour and smoothness of gold; he is also described as bathed in radiant, sometimes golden, light. The largest solid gold statue in the world is the Golden Buddha, in Bangkok, Thailand, originally created in the Sukhothai period (the thirteenth to fourteenth century CE). At some point in its history, in a reversal of the more typical act of gilding, the statue’s guardians covered it in plaster to protect it from thieves. Later it was adorned with paint and coloured glass. The precious metal core only re-emerged in 1955, when the ropes holding it as it was moved to a new location gave way and the statue dropped, chipping off some of its plaster coating and revealing the gold beneath.
Like other religions, Buddhism has an ambivalent relationship to gold. The Buddha renounced material wealth, and Buddhist monks are expected to maintain an ascetic lifestyle. But in Buddhist legends and practice, precious materials indicate spiritual worth and give honour to the Buddha. Buddhist stories told of paradisiac spaces laden with gold: the paradise of the Buddha Amith-aba has ground made of gold; the Maitreya Buddha was born in a city whose ground is gold sand. But Buddhism also prescribes the renunciation of material wealth. Although sacred texts told monks not to use alms bowls of gold, such bowls were regularly made as imperial gifts to high-ranking monks.26 This apparent contradiction was not lost on critics.27 In the ninth century, as part of a programme of suppression from which Buddhism in China never entirely recovered, Emperor Wuzong forbade Buddhists to use gold (or other precious materials) in the creation of religious images, not because he subscribed to the ascetic ideal, but because he believed the accumulation of wealth in temples was draining the money supply. Clay and wood, he declared, ‘are sufficient to express respect’. He even ordered the gilding to be peeled off the statues and presented to him.28 In 2014 the dome of the Mahabodhi Buddhist temple in Bihar, India, was covered in gold plate through a donation by the king of Thailand. Ironically the temple commemorates the spot where the Buddha is said to have renounced material possessions.
Golden Buddha. Sukhothai period, 13th–14th century, Bangkok, Thailand.
Montien Boonma, Melting Void: Molds for the Mind (1998), plaster, gold foil and herbs. |
With a project entitled Melting Void: Molds for the Mind (1998), the modern Thai artist Montien Boonma alluded to the idea of gilding the Buddha statue, but by inviting viewers into a more private experience. He created moulds for statues – not the statues themselves, but their reverse, the void within which they would be created – and invited viewers to step inside them as a place of refuge and mindfulness. On the insides, not the outsides, he applied gold foil (along with herbs and cinnabar). This invisibility suggests a logic of modest spirituality like that of bpìt tong lăng prá, which does not seek the approbation of society. In a sense he places viewers within the mind of the Buddha, with honorific gold surrounding but not touching them in a darkened space displaying ephemerality more than permanence.29
Nicolas Poussin, Midas washing away his Curse in the River Pactolus, 1624, oil on canvas.
