Paintings In the West, the style was usual in
Italo-Byzantine icon-style paintings from the 13th century onwards, inspired by the Byzantine icons reaching Europe after the
Sack of Constantinople in 1204. These soon developed into the
polyptych wooden-framed
altarpiece, which also usually used the gold ground style, especially in Italy. By the end of the century, increased numbers of Italian frescos were developing naturalistic backgrounds, as well as effects of mass and depth. This trend began to spread to
panel paintings, although many still used the golden backgrounds until well into the 14th century, and indeed beyond, especially in more conservative centres such as
Venice and
Siena, and for major altarpieces.
Lorenzo Monaco, who died about 1424, represents "the final gasp of gold-ground brilliance in Florentine art". In
Early Netherlandish painting the gold ground style was initially used, as in the
Seilern Triptych of c. 1425 by
Robert Campin, but a few years later his
Mérode Altarpiece is given a famously detailed naturalistic setting. The "near-elimination of gold backgrounds began in early Netherlandish painting around the mid-1420s", and was fairly rapid, with some exceptions like
Rogier van der Weyden's
Medici Altarpiece, which was probably painted after 1450, perhaps for an Italian patron who requested the earlier style. , lunette with
Michelangelo,
staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, 1880s, gold paint. By the late 15th century the style represented a deliberate archaism, which was sometimes still used. The Roman painter
Antoniazzo Romano and his workshop continued to use it into the first years of the 16th century, as he "made a speciality of repainting or interpreting older images, or generating new
cult images with an archaic flavor",
Carlo Crivelli (died c. 1495), who for much of his career worked for relatively provincial patrons in the
Marche region, also made late use of the style, to achieve sophisticated effects.
Joos van Cleve painted a gold ground
Salvator Mundi in 1516–18 (now
Louvre).
Albrecht Altdorfer's
Crucifixion of c. 1520 in
Budapest is a very late example, that also "reprises an iconographic type (the "Crucifixion with Crowd") and a non-naturalistic approach to space long out of fashion." '',
George Stubbs, c. 1762 In later periods of European art, the style was sometimes revived, usually just with gold paint. In 1762
George Stubbs painted three compositions with racehorses on a blank gold or honey background, much the largest being
Whistlejacket (now
National Gallery). All were for their owner,
the Marquess of Rockingham, who may have suggested the idea. Given his passion for "the turf", there was possibly a joke on his high regard for the horses. In the 19th century the style became popular for church paintings in
Gothic Revival architecture, and was used for ceilings or smaller high up
lunettes in large public or church buildings, loosely recalling Byzantine precedents, reflecting the light and also saving the trouble of painting backgrounds. The
paintings in the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in
Vienna by
Hans Makart (1881–84) are one example of many. Another are the ceiling paintings
Lord Leighton painted (exhibited
Royal Academy 1886) for the
Manhattan home of
Henry Marquand, which he insisted use a painted gold ground rather than the "sylvan setting" the patron wanted for the figures, from classical mythology, saying in an interview: "if you look into it you will find it a luminous surface…. Viewing the pictures from this point you get a brilliant effect, like the brightness of day upon it; if from the other side you observe the light resolves itself into the rich, warm glow of the setting sun".
Gustav Klimt's "Golden Phase" lasted from about 1898 and 1911, and included some his best-known paintings, including
The Kiss (1907–08), the
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), and the
frieze in the
Stoclet Palace (1905–11). The last was designed by Klimt and executed in mosaic by
Leopold Forstner, an artist who did much work in mosaic including gold. Apparently Klimt's interest in the style intensified after a visit to Ravenna in 1903, where his companion said that "the mosaics made an immense, decisive impression on him". He used large amounts of gold leaf and gold paint in a variety of ways, for the clothes of his subjects as well as the backgrounds. File:The Crucifixion MET DP328370.jpg|14th-century Italian
Crucifixion by
Allegretto Nuzi; much of the gold leaf has worn away, revealing the red bole below. File:Antoniazzo Romano - Virgin and Child with Donor - Google Art Project.jpg|
Antoniazzo Romano, Virgin and Child with
donor portrait, c. 1480 File:Erato by Frederic Leighton.jpg|
Erato, by
Lord Leighton, 1886, one of a ceiling set for
Henry Marquand File:Gustav Klimt 046.jpg|
Gustav Klimt,
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) File:Musée du quai Branly Peintures des lointains René Piot Danseuse cambodgienne 03012019 6364.jpg|
Cambodian Dancer, 1922, by
René Piot, gold leaf and
tempera Cretan school '' by
Theodore Poulakis (d. 1692), after a Western engraving Paintings of the
Cretan School in Crete and the Ionian Islands, known as the
Maniera Greca in the West, continued using gold backgrounds in works largely for export to the West. Most Italian painters adopted oil painting, abandoning the egg
tempera technique.
Giorgio Vasari's famous book
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects commented on the Greek technique unfavourably.
Maniera Greca was one of the first post-classical European terms for
style in art. The technique was used from 1400 to 1830s in both the
Cretan School and the
Heptanese School.
Michael Damaskinos began to mix
Venetian painting and the traditional Greek Italian Byzantine painting style. The technique became an important component of the Cretan School. Gilded backgrounds were important to the painters but they escaped tradition by adopting modern Italian painting techniques. By the 1600s, painters began to adopt variations to their painting styles. During the mid 1600s Greek painters in the Venetian world used a version of the Flemish artistic style. While continuing the tradition of the gilded background they painted works featuring complex three-dimensional figures.
Theodore Poulakis integrated the gilded technique in most of his modernized paintings, one example was his work entitled ''
Noah's Ark''. Clearly, the painter intentionally replaces the sky in his work with gold sheet while maintaining the modern Flemish painting style escaping the Greek Italian Byzantine tradition. Another painter who emulated
Titian's work was
Stephanos Tzangarolas. Tzangarolas used
Madonna Col Bambino as his inspiration to paint
Virgin Glykofilousa with the Akathist Hymn. The gold-gilded background exults the theological figures into a supreme realm. Each biblical story in the painting is backed in gold. The traditional style is often continued in the Greek world until today. File:The Crucifixion (Paleokapas).png|
The Crucifixion by
Konstantinos Paleokapas, 1640 File:Virgin of the Passion by E.Tzanfournaris.jpg|
Virgin of the Passion by
Emmanuel Tzanfournaris, Early 1600s File:Stephanos Tzangarolas Virgin and Child.png|
Virgin Glykofilousa with the Akathist Hymn by
Stephanos Tzangarolas, 1700
Japanese painting ,
Cypress Trees, folding screen, c. 1590, with gold leaf In
Azuchi–Momoyama period Japan (1568–1600), the style became used in the large folding screens (
byōbu) in the
shiro or castles of the
daimyo families by the late 16th century. The subjects included landscapes, birds and animals, and some crowded scenes from literature, or of everyday life. These were used in the rooms used for entertaining guests, while those for the family tended to use screens with ink and some colours. Gold leaf squares were used on paper, with their edges sometimes left visible. These rooms had rather small windows, and the gold reflected light into the room; ceilings might be decorated the same way. The full background might be in gold leaf, or sometimes just the clouds in the sky. The
Rinpa school made extensive use of gold ground. In
Kano Eitoku's
Cypress Trees screen (c. 1590), most of the "sky" behind the trees is gold, but the coloured areas of the foreground and the distant mountain peaks show that this gold is intended to represent a mountain mist. The immediate foreground surface is also a duller gold. Alternatively, backgrounds could be painted with a thin gold wash, allowing for more variation in effect in landscapes. The style was not so suitable for Japanese
scroll paintings, which were often kept rolled up. Some smaller wooden panels were given gold leaf backgrounds.
Mosaics , portal mosaic, 13th-century It was only in the 1st and 2nd centuries that wall, as opposed to floor, mosaics became common in the Greco-Roman world, at first for damp tombs and
nymphea, before being used in religious settings by the late 4th century. At first they were concentrated on or around the
apse and sanctuary behind the main altar. It was found that "by careful lighting, they seemed not to enclose but to enlarge the space which they surrounded". One of the earliest surviving groups of gold-ground mosaics, from before about 440, is in
Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, on the "triumphal arch" and nave (the apse mosaics are much later), although those in the nave are placed too high to be seen clearly. The amount of gold background varies between scenes, and is often mixed with architectural settings, blue skies, and other elements. Later, mosaic became "the vehicle of choice for conveying the truth of Orthodox beliefs", as well as "the imperial medium par excellence". The traditional view, now challenged by some scholars, is that patterns of mosaic use spread from the court workshops of
Constantinople, from which teams were sometimes despatched to other parts of the empire, or beyond as diplomatic gifts, and that their involvement can be deduced from the relatively higher quality of their production.
Manuscripts from the
Golden Haggadah, c. 1320–1330,
Catalonia, with Gothic patterned tooling. Technically, the term
illuminated manuscript is limited to manuscripts whose pages are embellished with metals, of which gold is the most common. However, in modern usage manuscripts with miniatures and initials only using other colours are normally covered by the term. In manuscripts gold was used in the larger letters and borders as much as for a full background to miniatures. Typically only a few pages made much use of it, and those were usually at the front of the book, or marking a major new section, for example the start of each
gospel in a
Gospel Book. In Western Europe the use of gold grounds on a large scale is mostly found either in the most sumptuous royal or imperial manuscripts in earlier periods such as
Ottonian art, or towards the end of the
Middle Ages, when gold became more widely available. The 14th-century
Golden Haggadah in the
British Library has a prefatory cycle of 14 miniatures of biblical subjects on gold ground tooled with a regular pattern, as was also typical in luxury Christian illumination at this period, as well as using gold letters for major headings. Gold was used in manuscripts in Persia, India and Tibet, for text, in miniatures and borders. In Persia it was used as a background to text, typically with a plain "bubble" left around the letters. In Tibet, as well as China, Japan and
Burma, it was used to form the letters or characters of the text, in all cases for especially important or luxurious manuscripts, usually of Buddhist texts, and often using paper dyed blue for a good contrast. In Tibet it became, relatively late, used as a background colour for images, restricted to some subjects only. In India it was mostly used in borders, or in elements of images, such as the sky; this is especially common in the showy style of
Deccan painting.
Mughal miniatures may have beautifully painted landscape and animal borders painted on gold on a background of a similar colour. Gold flecks might also be added during the making of the paper. ==Gallery==