gyldan

Gyldan comes from Old English gold, from Proto-Germanic gulþą. To gild is to cover with gold. The practice is older than the word: Egyptian sarcophagi from 2500 BCE were gilded. The technique requires beating gold into leaf so thin it is translucent — a troy ounce of gold can be beaten into roughly 100 square feet of leaf, at a thickness of about 0.1 micrometers. The gold is real. The abundance is an illusion.

Medieval and Renaissance gilding was a guild-controlled craft. In Florence, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (guild of doctors and apothecaries) governed gold-leaf workers. Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte (1390) devotes multiple chapters to gilding techniques: water gilding, oil gilding, mordant gilding. The gold leaf was applied to altarpieces, manuscript illuminations, and frescoes. The gold backgrounds of Byzantine and early Italian panel paintings — the gold ground that makes saints glow — were gilded, not painted. The light that bounces off a gilded surface is real reflected light, not a painter's approximation of it.

The word 'gild' gave English two idioms that say everything about the technique's relationship to truth. 'To gild the lily' (from Shakespeare's King John, actually 'to gild refined gold') means to add unnecessary decoration. 'All that glitters is not gold' (Merchant of Venice) warns that a gold surface may hide a different material underneath. Both idioms use gilding as a metaphor for deception. The craft's purpose — making things look golden — became the English language's standard metaphor for beautiful dishonesty.

Modern gilding uses the same technique. The dome of the Iowa State Capitol, regilded in 1998, used 100 ounces of 23-karat gold leaf. The process took two months and cost $400,000. The original gilding from 1886 had lasted 112 years. A hundred ounces of gold, beaten impossibly thin, covering a dome the size of a building. The material is precious. The layer is almost nothing.