The Story Of Gold-Ancient Origins - Stories In Colour Podcast Gold Ep1 - National Gallery

They say a fool and his gold are soon parted but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all. That's from Stephen Fry's Troy the Greek myths reimagined. Welcome back to Stories in Colour a podcast from the National Gallery in London uncovering the mysteries of colour in culture art and history. Do make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any episodes. And welcome to the first in this our new mini-series we're telling the story of a rare sparkling and glistening colour. It's been called the tears of the gods the sweat of the Sun a universal language and a barbaric relic and it's had a profound impact on the history of art. The colour and material we're talking about today is gold. I'm Bex Leary from the digital department here at the Gallery and to help us look at this topic I am joined by Nellie Von Adekas. Nellie is a conservation scientist here at the National Gallery and she has a background in chemistry and paintings conservation. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining us. So this topic of gold I'm so excited to get into this because it's an amazing material and there is a whole story about it becoming a colour in art and so we'll have to start at the very beginning to look at it as a material. So what is it about the chemistry of gold that makes it so precious? Well gold's amazing. It's an element and it's found in its elemental form. It's on the periodic table so it has atomic number 79 and it sits between platinum and mercury and it's a metal and so other metals that you might know are copper, silver, platinum, mercury and these all have a few properties in common. They all tend to be great conductors of electricity and heat. They all have high melting points so they tend to be solid at room temperature. They're all quite malleable and they're shiny. Not all of them have every single one of these. Mercury for instance is liquid at room temperature but gold is great at all of these. It is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. It has been used as a material to make superconductors which are materials which conduct heat and electricity without any resistance at all so it's very cool. It also has a high melting point which is 1064 degrees Celsius which means that if you heat it up to that degree you can then melt it down and then reform it into other things. But from our perspective at the National Gallery it has two particular properties which make it really special for us. It is very malleable. In fact it is the most malleable of the metals and it allows it to be used as a material in paintings. What does exactly the malleability mean about the material? It means that it's really soft and workable so you can hammer it down and you can take a block of gold and without, I mean it does take hammering, but you can turn that into a really small material. You can beat it out into thin sheets of foil and then you can beat those down even further until they become thin leaves of gold that's what they're called. And so if you put gold leaf onto paintings you can create amazing golden effects. You can use it for large-scale sort of gold backgrounds. In the backgrounds of many of our paintings we have these they look like they're painted on a solid block of gold. And then you have lots of lovely intricate details that are also done with gold leaf. The second property which is great about gold is that it is inert, meaning that it doesn't react. Basically gold keeps its luster and its color. It does scratch easily because of the malleability that I mentioned earlier but it doesn't fade and it doesn't oxidize. This is amazing when you look at a collection like the one that we have here at the National Gallery. These golden pictures they might abrade a bit but they actually look quite similar to what they originally have looked like. So gold shines forever and ever and ever. It does yeah. Doesn't really change over time. Not really. And this is actually not a property that other metals have. So if you think about it copper corrodes, iron rusts and silver in particular is very prone to oxidation. And if you have any silver objects in your home you'll know that if you just leave them they will lose their shine and they'll start to tarnish unless you polish them. And I just mentioned that the National Gallery has lots of pictures that are covered in gold and we actually have a few that have silver on them as well. Should we look at a quick example? There's a work that's sort of had both used in it isn't it? We can kind of compare how they've lasted. So the Crucifixion by Jacopo di Cioni from around 1369 to 70 is what we've just been talking about. A gold ground painting or a devotional altarpiece work and depicts a scene of the Crucifixion of Christ. But yeah what's interesting about this work from the kind of perspective of gold and silver? It's got many different types of gilding on it so it's got many different techniques of gold. But to give you a contrast of what gold and silver look like over time it's worth looking at the soldiers in this picture who are not the stars of this painting. But there are quite a few soldiers in here and they have these little helmets and little spears and they're all done in silver. And while the gold on this picture still looks incredible it really does. I urge you to go see it if you haven't seen it it's wonderful. But the silver on it actually looks quite greyish brownish. It's pretty unremarkable and that is because it has tarnished quite badly. And there's not really much we can do about that in terms of restoration or anything? No there's nothing that can be done about that. It is what it is. So they recede into the background. The soldiers are grey soldiers. But the gold is still spectacular. So you've described to us kind of chemically what's so special about gold. But where do we find gold and how does it get here? How does it get to earth as well? It comes from the heavens of course. Where else? It comes from the merger or collisions of neutron stars. This is thought to be the primary source of gold on earth. It does also come from the collisions of supernovas. These collide and then form these really heavy metals which are then blown into space. And then I saw one geologist refer to earth as being salted with meteorites which I thought was very charming. And we have these veins of gold in Earth's crust and our gold is coming from dead stars. It's very beautiful. It is. Basically you can get gold out of the earth through fairly extractive methods. It is quite rare and quite difficult to get. It's extracted mostly by large-scale mining. You can take gold from ores that are removed from the earth. So pit mining. And there's another technique called gold cyanidation. This uses a sort of complex chemical reaction which involves cyanide to extract gold from the ore into a solution. You can also pan for gold which is basically where you look in riverbeds and streams and you take the gravel from the bottom and you sift it in a pan and the heaviest sort of rocks and things like that come to the bottom and that is where you will find your gold. This is the image I kind of have of the kind of quintessential gold rush. Panning. You can see that it was very attractive to a lot of people because you needed almost no financial outlay to do this. You just needed a certain type of pan and you could go do it for yourself and if you found the gold then obviously the rewards were enormous but not many people did. And we should of course note that gold mining, like many kinds of mining, is a very difficult and hazardous and dangerous process and has not been the most ethically conducted of processes through history. But is gold kind of localised around the world or is it quite kind of evenly spread around? Gold is actually pretty rare. I mean we talk an awful lot about gold and it occupies a large part of our cultural space but gold is actually quite hard to find and quite difficult to extract. Its rarity is of course tied to its value but it also occupies this strange place in our financial systems which is also something that you know requires its own podcast and probably does. And at the time of recording gold is valued at just under 2,500 pounds per ounce which is a lot. But yeah it is a finite resource and there isn't a ton of it so once it's mined from the earth that is that is it. But there's good news it is endlessly reusable so you know one's gold earrings or rings will have come from someone else's candlesticks or I don't know gold coins and I think there's something kind of comforting about that. There's a sort of golden thread that goes through time which is nice. And I guess there's also a downside to the fact that you can melt it down in that you can kind of almost you know if there's an artistic object that has been made you can lose all sense of that original object and transport it or break it down by melting it. And if you come back for our third episode in this miniseries we will talk about quite a famous example where this allegedly has happened so make sure you stay tuned for that. Let's talk a little bit now about why we call gold, gold. Because it's an interesting transition from gold in ancient times and the wording for how it's used and then how it slowly becomes referred to as a colour term. So remind us what the chemical symbol for gold is. It's AU. Yes so this comes from the Latin word Aurora which means dawn and which refers to the Roman goddess of dawn who announces the coming of the sun god Helios by riding across the sky in a chariot of light and her light is said to dispel darkness and bring hope and renewal. So her brother is Helios the sun god and then her sister is actually Luna the moon god. And then in ancient Rome gold was referred to in Latin as Aurum. So Aurum is kind of loosely translated as glowing dawn and when we look at the root of the English word gold we have to go back to the Proto-Indo-European root gel and that means to shine or yellow. So I guess these things kind of like dawn, yellow, shining they all kind of make sense and then you get an old English term and then meaning yellow and then that evolves into gold that we get today. But it's not until probably the late 14th century kind of accounts differ a little bit that we start using gold or golden actually as a colour term. So rather than it just being like referring to the metal it's actually being used as a colour and etymologists think that it sort of first starts being used to refer to people's blonde hair so like golden locks as a phrase. And if then we kind of run forward into 20th, 21st century we can start thinking of when does gold kind of become a digital colour and or how does it become a kind of digital colour because I think this one's a bit interesting because you kind of have to pick a shade of yellow because obviously with like a colour picker on a you know if you have like a hex code for a digital colour on a computer screen or a phone screen it's not going to shine like the real gold. No you wouldn't get gold. No exactly but there is an official Pantone colour categorised which is number 871 and there is an official hex code which is FFD 700 for gold. But I always find this a little confusing I guess because on screen you just can't capture the reality of gold can you? You do sort of need the shine and the reflecting nature of it and also it kind of as a colour it doesn't sit still for me it does sort of change a bit as the light hits it. So yeah I think that that's really an interesting concept but I love that there that they've pinned it down. Absolutely. So this is a good point for us to take a break we've kind of looked at a little bit at the chemistry and the naming of gold and after the break we're going to get into some ancient civilization history and thinking about their use of gold. Welcome back from the break. So we're going to look at an ancient civilization now that is renowned for its use of gold which is of course the ancient Egyptians. So the Egyptians were very lucky they found gold everywhere. Their territory had hundreds of deposits of gold. They were amazing at extracting it technologically they had huge teams of men and so they can be thought of as the world's first great gold producing state and of course then as now their methods of extracting gold mining were pretty exploitative. But their metalwork smiths began creating gold objects as early as the pre-dynastic period so that's the fourth millennium BC and that's before the Egyptians had even established a written language. So they were very early gold adopters in their own culture and they had particular associations with gold and you know you might be able to imagine or expect these associations but they really did associate gold with divinity, divine power, immortality, the eternal and that's due to all the chemical properties Nellie that you were describing before. So the fact that it doesn't tarnish or rust with time for them makes it this quite magical substance. It gleams like the sun I mean you know. Absolutely and they do associate it with their sun god Ra and it was also considered to be like the skin of their gods and goddesses as well and it was usually reserved exclusively for the use of kings and then perhaps nobles or royal family members. Actually it's interesting that you mentioned that about the sort of it being their skin and things like that because when you look at a lot of the coffins that come out of Egypt, so these are made out of wood and then as you sort of move into the Roman and Greek periods they are they become more like cartonnage coffins. Cartonnage is a kind of wrapping made of plaster covered linen but they are meant to look like the people who are being buried and they are shaped there and they're called anthropoid coffins and the faces are often gilded and so are the hands and it's used very much for emphasis. And by gilded we mean covered in gold. We mean covered in gold leaf and so they were already making gold leaf at this time and they were using it in a really sophisticated and very specific way. There is also a sort of subset of these coffins which is interesting as well which start in the New Kingdom. We get something called yellow coffins and this is around the 19th to 20th dynasties which is approximately 1290 to 1070 BC and these yeah they're called yellow coffins for a reason. They are very yellow and golden and this comes from a really thin wash of a pigment called orpiment and it's rich and yellow and kind of sparkling and then this is covered with a thick varnish layer and this creates a really lovely golden effect and this has actually only become much deeper and more golden with time because the varnish naturally just becomes darker and darker and this combination has been thought of as a substitute for gold it represents gold. Okay yeah so we think they're using this pigment as a representative of the real gold material. As a stand-in for gold yeah and we have quite a few here in the UK and they really are golden it's very amazing to look at. You worked on some of them in a previous role didn't you? I did I worked with a few of them at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and they are absolutely beautiful. So I guess perhaps the most famous archaeological discovery of golden items is the discovery of Tutankhamun. Many of you may know the story of Tutankhamun's tomb. So Tutankhamun known as the Boy King was a king of ancient Egypt around 1332 to 1323 BC and it was estimated that he died around the age of 18 or 19 so we're not entirely certain when or why he died but it's believed that malaria might have contributed to his early death. His tomb was in or is in the Valley of the Kings. Lots of archaeological digs been happening there for many years through the 19th century into the early 20th century and lots of these tombs lots of them get plundered lots of them have robberies and so most of the ones that archaeologists are discovering you know later into the 19th century and into the early 20th century most of them aren't that intact they're discovering some things. So what was so special about the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings was that it was almost completely intact which was unlike any of the others that had been discovered in the Valley of the Kings. It was completely sealed wasn't it? Absolutely and so it's an Englishman called Howard Carter who went to Egypt in search of gold who found this tomb on the 26th of November 1922. Yeah just obviously a really significant discovery. There's an audio recording of him discovering he says everywhere the glint of gold and the most astounding object I think that they found is the golden mask of King Tutankhamun which is huge and solid gold over 10 kilograms of gold. This is a heavy object and inlaid with lapis lazuli which is a semi-precious rock we will talk about in later episodes. But just an absolutely stunning work it has obsidian in it has turquoise and it really does try to capture the face of this young king who has died and you know amongst all of the other objects that he was buried with the gold isn't really a statement of wealth that we might expect it to be. He believed like we talked about that gold was magical and he hoped that the gold and all the gold things that he was buried with would give him a bit of eternity like an immortal son which is amazing. It's incredible. I've seen it's been said by Nicholas Reeves who's an Egyptologist that this is perhaps the best-known object from ancient Egypt itself and I think he's right it's just so iconic everybody knows this mask but it is difficult to appreciate just how singular it is. Totally. Another object found in the tomb was Tutankhamun's nesting coffins which might not be as well known so there are three coffins the inner coffin in which the mummy is actually housed is solid gold and then the two outer coffins are made of gilded wood so we talked a little bit about gilding but do you want to explain a bit more like what the difference is between the solid gold coffin and then the gilded ones and the gold beating process to get us there? Yeah of course. So yeah the solid gold coffin is what it sounds like it is pure metal that has been formed into that shape and actually the innermost coffin for Tutankhamun weighs approximately a hundred and ten kilograms which is a lot of gold. That's just that's kind of hard to get my head around actually. Now gilding on the other hand is the practice of putting down gold leaf onto a surface to make it look like solid gold and so Egyptian coffins did this quite a lot. They would use gold leaf on top of layers of plaster or layers of chalk to yeah to create lovely golden effects. Gilding sort of relies on this property of malleability of gold to create gold leaf and which is just done by beating gold till it's thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner and then you can place it on top of surfaces and then burnish it till it makes a lovely shine. This is a very skilled craft. It goes way back to the ancient Egyptians and it continues on into the medieval period in Europe and it comes on until today even. When it's done very well it is extremely effective and really does look like shining gold. It really can trick you into thinking that something is a solid gold object. Absolutely. It's only a very very thin layer. And we have countless examples in our own collection here at the National Gallery of pictures that really do look like they are carved out of solid gold and they are a very very thin layer of gold placed on top of plaster or gesso. A very economic way of using it. So if we compare kind of ancient cultures, ancient Egypt with now you're saying that a lot of the processes are quite similar. So how do people get the gold so thin? What's the process that gets us there? Well it is the softness and manipulability if that's a word of gold that makes it possible to create gold leaf. So you can hammer any metal really thin but most metals have a point at which they become too brittle to go any further. Okay so they would like break up as you... Exactly. They would more or less turn to dust. Whereas gold, it is the most malleable of all the metals and you can kind of do this infinitely. It's possible to hammer gold so thin that it is semi-transparent. Wow. I mean it's pretty much at the atomic level. It is crazy. And it stays intact. It does. Yeah it does. It is absolutely crazy. So basically it is very labor-intensive work to hammer gold and the ancient Egyptians have lots of records of them doing this and it's a skill that continues on through time and effectively once you get small pieces of gold you place a small square of thin metal between two layers of parchment and then you create a stack with several other sandwiches like this into a little block. So you're layering them up you're showing me with your hands. Yes I'm sorry. I'm layering sort of sandwiches of gold in small pieces of gold in between pieces of parchment up into a little block and then you secure them in place and you hammer them with big mallet until the gold reaches the edges of those parchment paper and then what you do is you take them out you cut them smaller you put them into new pieces of new parchment sandwiches make a new block and you repeat and you do this again and again until the gold leaf gets thinner and thinner and thinner. And to make the thinnest kind of gold leaf you need the parchment to be replaced with material that's known as gold beater skin which is a kind of membrane that's made from animal guts. And presumably mostly that's all been done by hand through history but are there any tools or it hasn't been mechanized at all? Well actually Leonardo da Vinci invented a device to make gold beating easier. This is one of his most famous inventions was a device for metal beating. Well we think it was made for gold beating there's certainly an association there and it's a very early example of sort of mechanization industrial sort of machines. There is no evidence that he actually put it into practice but it was very influential and it certainly stretched into the industrial era. If he had put into practice how would it have worked? So it's quite simple it's got a sort of a handle a thing called a cam and a hammer and a cam is a sort of asymmetrical wheel and it sort of looks a little bit like a comma if you can picture a comma. So it's got a kind of asymmetrically circular shape that kind of goes up and the hammer is able to trace the edge of that which raises it up and then it comes to the abrupt edge of the comma which instead of rounding off has a sheer drop and that drops the hammer and all of this is attached to a handle and allows you to turn it around and around again and again and make the hammer raise and fall raise and fall on top of your gold. And we should say Leonardo da Vinci whose work you can see in the National Gallery was born in 1452 and died in 1519 and was an artist and scientist and inventor and sort of polymath the maybe originator of the multi-hyphenate career. So yes today what are we doing to get these gold leaves how do we hammer it down today? Well today the process is largely done by machines and I have actually seen a source declare that the craft of gold beading is actually extinct in the UK. Really? Yeah so there's nobody who is actively practicing manual gold beading anymore. Oh that's kind of sad. It is yeah I would love to hear if any of our listeners. Yes please tell us. I would love to know but while it is now met largely mechanized the actual process of gold beading is actually really similar to what it has been from the ancient Egyptians right till now. It does still require extremely skilled people to to work this whole process. So nowadays what happens is that the freshly melted gold passes through rollers to make it nice and thin and small squares from this rolled gold get put into parchment sandwiches just like it would have in previous times. That stack of parchment and gold gets put into a stack and gets hammered by a hammering machine. It's actually remarkably similar. It is. The power is not coming from a human hand it's coming from a machine. Exactly and the stage is repeated at each stage it's transferred from one set of parchment cut and then moved to a new set and that's done by really fine finely dexterous people. I was watching videos of this and I was just blown away by how difficult that must be but how they make it look so easy. And yeah the stage is repeated until the gold is thin enough and the result of this largely mechanized process is that gold leaf nowadays is substantially thinner than it was in the medieval period or with the Egyptians. And we can see a really neat example of this if we read a passage in Chinino Chinini's 14th century book which is a sort of just he has lots of descriptions of how you gild things. And there he describes that you can pick up the gold leaf with quote tweezers or small pincers. And this is just simply not possible with modern gold leaf. It is it's not because it's too thin. It is it's too thin. It is so thin that it flies on the air. If you're working with gold leaf and someone walks past you the gold is very likely to lift off your table. So how are we picking it up today? We have to use a thing called a gilder's tip. You can't touch it with your hands the gold because it will stick to any oils on your hands. So a gilder's tip is a flat brush. It's about a hand span wide and it has very fine squirrel hair. And so you use that to gently pick up the gold leaf and to place it wherever it is that you're using it. And it just grabs by the hair? It just uses basically static to pick it up and to put it on to if you're gilding a frame or something like that to place it where it is using the gold. And then presumably there needs to be quite a lot of preparation to even get to the point that you're picking up the gold and putting it on to something. So yes could you tell us a bit about that? And I think and Chinini who you just mentioned he has a kind of recipe for how this is all done. Yeah so probably should tell you a little bit about Chinino Chinini. He wrote a book called and apologies for my Italian. This was probably written in the late 1390s and just for context the printing press was invented in the West in 1440. So this is about 50 years before that. And in English it's known as the craftsman's handbook and it's still in print today which is incredible. And it was written in Florence for quote the use and good and profit of anyone who wants to enter this profession. The profession being a painter. And it's very much a how-to guide on how to make paintings in Italy at the turn of the 15th century. It not only tells you how to apply like a ground layer or animal skin glue or gold or bowl to a painting but it also gives you tips on how to live your life as a as a respectable painter at this time. It's very sweet. And so he talks an awful lot about how to prepare a panel painting for instance for the application of gold. Panel being it's made on wood. Yes of course. So like a in Italy at that time was very likely to be popular and if you were more into northern Europe you'd use a lot more things like oak. So a panel to prepare it for gold for the application of gold requires you to put down layers of animal skin glue and then layers of material called gesso which is a type of calcium sulfate. And you have different levels of hydration that you use at different stages but basically you combine these in such a way and sand them down in such a way that the surface is smooth like ivory. It's a very complex process and it yeah the final product is silky white clay. It's lovely. And to test it you can put graphite powder on it and it comes straight off. And if the graphite powder sticks to any of the sort of divots or lumps then you need to keep going. Wait so it's not smooth enough if the powder sticks basically? Yeah basically. And so then you would then apply a layer of a material called bole which is a sort of clay material. It's got a lot of slip to it. If you run it through your hands it's very silky and slippy. It's often a red iron oxide kind of material but you can get it in slightly different colors as well. And you put that down on the surface where you're going to be putting your gold. And when that dries it's very shiny and kind of has a nice space for you to put your gold onto. And then if you're water gilding this is the point at which you would add a thin layer of water to your surface and then place your gold leaf on top of it. So the bole dries? Yes. And then you add water? You add a thin layer of water yeah. Tiny bit of water. It's basically to get your gold to stick to that. And so it like makes the bole sticky again so that the gold can stick? It gives a sort of surface for it to stick on to yeah. And so then when it dries you can then burnish that gold and that you use a stone and actually Cianino Cianini has a whole list of animal teeth that he recommends for this purpose. And you then basically make it nice and flat and it comes out really shiny. So the burnishing adds pressure through your stone or tooth? Yes. And that's what makes it shiny? Exactly. It makes it sort of localized kind of polishing basically. And when you've done that if you've done it well it will look like a solid block of gold. So that's water gilding. Water gilding. And are there other types of gilding? Yeah there's quite a few. You can take water gilding and you can manipulate it further. You can add incised lines or punch marks or other sorts of tool marks. You can make halos with a compass. And these all again rely on this malleability of gold. The ability that you can kind of dent it very quickly and easily. And this will create lovely sparkling effects. You can make a thing called pastillia by modifying your gesso at the beginning. So making it into sort of three dimensional shapes before you add your bowl. And then that way when you put the gold on it will make this sort of relief which will stick out at you. But you can also use gold in different ways completely. You can use a thing called mordant gilding. And this is generally done after you've applied paint to the surface. So say you have a painting of the Virgin's robes and you have this lovely blue folds. You can then run a line of mordant which is a very it's oil paint with some dryers added to it to make it slightly to dry faster. And when it has just the right amount of stickiness to it you put the gold leaf on it and then brush away the excess. And the gold will stick to the line of paint that you've made in the mordant. So I feel like this is a much more sophisticated version of when you teach children to sort of paint some glue on a picture and then put glitter on it. Exactly. I have a three-year-old so I'm quite acquainted with this particular craft so yes. But obviously much more sophisticated. Yeah. And then you can also take that gold leaf and you can grind it up and mix it with oil paint and turn it into a pigment in and of itself. And this is known as shell gold. Why is it called shell gold? It's typically done in shells. That's what it says on the tin. And now you mentioned that gold tends to be a reddish colour. Does the red, can you see the red through the gold? Because obviously the gold is really thin. The red bowl actually lends a lot of what we consider like a golden glow to gold when you see it in pictures. Because the gold is very thin if you put white behind it you actually get a slightly different effect than if you were to put red or yellow behind it. So you get this sort of optical addition to your colour if you can see what I mean. And over time again coming back to this concept that I'm gonna keep hammering home, this malleability of gold. You do get scratches in the gold over time but actually having little glimpses of red or yellow as it comes through your your painting is actually not a terrible thing. It sort of lends to the warmth of the picture. Beautiful. Now is a great time for us to take another break. So we've been to ancient Egypt and made some amazing discoveries and then we've come all the way through to the 14th century in Italy for a guide to gilding. After the break we will start thinking a bit more about our collection of paintings in the Western European tradition. Welcome back from the break and now we're gonna have a look at some stories from some other ancient civilizations and their figures associated with gold. I say some other obviously the medieval period not being ancient. We're going back into ancient times now. So let's think about the Midas. The Midas touch. So there's a theme June isn't there that people might know this phrase from. I'm not gonna sing it I'm sorry. But it does come into Goldfinger from the Bond movie. Shirley Bassey sings to great effect where she refers to Goldfinger as the man with the Midas touch. So what's the legend? What is the story with gold? So King Midas I can tell you very abbreviated version of the story as I understand it. Which is that he was a king and he hosted some a member of Dionysus's entourage a sort of minor deity who turns up at his house and King Midas's generosity is such that he stays there for a substantial amount of time and then when he's reunited with Dionysus, Dionysus offers Midas a reward and Midas asks for the ability to everything he touched to turn to gold and it's sort of this classic gift is an actual curse kind of situations where Dionysus is all too happy to grant this gift to King Midas which then of true immediately and everything he touches does turn to gold which is very exciting for a very short period of time until of course he touches his wife and daughter and turns them both to gold. Very dramatic. And then of course can't eat anything, can't touch anything, can't drink, can't yeah. So this is where we start getting yeah as you said a very typical story associated with gold which is that it's like a blessing and a curse it's beautiful associated with divinity but also associated with greed and we should say that you might be familiar with the Midas story from Stephen Fry's popular mythos the Greek myths were told obviously originally it's a Greco-Roman mythology. It's written Ovid's Metamorphoses I think? Yes, yes comes up in Ovid and the quote that we referred to at the start of the episode was Stephen Fry on gold so that is an amazing book to dive into and there's a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that depicts this story it's called Midas washing at the source of the Pactolus by Nicolas Poussin around painted around 1627 and so Poussin probably a painter familiar to many of our listeners being well represented in the National Gallery's collection and you can tell from this painting that it has been a popular subject for artists so Midas wanting to reverse his wish that had ultimately become a curse and Bacchus instructs Midas to wash in the Pactolus River. Bacchus and Dionysus being the same god depending on whether or not you are talking about the Romans or the Greeks. Yes very good clarification there thank you. So yeah in the painting we can see Midas as a smaller humbled figure behind a classical representation of the reclining river god. And Midas does reverse his fortunes and he does he washes the statues the gold statues of his wife and daughter in the river and is reunited with his wife and child again. There's a happy ending. So yeah we see that associated through history don't we time and time again about gold being associated with greed and particularly with dragons. Oh my goodness dragons and gold. Tell us some dragons and gold stories. Well I can think of a few just just thinking off the top of my head the Hobbit of course has a gold as a dragon that not only guards gold but loves gold. So the Hobbit being the J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien's story published in 1937 I have here and obviously famously made into films by Peter Jackson. And I believe that the dragon is called Smaug. This also comes up in Beowulf where there is also a dragon who is guarding a large treasure of gold and of course there is Jason and his Argonauts which comes again from Ovid's Metamorphoses where Jason is sent to accomplish a whole series of tasks so that he may reclaim his kingdom which has been taken from him. And the final task is for him to conquer a dragon who's never sleeping and is guarding the Golden Fleece. And Jason and the Golden Fleece also is in ancient Greek epic poem Argonautica Polonius of Rhodes written in the third century BC. So there yeah they're on the hunt for the Rams golden fleece. And we have another painting we can reference here which is the Capture of the Golden Fleece by Jean-Francois de Troy from 1742 to 3. And as you mentioned this painter actually used the Ovid's Metamorphoses source of the story for his painting. So in this picture you can see Jason having conquered the dragon holding up the Golden Fleece and it's this beautiful golden wool of this slaughtered ram but it's also the same shade of gold as his armor that he's wearing there. And the way that he gets around the dragon is actually through the help of Medea who is King Aeti's daughter who puts the dragon to sleep through magic basically. And Jason gets his fleece. Here the artist hasn't actually used any gold this is all gold represented by the artist he's painted it with a whole different array of pigments. Yeah there's no real gold it's yellows and browns and whites used to capture gold. But it's produced a great effect I mean it does the golden. And yes this leads us into the story of gold becoming a color as I guess we talked about with the etymology at the start of the episode. We also get this kind of journey through artists and painters transferring from using real gold in their works to depicting gold through paint. And I guess one of the most famous examples of gold and greed might be in the Bible or the Torah depending on whether you're looking at the Jewish or Christian tradition. But the painting that we can use to reference the story is the Adoration of the Golden Calf by Nicholas Poussin. So back to Poussin a famous 17th century painter. This was painted in 1633 to 4. And this story from the book of Exodus it's Moses at the center of it so there's a large gathering of Israelites who are worshipping a life-size statue of a golden calf or it's actually a bull which represents the Egyptian bull god Apis. And so they have very simply decided to worship a different pagan god while their leader has been away. So while Moses has been away on Mount Sinai collecting the stone tablets on which God writes the Ten Commandments so his laws about how his people should be living and honoring him. And this painting by Poussin a very famous one in our collection you get almost this distraction of the revelry of all of these people who are very brightly lit so all the Israelites the crowds they're dancing around this golden calf. It's quite stormy sky. You might think of that as kind of a pathetic fallacy for the darkness actually of what is happening. And Moses is very hidden almost in the background. He's very small. And I think that might almost be the point that actually the most important thing here happening is the Moses story with the Ten Commandments. But the people have been distracted and so we the viewer have also been distracted by this revelry going on in the foreground. I have to say that's entirely how I read this picture initially. I was completely taken in by it being such a joyful painting. And then I was like oh no that's not what's happening here at all. And then I guess we get gold but riches picked up again as being associated with greed sinfulness. So Jesus says in Matthew chapter 19 24 I'll say it again it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. But you do also get gold associated with divinity in the Bible often through for example descriptions for how the temple should be designed. But that's a whole nother story which we don't have time to go into today. So we will close the episode with a question from the audience which came in through YouTube which Nellie I think you are gonna be very well placed to answer. Which is how is yellow gold converted into different colors for jewelry? Ah well so gold is frequently alloyed with other metals to alter its properties. Alloyed is basically putting two metals together. So in this case gold with some other kind of metal. So we don't actually use gold on its own like pure gold all that often. It's quite an attractive idea but again gold is very soft. But it is possible to change that by adding in another metal and mixing them together basically to make it harder. But you can also do this to change its color. So as you say pure metal is yellow in color and incidentally it is one of only two colored pure metals. Gold is yellow and copper is a red-brown color. And we measure like the purity of gold on a carat scale. So if it's completely pure and unadulterated and yellow it is 24 carat. And you can alloy gold with zinc, copper, nickel, pretty much anything that is also a metal. And white gold tends to be alloyed with platinum or palladium. Rose gold is with copper and so it gets that red color in there. Makes sense. There's also a little bit of silver in there as well. And green gold is a combination of gold silver and copper. Green gold? Green gold there is such a thing yeah. Me neither actually. But yeah alloying it with any metal will help with the softness that pure gold has because you can imagine that if you have a very soft ring for instance that would be very prone to dents and scratches and that's not a desirable quality in a piece of jewelry. Okay so when people are looking for a gold ring or something they might want to consider actually just how pure the gold they want to be is because actually it might get softer and then dent more easily or bend more easily. Exactly. So very pure gold is very valuable but less sturdy. Don't say we don't give you practical tips on this podcast. So that brings us to the end of our first episode in our sparkling gold miniseries of Stories in Colour. Make sure as we said at the beginning that you've subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss out on the next episodes on gold which will explore how artists have made devotional works glisten. I'm gonna dive even more into that and how contemporary artists have tested the limits of the colour and the material. We would absolutely love it if you could drop us a rating and a review wherever you are listening or watching and you can also explore lots more on the subject of gold in paintings on the National Gallery's YouTube channel including a fabulous video with Nellie herself and an amazing woman called Isabella from our framing department. If you've got more questions about the story of colour in art and culture and how it's interacted with human history you can email us we are on podcast at nationalgallery.org.uk or you can send us questions via our social media channels just mention the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of Stories in Colour with huge thanks to our guest Nellie Von Adegast. Thank you so much for having me I had so much fun. Thanks for being here. I've been your host Bex Leary, our producer is Harry Rosehill, our researcher was Hannah Rogers, our technicians were Ian Warren and Timothy Carpenter, our video producer was Jeanne Kenyon. With huge thanks to the whole scientific team at the National Gallery and thank you very much for listening.