Gilding is the craft of covering a surface with real gold. The metal is beaten into a leaf so thin that fingers would tear it, so the gilder lifts it with a soft brush and presses it onto a prepared panel, wall, frame or page.
In painting, gilding made the gold backgrounds, halos and borders of medieval and early Renaissance altarpieces, the painted panels that stood above church altars.
The name of the craft goes back to the Old English gyldan, "to cover with a thin layer of gold," a verb built on the word for gold itself.
Almost every step of that craft can be seen on one small altarpiece, the Wilton Diptych. It was painted in the late 1390s for King Richard II of England, and it hangs today in London's National Gallery.
A diptych is two panels joined by hinges, which open and close like a book. Closed, the Wilton Diptych shows its outer faces, painted with a shield and a white stag. Open, it shows King Richard kneeling on the left panel and the Virgin and Child, surrounded by angels, on the right.
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Painters went to the trouble of using real gold because paint could not do what gold does. Yellow paint can imitate the color, but a leaf of metal reflects the light around it. On an altar lit by candles, the gilded halos and robes of the holy figures caught the flames and glowed against the dark church.
The metal also lasts. Silver darkens with time, while gold does not tarnish. In the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, the heavenly city is built of pure gold, so a metal that never lost its shine seemed fit for the worship of God.
Laid behind the figures, a ground of gold came to stand for the light of heaven itself. The saints in front of it belong to no earthly room or landscape.
Gilding ruled the altarpieces of the fourteenth century and slowly gave way in the fifteenth, as painters began to set their figures under real skies. Before that change, it reached its peak in Tuscany, the region of central Italy around Florence, in Florence itself and in its rival Siena, to the south.
The gold grounds of Siena and Florence
The painters of Siena made the gold ground their specialty. On one of their altarpieces, the gold even carries the words an angel speaks.
What You'll Discover
How thin a leaf of gold really is.
Why a painter polished gold with a tooth.
Why one painting holds two kinds of gold.
Where a painter hid gold under red paint.
The writer who told painters to drop gold.
Who brought gold leaf back in Vienna.