Gold Leaf and Gilding

About

Gold leaf is gold beaten so thin that it glows green against the light. In water gilding the leaf goes onto layers of gesso and coloured clay called bole and is then burnished with agate to a metallic shine; oil gilding, laid on a tacky varnish, gives a softer, matt gleam.

Many cultures used gold to signal the sacred and the precious. Byzantine mosaicists set gold-backed glass cubes into church vaults, and medieval Italian panel painters tooled halos with punches so they sparkled in candlelight. In Japan, artists of the Momoyama and Edo periods covered folding screens in gold leaf, against which Tawaraya Sōtatsu set his Wind God and Thunder God in the early 17th century. Yves Klein later covered panels in gold for his Monogold works of the early 1960s. Look for the faint grid of overlapping squares and red bole where gold has worn thin.