The first Christmas gift is gold, given to the young Christ child in his stable.
There are golden objects however through the National Gallery's collection.
From golden apples, to golden fleeces and golden vessels,
the National Gallery is full of stories about gold.
In the early part of our collection from the early
Renaissance works the most regular place in which we'll find the act of
gift-giving going on is in paintings depicting the moment of the Adoration
of the Magi. The moment that painters normally choose to depict is the moment
in which these gifts are given over.
Vincenzo Foppa’s 'The Adoration of the Kings'
was painted in the early 1500s and we see in the painting the kings
surrounded by a retinue of courtiers, pageboys; we see a pageboy adjusting the spurred
footwear of one of the kings. We also see a pageboy holding the crown of one of the kings.
Some of the gold details that we see are much more vivid
and more plastic in their appearance.
They are rendered using pastiglia where
the artists build up the surface first to create a 3D effect, before then
putting gold leaf over the top.
So today these gold elements really pop out to us and they would have been
very impressive when the painting was first made.
But today they seem to stand out even more because of the way in which the
rest of the painted surface has degraded over time and that is thanks to this use
of pastiglia where it really creates a 3D effect and the gold can really shine out to us today.
In Rubens's 'Judgement of Paris' we see our protagonist Paris at
the right hand side of the picture, and in his hand he's holding a golden apple.
So there was a dispute between the gods at a wedding, of all places, as to
who was the most beautiful goddess and the three goddesses we see in the
picture; Venus, Minerva and Juno very, very much wanted to be crowned the most beautiful goddess.
Venus, the goddess of love, offers Paris the love of the most
beautiful women in the world if he'll give her the golden apple.
Minerva, the goddess of war and wisdom, promises Paris victory in battle
and Juno, the queen of the Gods, offers him land and riches.
Paris is in the process of making his decision. He's awarding the golden apple to the
fairest goddess and he's chosen to give it to Venus, the goddess of love, and so
he's reaching forward to pass the apple over to her.
The apple isn't actually the most standout shiny part of the painting. There are a quite a number of other
precious metal elements to the painting that start over on the left with the
armour and very particularly the shield of Minerva, also some of Venus's jewellery
and the tie that attaches the quiver of arrows to Cupid.
One of the modern figures of Christmas
is Father Christmas and he is universally recognised as the person who
delivers gifts to our houses, often down a chimney. He derives almost entirely
deliberately from America but his antecedents is very much
Saint Nicholas of Bari who was a 4th century
Christian cleric in what's now Turkey. Saint Nicholas of Bari came across a nobleman
who was impoverished who had three daughters. So Nicholas decides that he's
going to help them. This story is represented in a painting in
the National Gallery by Girolamo Macchietti and the painting shows him, rather
fabulously, about throw a gold ball through a latticed window, and in the
room there are three girls asleep and the father also asleep.
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is not really
that well represented in art, but there is, at the moment, in the Sainsbury Wing
of the National Gallery, a really fabulous version of this subject by the
Florentine artist Bartolomeo di Giovanni. Jason the hero from mythology
embarks in a ship called the Argo with his crew, the Argonauts, and they head for
the ancient kingdom of Colchis because they want to seize the legendary Golden Fleece
which had magical powers. A repeated figure here is Jason who is
seen getting off the Argo on the left-hand side of the picture, dining
with the king of Colchis in the centre of the picture, and then fulfilling a
series of challenges on the right-hand side of the picture, before he finally
seizes and runs off with not just a Golden Fleece but a whole golden ram.
The entire surface is punctuated with tiny flecks of gold: in the armour, in the
architecture, in the clothing that some of the figures are wearing even in the
food that's being served.
My favourite painting the collection, in terms of the depiction of gold objects,
is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting
of the Adoration of the Magi. The most interesting gift in this painting is
the gift presented by Balthazar. What he holds in his hand
is a green nautilus-like shell which has been encased in gold and transformed
into a ship. This kind of gift is indicative of the taste of a wealthy
contemporary patron.
So gold manifests itself in a number of different ways and
with a number of different meanings. One thing you can be certain of, where
gold is used in a picture is that there's going to be some kind of
reference to power, wealth, and status.