Gold is everywhere in The National Gallery. It's in the frames that surround
the pictures, it's in the costumes worn by the people in the paintings, it's in
the objects they hold and, if we go back to the earliest pictures in the
collection, the paintings themselves are actually made of gold.
Gold symbolises the fact that these are superior beings who do not belong in our world but who
occupy a higher realm. The gold can also be understood to reflect the purity of
the Virgin and the purity of the Christ child, because gold was understood to be
a particularly pure medium. Artists were very skilled at convincing us that we
were looking at objects of solid gold, when actually they were using a piece of
wood with some gold leaf on top. The techniques that they use to create this
illusion include burnishing or working the surface or building it up with all
types of relief, but it's extraordinary the variety of effects that this has.
When people see paintings by Duccio or 'The Wilton Diptych', they are in a sense
miraculously well preserved when you think of how old they are, but they
certainly don't, however fresh they may seem to us, look
like they did when they left the artist's easel, and that's because their
intention was to create works that looked like gigantic pieces of
goldsmith's work. That gilded background which is now matte was once deeply
burnished and gleaming like a solid block of gold.
This is a painting known as 'The Wilton Diptych' and it was made for King Richard II
of England at the end of the 14th century, and we can see him with three
saints behind him praying to the Virgin and Child who are surrounded by eleven
angels in this beautiful flowery meadow. It uses an immense amount of gold in all
kinds of extraordinary techniques. There are immensely detailed patterns made
with tiny little punches, and then there is a sense of texture, we can see that
particularly perhaps around Richard's crown and collar where there are little
dots of paint raised up to look as though they're pearls. When the painting
was closed up to be carried the first thing you would see is Richard’s badge of
the White Stag which is partly painted, but the antlers are created in this
beautiful gold stipple technique. For anyone who wants to understand how these
panel paintings were made with their gilding, we have one absolutely
fundamental source which is a manuscript written down by an artist called
Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, and he wrote down all the recipes and secrets of his craft.
You can use this manuscript to reconstruct techniques and you come up
with something that looks reasonably like an old painting. And our Scientific
Department too, have used this to look at the samples from very old paintings to
confirm that this is indeed the sort of thing that was done. One of the key tools that
we have at our disposal in the
Scientific Department is a high powered scanning electron microscope which we
can use to investigate the gold in paintings in more detail and it's
particularly useful for investigating the different types of metal leaf that artists used.
We gradually build up an impression of how the artists worked
and what effects they were trying to achieve.
We set out to make a reconstruction of their techniques
following always Cennini’s guide. So there were lots of stages working its
way up to the beautifully smooth gesso. You're then ready to draw your design on
the panel. It's very important if you're going to be doing gilding and
painting to separate the two because you do the gilding before you do the
painting. Therefore you have to have drawn your figure on the panel.
So there's four different main techniques for applying the gold, the first is
called water gilding and they would use this for the large expanses of gold in
the backgrounds, by first applying soft red brown clay.
The red is also an advantage because gold leaf is very, very thin
and if you lay it over red it will make it look rich and deep,
and then you can start to apply the thin gold leaf.
These were then burnished or polished to a very very high sheen, and these could
then be decorated in a multitude of different ways. Another way of producing
a similar effect was a technique called mordant gilding, and this was done by making
an adhesive mixing oil with pigments so you created a very sort of sticky
mixture, and then you'd put your gold leaf on top, and it would only stick in
the parts where there was a pattern on the gold. The mordant gilding is beautifully
demonstrated in The National Gallery collection by Duccio’s paintings, for
example, his wonderful 'Virgin and Child'. In paintings such as this the gold
ground is used to denote the heavenly realm and the divine sphere. A work such
as this was probably a domestic altarpiece used within the home,
lit solely by candles, and so you have to imagine this whole gold background
shimmering and moving under the light of that flickering candle. The effect of
lighting a painting like this would have really drawn your attention to it,
because it would have almost be as if it was emanating light itself, as if the
panel was alive with light.
So this altarpiece, which is from the workshop of
Jacopo di Cione, is a very good example of mordant gilding, which you can
see here in the lavishly decorated robes of both Christ and the Virgin and also
in the backdrop behind them, in the robes of the saints at their feet and in many
of the Saints in the left hand and the right hand panel. Artists quite often
depicted cloth of gold draperies and there are several different ways of
achieving those effects. One of them's called sgraffito and you
would start with a water gilding technique, and then you'd apply paint onto the
surface of the gold and then you could carefully scratch away the paint in a
pattern, revealing the gold beneath. One of the most gorgeous uses of sgraffito
in an Italian painting in The National Gallery’s collection is Nardo di Cione’s
'Three Saints'. The elaborate carpet on which they’re standing, is all done using this
technique of scraping away the tempera. Another way was to use something called
shell gold and this was gold that had been ground up into a powder and then
mixed with egg to make a paint, and then you could
paint on very very fine lines of gold in a much more painterly manner.
Andrea Mantegna was a painter who very much liked to use shell gold, and a really good
example is our altarpiece of 'The Virgin and Child with Saints'. The area where
Mantegna has used gold really to the most astonishing effect is in the Virgin's
dress, where he's put tiny feathered strokes of shell gold on the Virgin's
shoulder, creating this sort of shimmering effect of shot silk.
So the backgrounds of paintings were often decorated with a relief pattern called pastiglia.
A very good example of the use of pastiglia, this raised decoration
using the gesso, is in Jacopo di Cione’s 'Crucifixion' altarpiece where the
predella, but also the sides and the canopy of the frame are all decorated with pastiglia.
Another way of doing this, which is the way that the artist Michael
Pacher used, is to actually carve into the gesso and to make the pattern that
way, and he's done this in the background of his 'Virgin and Child with Saints'.
He's used a black bole and this gives the gold a different color because the gold
leaf is so thin that the color on which you apply it actually does influence its appearance.