Tea bowl repaired using the kintsugi method of fixing broken pieces with a mixture of powdered gold.
For millennia specialized workers have crafted gold into objects of all kinds – for adornment, worship, symbolic power and currency. Gold as an ornament highlights other things, enhancing their glitter. Jewellers use it to create settings for gems and other precious things: in early modern Europe, jewellers mounted exotica – artefacts, coconuts, ostrich eggs – in gold to allow collectors to reinvent objects from other lands as their own. In the Japanese art of kintsugi gold adorns by serving as a cement to repair pottery, its joins making beauty out of brokenness. To glorify princes and gods, many cultures have sheathed buildings in gold, inside and out. Already in ancient Mesopotamia, goldworkers practised a form of gilding by engraving an underlying surface with grooves to grip a sheet of gold foil. Around the fourth century BCE Chinese goldworkers developed the ‘fire-gilding’ technique that involved chemically bonding gold leaf (thinner than foil) to bronze and other metals. Sculptors in the Roman Empire used this same technique to gild statues. An early modern example that draws on the Roman tradition is the Monument to the Great Fire of London, topped with an urn of gilded bronze.
Over the centuries gold has been applied to cloth, leather, glass and the pages of books. As we have seen, scribes and illuminators used it to make inks for writing and painting lavish manuscript books. Gold-splashed papers were made in China from early times.1 Along with making golden thread into cloth of gold, and using it to sew jade suits for emperors, textile workers embroidered purses and vestments with it, and wove it into tapestries. Mosaics made from tesserae of glass bonded with gold adorn the interiors of churches and mosques. Glass vessels and other objects receive gilding as well. In gold sandwich glass, which has been made since antiquity, a thin layer of gold is sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Venetian glassmakers gilded vessels by placing pieces of gold leaf or even sprinkling granular gold on the molten glass before blowing it, or on the finished object once cooled. In the Islamic world tanners have long practised gold tooling on leather; Persian and North African artists introduced the technique to Italy in the fifteenth century and it became popular in Europe, especially for bookbinding. All these techniques expressed the honour and value (economic and otherwise) attached to the adorned object. Gold is scarcer and more expensive than many of the things it adorns, which may help explain why it is often used in this way; many people who can afford a little gold cannot afford an object made entirely out of the precious metal. But specialized artisans have also, through the millennia, fashioned objects entirely or mostly of gold.
Tea bowl repaired using the kintsugi method of fixing broken pieces with a mixture of powdered gold. |
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The artistry of gold has had different meanings for different cultures and in different time periods. During the period of European conquest, stories abounded of indigenous peoples trading gold for glass beads and other items that the Spanish considered valueless. Some Europeans believed this demonstrated the naivety of American natives – they did not seem to value gold properly – or even used it to justify treating them as less than human. Others, by contrast, idealized what they saw as a ‘Golden Age’ prior to the deadening and corrupting power of greed. But a story told about an episode in Panama suggests something different at work. Watching the Spanish melt down the handiwork of indigenous craftsmen, the son of the cacique (chief) Comogre reportedly exclaimed:
Sir Christopher Wren, Monument to the Great Fire of London (detail), 1677.
What thing then is this, Christians? Is it possible that you set a high value upon such a small quantity of gold? You nevertheless destroy the artistic beauty of these necklaces, melting them into ingots . . . We place no more value on rough gold than on a lump of clay, before it has been transformed by the workman’s hand into a vase which pleases our taste or serves our need.2
The story of Comogre’s son – if it isn’t just the projection of a European observer intent on critiquing other Europeans – shows how one group of indigenous Americans attached value to gold. They appreciated it as a material with the potential to convey symbolic values, but only when fashioned by the skill of sophisticated artists. This view stands at odds with the ideas about gold as a material of artistic production that Europeans brought with them to the Americas. In Europe the monetary value of gold trumped all but the most exquisite workmanship, and often even that. The labour and skill devoted to the working of golden objects might even be suspect. It took gold temporarily out of economic circulation; it was ephemeral, even wasteful, if the underlying material was eventually to be melted down; and it sometimes appeared to be merely a ruse by the artisan to charge more for the material than it was worth, especially in situations in which the market value of a precious metal might exceed its coinage value, regulated by law.
Two saints on the base of a glass cup, made with the Zwischengoldglas method. Roman, 4th century CE. |
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The artistic working of gold adds another element to the already complex relationship between the monetary value and religious and political symbolism of gold. For Comogre’s son, gold was apparently no more valuable than any other product of the earth until an artisan worked it. In Europe gold’s economic value was so powerful that the value added by craft was often considered negligible by comparison. This wasn’t always the case, but when artisans were able to enhance the value of gold it was seen as a special accomplishment, nothing short of miraculous. When the Italian Renaissance architect and writer Filarete described Piero de’ Medici’s collection of antique gold medals, he wrote with awe that, although nothing is more valuable than gold, ancient craftsmen made gold ‘worth more than gold by means of their skill’. The artifice involved ‘appears to have come from heaven rather than to have been made by man’.3 Rather than creating the value of gold through craftsmanship, European artists can at best enhance it.
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Emerald glass goblet with granular gilding and portrait of a betrothed man, late 15th century, Venice. |
Gold-tooled leather binding from a manuscript of the Mantiq al-Tayr (The Language of the Birds), by Farid al-Din Attar, made in Safarid Iran c. 1600.
In the late medieval illuminated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, gold leaf is used for haloes, borders, backgrounds and highlights, as was customary in such books. But gold was also used to depict gold. The gold objects and adornments on the famous January page express the wealth of a stylish French ducal court, including a ‘nef’ – a vessel shaped like a ship that contains cutlery or spices. This is a princely display of glitter with which an artist like Albrecht Dürer – trained as a goldsmith in the late fifteenth century – might have been familiar. But the German artist was rendered literally speechless by the gold objects brought from Mexico to Spain and displayed at the Habsburg court in Brussels:
I saw the things that have been brought to the King from the new land of gold: a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of armor of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds, and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies. These things were all so precious that they are valued at 100,000 florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.4
The artisanal cultures the Spanish Conquest destroyed were producing sophisticated artworks whose technical prowess and aesthetic qualities are apparent from works that have been excavated, largely from tombs, in more recent times. Goldworking began in South America thousands of years later than in Mesopotamia, but by the time the Europeans arrived, artisanal traditions had already existed there for millennia. As early as 1500 BCE, people in what is now south central Peru had begun hammering gold into very thin foil; along with fragments of gold foil from this period, archaeologists discovered a specialized toolkit for working gold.5 Precious metals played a bigger role in South America than they did in Europe, whose metalworking crafts emphasized iron and bronze for tools and military uses. But in the Andes, because of the mountainous terrain, wheels were useless for transport, and the technology of warfare that Andean people developed emphasized cloth (using slings and quilted armour). Metals also did not serve as currency per se, so their importance was more symbolic than functional.6
Limbourg Brothers (fl. 1399–1416 CE), January: The Feast of the Duke of Berry, illuminated manuscript page from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1416, pigment and gold on vellum.
The earliest known substantial caches of gold artefacts from Peru are from the Chavín culture. The name Chavín derives from a site in the northern Andean highlands whose importance as a religious pilgrimage destination dates to around 1500 BCE; as a stylistic label for artefacts, it designates a set of forms and techniques that flourished from around 900 to 200 BCE. Two main burial sites, Chongoyape and Kuntur Wasi, have yielded troves of sophisticated gold artefacts, consisting of personal adornments including pectorals, pendants, gorgets, ear spools, nose rings, headdresses, plaques to be sewn on clothing and such small implements of personal indulgence as golden nosehair tweezers and snuff spoons. Chavín metalworkers were highly skilled, using the techniques of alloying, burnishing, annealing, sweat welding (in which the edges to be joined were heated to their melting point in order to create the join) and soldering (in which additional molten metal was added to serve as the ‘glue’ that joined two pieces). A pair of Chavín armbands bear a repoussé design that may have been inspired by textiles. The central motif demonstrates Chavín ‘anatropic’ styles, by which elements of the central symbolic face rearrange themselves into a different creature when the design is turned 180 degrees.7
Pair of gold armbands from the prehistoric Chavín culture, Peru, 7th–5th century BCE.
One of the most impressive technical feats of pre-Hispanic American metallurgy is the working of platinum by artisans at La Tolita in Ecuador, who were active from around 600 BCE to 400 CE. Premodern people could not produce fires that burned hot enough to melt platinum, with its melting point of 1,768°C (3,214°F), but they could achieve gold’s melting point of 1,064°C (1,947°F). La Tolita’s metalworkers combined gold and platinum using powder metallurgy or ‘sintering’, an art unknown at the time in Europe. In order to create a metal of platinum appearance that could be melted, they created fine granules of each metal and alternately hammered and heated them together until the gold particles ‘trapped’ the platinum ones, eventually creating a homogeneous alloy that could be worked like gold.8 La Tolita’s artisans produced objects that deftly paired gold with the platinum-appearing alloy to create visual contrast. This technique was forgotten after the Spanish Conquest and was only revived in the nineteenth century; it forms the basis of modern powder metallurgy, which is used in many industries, especially electronics.
Following the Chavín culture in Peru, the Moche civilization became dominant in the Andes from around the first to the eighth century CE. Moche metallurgy employed copper, silver and gold. In the Moche royal tombs at Sipán, excavated beginning in the 1980s, the symbolic relationships between metals become apparent by their placement in relation to male and female bodies of varying status. The materials scientist and archaeologist Heather Lechtman has combined metallurgical analysis with cultural interpretation, showing that gold was associated with maleness and the right side of the body, silver with femaleness and the left. For example, a Moche necklace made up of metallic peanuts – a key crop – was worn with gold peanuts on the wearer’s right side and silver peanuts on the left. Copper, the third in the symbolic system of metals, was generally worn by women, children and high-ranking attendants.9 In one myth collected after the Spanish Conquest, the Sun sends three eggs – one of gold, one of silver and one of copper – to the earth to create human beings, with the gold representing male nobles, the silver their wives and the copper the common people.10
The three metals were typically alloyed together. The peanut necklace’s ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ are actually both based on ternary alloys of all three metals (a material called tumbaga). These alloys have a lower melting (fusion) point and are thus easier to work than pure versions of each metal. To create a golden surface sheen, Andean goldsmiths used a technique known as depletion gilding, in which the other metals are removed from the surface chemically (perhaps using acids made from plant juices or stale urine to remove the copper, and salt or ferric sulphate to remove the silver), and the resulting pitted gold surface is burnished to smooth it. Were it merely a matter of presenting a golden appearance while conserving the more valuable metal, they could simply have made an object from the other metals and gilded it with a thin coating of molten gold. Instead this process may have reflected a particular value given to the idea of gold as integral to the object: the artisan does not conceal what is inside, but rather transforms it to bring out its virtues. As Lechtman puts it, ‘Perhaps the notions of “technological essence” – of the visually apprehended aspect of an object as revealing its inner structure – are related to these fundamental Andean concepts of the divine animation of all material things.’11
Moche peanut bead necklace, Tomb I, Sipán, Peru, c. 300 CE. Gold, silver and copper.
By the late Inca period artisans brought from all over the empire’s conquered territories were making huge quantities of precious metal objects – so much so that archaeologists have found numerous discarded metal objects in excavated refuse pits.12 The Inca possessed a sophisticated trade network and political structure. Though they had no written language that was recognizable as such by Europeans (unlike Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs), they used knotted strings called quipu for record keeping, and these knots may have encoded words as well as numerical information. The Inca seem to have carried on the associations of the three metals developed by their predecessors in the Andes. While only traces of Andean gold survived the Spanish Conquest, we know from contemporary accounts that Inca temple walls were clad in gold and silver and endowed with life-sized golden statues and other objects.13 Pedro de Cieza de León wrote in his seventeenth-century Chronicle of Peru that in the temple of the Sun god, Coricancha, in Cusco,
They had also a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold; and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal . . . Besides all this, they had more than twenty golden sheep [probably llamas] with their lambs, and the shepherds with their slings and crooks to watch them, all made of the same metal.14
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, a Quechua-Spanish chronicler of the Inca born in the first generation after the conquest, depicted Coricancha (as ‘curi cancha’) prominently in a map of Cusco in his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. According to the art historian Adam Herring,
The Inca understood glittering light, the shining surfaces of gold, and spearlike instruments to operate as a set of metonymic equivalents, together with a final master term, sunlight. Across the Andes, the sharp, eye-catching visual effects of shine, gleam, glint, glitter, glow, and strong colours were all considered the phenomena of sacredness.15
Peruvians knew how to cast molten metals, but they preferred hammering their pieces and assembling them by soldering. Colombian goldsmiths, on the other hand, emphasized casting. The Muisca, a tribal confederation of central Colombia, produced numerous precious metal objects of varying sizes as offerings to the gods, called tunjos. The Muisca raft, depicting the ritual that gave rise to the name El Dorado, is one. Priests communicated the particulars of the objects to be created for a given purpose and placed the resulting objects in a clay offering vessel. Usually made from varying alloys of gold and copper, these artefacts at first glance appear to have been made with filigree by soldering thin decorative wires onto them (like the ornamental panels on the shrine of St Patrick’s bell, see page 86). But the Muisca pieces were instead cast integrally using the ‘lost-wax’ method, and are thus sometimes called ‘false filigree’. In the lost-wax method the artisan created a wax model in the exact desired form of the final object, then coated it in a clay mould and heated it so that the wax would melt and run out through channels (called sprues) in the mould. The mould could then be used to cast an object from molten metal. In the case of the Muisca goldwork, wirelike pieces (originally made in wax) create linear definition and ornamentation. Interestingly the artisans do not seem to have been especially concerned with the finish of the metal objects – they are not burnished, and obvious mistakes and channel pieces remaining from the casting process are not removed – even though they must have lavished careful attention on the design of the wax models.16 Many Colombian gold artefacts also have hanging pieces added to them that must have created a sense of animation, clinking and glinting as the object moved.
Map of Cusco in Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). |
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Goldworking came later to Mexico and the rest of Central America. The craft was most likely introduced to western Mexico by metalworkers from Ecuador via a maritime route in the seventh century CE.17 In succeeding centuries the Tarascans, Maya, Mixtecs and Aztecs all practised some form of the craft. Some of the most beautiful gold objects surviving from the Maya culture of southern Mexico and Central America are gold discs with repoussé designs found in the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza (dating from around 800–1100 CE) and face ornaments, possibly belonging to a statue, with geometric eye and mouth holes and feathered serpent and cartouche adornments. The Mayans’ neighbours in southern Mexico, the Mixtecs, developed the method of lost-wax casting to the fullest extent in pre-Hispanic America. Much of the gold that the Spanish found in the Aztec empire (which had subjugated portions of Mixtec territory) was actually made by Mixtec craftsmen whose use of false filigree recalls the Muisca artefacts of Colombia. The pectoral shown in Chapter One is a stunning example of Mixtec work produced during the period of the Aztec empire.
Mixtec and Aztec gold objects made as big an impression on Europeans as the Inca ones. We have already seen Albrecht Dürer’s reaction to Mexican goldwork. Fray Toribio de Motolinia, who saw golden artefacts in Mexico, wrote that
Muisca culture, ‘Muisca raft’, made between 600 and 1600 CE. |
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they took precedence over the goldsmiths of Spain, inasmuch as they could cast a bird with a movable head, tongue, feet, and hands, and in the hand put a toy so that it appeared to dance with it; and even more, they cast a piece, one-half silver, and cast a fish with all its scales, one scale of silver, one of gold, at which the Spanish goldsmiths would much marvel.18
Hernán Cortés himself agreed; in a letter to Charles V he referred to the Aztecs’ ‘gold and silver . . . wrought so naturally as not to be surpassed by any smith in the world.’19 Most of the gold and silver objects Motolinia, Cortés and Dürer saw have vanished, literally liquidated for their monetary value; only a few Central and South American objects brought to Europe in the early years of contact remain in European collections, and of these even fewer are gold.20 The physical properties of gold rendered the form of fashioned gold objects precarious, since they can be remade indefinitely by melting and recasting with little loss of material value. It wasn’t only Europeans who saw golden objects this way. In the kingdom of Ghana a royal decree required owners of gold ornaments to melt them down and refashion them every year before the annual Yam Festival. This served the political function of erasing potentially troublesome past symbolic meanings; it also allowed the king to extract a tax on the recasting. In Europe, too, rulers constantly subjected finely fashioned gold objects to financial exigencies (often the result of warfare). Not a single one of the exquisite objects fashioned by the master goldsmith Gusmin of Cologne survives, according to Lorenzo Ghiberti, who wrote in his Commentaries that Gusmin, on seeing his work melted down, retired in despair to a hermitage.21 Even sacred functions did not protect objects from being melted down. The Benna Cross in Mainz, Germany, a crucifix cast from 272 kg (600 lb) of gold around 983, lost first a foot and then an arm to the expenses of two bishops before finally being melted down entirely in 1161.22 In 1673 the shrine of the Madonna of Loreto melted down most of its gold ex-votos (objects given to the church in thanks for miracles performed by the Madonna): these ‘useless monuments and superfluous testimonies to the holiness of the place’ were converted ‘to a more useful purpose’.23
If early modern Europeans didn’t mind melting down their own gold objects for currency, it was with all the more enthusiasm that they melted down the objects they found in the Americas. They also had an interest in obliterating their subject-matter – they considered many of the objects they found to be pagan idols. And perhaps they understood all too well the symbolic connection of artistic styles with local sovereignty. By destroying culture, conquerors were more readily able to assert their dominion. The destruction went on for centuries: as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, the Bank of England was melting down thousands of pounds sterling worth of pre-Columbian gold artefacts every year.24 It is hard to tell whether the destruction resulted from lingering prejudice against the style of the objects or simply the fact that gold’s financial value trumped all else.
Dürer looked at the Mexican objects he saw with a practised eye. Like many European artists of his time, he had originally trained as a goldsmith. For a printmaker in particular, who worked with metallurgy to create plates and used styluses to incise designs into metal surfaces, the crafts were especially closely related. But the field of goldsmithery attracted talented artists because gold objects were so sought after by elites (a lavish portrait medal of Isabella d’Este provides one example). This might seem to contradict the idea that the craft devoted to making gold objects was expendable. But the fashioning of gold objects can be thought of as ephemeral, virtuoso performance, like a lavish theatrical event or feast – even as a form of potlatch or conspicuous waste.
Gian Cristoforo Romano, gold portrait medal of Isabella d’Este, 1505, gold and precious stones.
Petrus Christus, A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius, 1449, oil on wood.
Goldsmiths were also among the most learned artists, because their work involved the study of ancient objects and could require wide-ranging knowledge in order to identify forgeries.25 Among the Renaissance artists better known as painters, sculptors or printmakers who began their careers apprenticed to goldsmiths are Luca della Robbia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Sarto, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello and Andrea Verrocchio. The great sixteenth-century Florentine biographer of artists, Giorgio Vasari, wrote that in the fifteenth century ‘there was a very close connection – nay, almost a constant intercourse – between the goldsmiths and the painters.’26 For him this explained how Botticelli, appropriately trained in the art of design (meaning drawing) as an apprentice goldsmith, was able so readily to switch to painting.
In late medieval Europe goldsmiths convened in guilds that typically had a fixed number of members, so that new spots only opened when a master artist died or moved away. To become a full member of the guild, one had to execute a ‘masterpiece’ – literally the work that demonstrated one’s fitness to become a ‘master’ craftsman of the guild. Each master – as is still the case today – had a specific ‘trademark’ registered with the guild: a mark stamped on his products that identified their authorship. (His or occasionally her; although women could rarely if ever become ‘masters’ in their own right, widows could take over their deceased husband’s marks.) This and other aspects of the trade were heavily regulated in order to maintain the quality of precious metals. This was no small matter, since gold and silver objects were often melted to make coinage and if they were adulterated could conceivably be vastly overvalued. In some cities goldsmiths’ movements were also regulated; in fifteenth-century Nuremberg, for example, goldsmiths were prohibited from both travelling out of the city without official permission and sharing secrets with outsiders.27
According to one estimate, less than half of 1 per cent of goldsmiths’ works from medieval Europe survive.28 Renaissance goldwork has not fared much better. Where gold is strongly associated with economic value, artistic use of gold was suspect because it took the metal out of circulation. Sumptuary laws attempted to prevent goldsmiths from putting too much effort into their workmanship, because it risked making the gold in the objects harder to extract, or perhaps encouraged hoarding. Artworks made of gold were at risk of being melted down for their material value by impecunious owners or by thieves or conquerors. Seen from this vantage point, the craft of the master goldsmith can be considered not an act of creation but a performance of skill – creating exquisite but ephemeral stylings poignantly slated for destruction.
No goldsmith was as much a performer as Benvenuto Cellini, whose sixteenth-century golden salt cellar – one of the lucky few objects to survive – is one of the most famous pieces of secular goldwork from Western Europe. It made news once again when it was stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2003 (then recovered in 2006). Originally designed for Ippolito d’Este, the cardinal of Ferrara, the Salt Cellar was finally executed for Francis I of France. It holds both salt and pepper, and its figures symbolically represent the sources of salt and pepper as the sea and earth respectively (the sea god Neptune, the earth goddess Berecynthia, and their various products). Today, salt and pepper seem like incongruously humble commodities to be housed in such a luxurious vessel, but at the time they were potent symbols. Table salt represented the wealth of France, which profited from salt harvesting on the Atlantic coast, and was essential to preserving foods during winter and lean times, whereas pepper was an exotic commodity from the east, representing foreign luxury trade.
As we saw with manuscript illumination, gold was a medium for the arts of writing and painting on parchment as well as for creating three-dimensional objects. In the Middle Ages paintings made on wood panels also gleamed with gold. Byzantine artists used gold highlights on icons (portrait-style paintings of the saints) to create a sense of relief or movement, to emphasize important visual elements, and to lend honour to holy figures. According to the art historian Jaroslav Folda, the practice of endowing icons with gold highlights was ‘part of the important new concept of the icon’ developed in the second half of the ninth century CE when supporters of icons (iconodules) won out against their detractors (iconoclasts).29 Western European artists who saw examples of the Byzantine work quickly adopted the use of gold in religious panel painting.
Simone Martini, Annunciation with Saints Ansano and Margaret, 1333, tempera and gold on wood.
The gold that formed the background of many such paintings was typically gold leaf, made by hammering high-quality gold coins.30 Like illuminators, panel painters also applied powdered shell gold as a pigment. They decorated their panels’ gold backgrounds by incising or punching designs into them, and created sculptural elements by building up the surface before gilding, typically with a clay mixture called bole and then with a gesso paste called pastiglia. Certain golden elements such as haloes, crowns, belts and angels’ wings thus project from the surfaces. Simone Martini’s Annunciation of 1333 is an excellent example of the use of gold as a background where golden haloes appear as thickly textured objects, not just flat paint. But a century later, taste had changed. Leon Battista Alberti, an art theorist concerned with the precise depiction of geometric space, criticized the use of gold in paintings. Alberti describes ‘painters who use much gold in their pictures, because they think it gives them majesty,’ and says bluntly, ‘I do not praise this.’
Benvenuto Cellini, Saltcellar, 1543, gold, niello work and ebony base.
Even if you were painting Virgil’s Dido – with her gold quiver, her golden hair fastened with a gold clasp, purple dress with a gold girdle, the reins and all her horse’s trappings of gold – even then I would not want you to use any gold, because to represent the glitter of gold with plain colours brings the craftsman more admiration and praise.31
Rather than using materials to dazzle, Alberti asks the painter to create the illusion of fine gold with ordinary materials. We can explain his focus in a number of different ways. It suggests a certain satisfaction with modest means and a distaste for overt magnificence; it might also reflect a concern that the ‘special effect’ of glittering gold counteracted the realism of the representation. Finally, in a time when artists strove to raise the profile of their profession, insisting on its learned character, Alberti focused on the value added by the artist’s skilled hand rather than the value inhering in the material.
The Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt flew in the face of Alberti’s pronouncements with the paintings of his ‘golden phase’, during which he was inspired by the gold mosaics and painted backgrounds of Byzantine and Western medieval art. In paintings like the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, The Kiss and Danaë Klimt liberally used gold leaf to flatten the space of the painting, blending figures and background into a shining, hallucinatory surface design. As with other painters of the legend of Danaë (impregnated by Zeus, who used the shape of a shower of gold to infiltrate the tower that imprisoned her, Danaë gave birth to the hero Perseus), the Austrian artist used the story as an excuse for undisguised eroticism. Several versions by the Renaissance painter Titian also played with an equivocation between the rain of gold as divine presence and as gold coins, suggesting something pecuniary about Danaë’s acceptance of her godly visitor. In Klimt’s case, however, the gold that envelops Danaë seems to comment on the artist’s own sensual gold-infused practice as a painter.
The issues Alberti’s critique raises are still at work today, as contemporary artists use gold itself as a medium to comment, sometimes ironically, on questions of intrinsic and artistic value. In 1959 the French conceptual artist Yves Klein created an art piece called Zone de sensibilité picturale immatérielle in which he printed receipts that claimed to give title to one ‘zone of immaterial pictural sensitivity’ in return for a certain amount of solid gold. Should the buyer choose, he or she could burn the receipt, accomplishing the ‘immateriality’ of the work’s title, and Klein would throw half the corresponding gold into the River Seine; the rest of the gold found its way into one of his ‘Monogold’ gold leaf paintings. Carl Andre’s Gold Field of 1966 was simply a flat square of gold that he paid a jeweller $600 to make, the same price he charged the collector, Vera List, who had commissioned it. The literalism of the gesture seems to erase the artist’s labour, possibly also commenting ironically on the relationship between patron, artist and fabricator.32 The sculptor Roni Horn played on Andre’s title with her 1980–82 piece Forms from the Gold Field, in which she flattened 900 grams (2 lb) of gold into a crinkly rectangular floor mat; Félix González-Torres, inspired by the piece, created one of his characteristic ‘candy spill’ pieces in response, with all the pieces of candy wrapped in gold-coloured foil. In the early 2000s the American artist Lisa Gralnick, a metalsmith by training, created The Gold Standard, a tripartite set of unusual small objects designed to prompt reflections on gold, value and history. The first group consists of portraits of objects in plaster with a smaller portion in gold that represents the value in gold, by weight, of the object represented. The objects are generally everyday items without any great monetary value, which means that plaster predominates. A book, for example, has just a tiny corner in gold; a handgun has a somewhat larger inset piece on the side of its grip. The piece called Rhinoplasty (the technical term for a plastic surgeon’s ‘nose job’) is a plaster cast of a human face with the nose – and a bit more – in gold. A second group consists of plaster casts of objects Gralnick had to purchase and melt down in order to obtain gold for her other pieces. The third group contains imagined objects placed within a surreal, fictionalized history of goldwork.33
Detail of Gustav Klimt, Danaë, 1907, oil and gold leaf on canvas.
Lisa Gralnick, Rhinoplasty, 2003, plaster and gold.
Yves Klein, Le silence est d’or (Silence is Golden), 1960, gold leaf on wood.
El Anatsui, Fresh and Fading Memories, exhibition installation at Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 2007, aluminium and copper wire.
The ephemerality of the form of gold objects reappears in the work of the British artist Richard Wright, who paints delicately intricate designs, like Baroque inkblots, in gold leaf on monumental walls of contemporary exhibition spaces (for example, his no title at the Tate Britain in 2009–10). Wright thus creates an immersive viewing experience in which the shimmering piece changes constantly with the position of the viewer, with the gold leaf ‘glorious in sunlight and invisible in shade’, as Sarah Lowndes puts it.34 The process is traditional – the design is transferred by cartoon to the wall, first size (adhesive) is applied, and then the small squares of gold leaf.
The artwork is painted over when the exhibition run is finished. Wright is interested in value but not in ‘things’: ‘These paintings may take several weeks to make and often do not survive as long after they are completed. Perhaps there is an element of sacrifice in this but really this approach stemmed more from other thoughts: from the feeling that there are too many things and from the desire that painting should become part of everything else.’35 The Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui also responds to the glut of things in the global consumer society: he fashions glittering, monumental tapestries out of cast-off bottlecaps and aluminium cans. The power of art appears in this almost alchemical transmutation of everyday waste into a kind of gold. Incidentally, Anatsui practices something very much like what Alberti argued for in the fifteenth century: to create the appearance of gold artfully, using ordinary materials rather than the precious substance itself.
