GILDED GESSO

Like most people, I have a great weakness for gold, from pre-Columbian jewellery and German luxury items, to neoclassical, giltwood panelled rooms. I also love the gilded gesso on early renaissance devotional pictures, like these saints from the predella of a 1450’s altarpiece in Perugia, their names and haloes punched in. 

A mid 15thC cassone wedding-chest has friezes entirely in gilded gesso, with only the figures’ skin and men’s hair painted, everything else in very low relief and drawn with punches in a rich vocabulary of marks and patterns. The whole design, with clothes and armour, architecture and furnishings, writhing floral background, women’s elaborate hairstyles and a tiny, yapping dog, feels to me like a vivid, gilded dream.

St Elisabeth of Hungary, left above, in her chapel in the lower church at Assisi, was painted with another saint c. 1317 by Simone Martini, with slightly raised, concave haloes modeled in plaster and covered in gilded gesso. St Elisabeth points at the panel above, in which Virgin and Child have similar haloes in relief against an entire gilded ground simulating cloth of gold, with a complex woven design. In Urbino, below, the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista has frescoes completed in 1416 by the Salimbeni brothers with these bustling crowd scenes full of vivid period detail and, probably, portraits of members of the oratory’s fraternity. Again, the haloes, like those of the densely-packed group of saints and the angels flying above them, bottom picture, are in relief and gilded. A morning visit to this hall, with sunlight catching those gold discs, is truly magical.