Gilding

Gilding is a technique whereby a surface is coated with gold leaf or gold powder.

Besides solid gold, gilding was a very popular form of decoration as far back as late antiquity.

Four thousand years ago, gold leaf beaters were already hammering out gold in Mesopotamia. Their hammers weighed five kilos and the gold to be beaten was wrapped in leather, later parchment. Thus the surface of the gold became much larger and the gold thinner and harder. The hammered-out fine gold was then cut into pieces of equal size and heated in order to soften it up again. When the cut and layered gold leaves were thin enough, they were put in between layers of ?goldbeater skin? which is the thin exterior layer of an ox?s gut, and beaten with lighter hammers. This procedure was continued until the required thickness of gold had been attained.

There are several different techniques for gilding with gold leaf, e.g. as a lacquer or burnished gold, on paintings, on wood carvings, as oil-based gilding on rough surfaces and in the open air as mordent gilding on an egg basis or wax basis, on murals and on paper.

 Bronze gilding is often used in mural painting whereby a mixture of gold dust and a binding agent is painted using a fine brush. In order to obtain the decorative golden shimmer it is necessary to paint an undercoat, usually in red or orange.