Gilding

Gilding is the craft of covering a surface with gold — most often as gold leaf, beaten so thin it is nearly translucent, laid down and burnished to a mirror brilliance. In Western painting it is bound up above all with the medieval and early Renaissance panel, whose gold grounds gave sacred figures a shimmering, otherworldly setting that seems to glow with its own light.

The traditional method, water gilding, is exacting. The wooden panel is prepared with layers of gesso, then with bole — a fine, usually red clay — which is wetted so the gold leaf adheres and can be burnished against its smooth cushion to a high shine. The red of the bole often glows faintly through worn gold, and skilled gilders tooled the surface with punches and incised patterns to catch the light, so that a gold ground in candlelight would flicker and move. Halos, borders and ornaments were elaborated this way into miniature works of relief.

As Renaissance painters turned toward naturalistic space and atmospheric depth, the flat gold ground gradually gave way to painted skies and landscapes, and gilding migrated largely to the frame, where it has remained a standard of finish ever since. But gold leaf never disappeared from the painter's repertory, returning prominently in the decorative art of Gustav Klimt's golden period.

To appreciate gilding, imagine the object in its original setting — not under even gallery lights but in the moving glow of candle and lamp, where the burnished and tooled gold was designed to come alive.

Written by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery · Further reading on Wikipedia ↗