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(Left) the soffit of the
Baptistery dome in
Florence gleams as if the
mundane sky had opened
to reveal the infinite
space of heaven
(Above right) theCa d'Oro
or golden house in Venice,
the facade of which was
originally covered with
gold leaf, was completed
in 1430.1n this 1897
painting by Jose Moreno
Carbonero it glows as
if restored to its
original splendour
(Below right) the Golden
Rock in Myanmar is
venerated with the
application of gold
leaf, but only by male
worshippers: women are
not permitted access'
Froin pagodas to the lavatory,
architecture's Inost precious
Inaterial is rich in Ineaning,
says Tom Wilkinson
hen we are victorious on a world scale', Lenin wrote in
1921, 'I think we shall use gold for t he purpose of building
public lavatories.' With this startling proposition,
t he revolut ionary attempted to imagine t he profound
transformation t hat would be wrought in value by the transition to
communism. Nothing, to his mind, could demonstrate this more strikingly
than the draining of splendour from gold, a kind of reverse alchemy
perpetrated by the proletariat that would encompass not just the world
economy but also, by extension, the realm of architecture. For gold,
when it had previously been used in building, had been the preserve
of the church - in Russia, one thinks immediately of St Basil's - and the
aristocracy. We are still waiting for these Midases to lose their golden
touch, but this does not mean the architectural demonstration
of splendour has remained unchanged over the centuries.
The Greeks gave us the Golden Ratio; the Romans, t he Domus Aurea -
t hat's one simple-mindedly binary way of plotting t hese modulations,
perpetuating the idea that architecture is essentially spatial and that
anything else is gilding t he lily. But, while the Golden Ratio was
formulated by t he Greeks, the notion that it underlay t heir greatest hits
(and everything in the canon since) is a mid-19th-century invention.
And while Nero's notorious D omus Aurea, or 'golden house',
was decorated richly enough (think gilded mosaics on t he ceiling) to win
it t hat nickname, it was also, thanks to the 'concrete revolution' that
occurred under Nero's rule, composed of rooms of unprecedented spatial
richness. So hn..'lll'y can clearly be as spatial as it is material - perhaps
increasingly so, as a glance at rightmove.co.uk might suggest.
Nevertheless, following on from t his suspicion of Roman decaden ce,
t he use of gold in art and architecture has been seen as an essentially
Byzantine (and therefore 'oriental') technique for t he production of
n on-perspectival space. The backgrounds of icons and apsidal mosaics,
like t hose in Ravenna and Istanbul, open a luminous window into t he
etern al, whereas, following Giotto, the flat space of t he painting plane
was, using perspective, transformed into an illusionistic reproduction
of earthly space. One is produced with geometry an d hnrn ble paint,
t he other with superstition and gilded glass - so runs t he saw.
There is clearly a significant historical association b etween gold
and spiritual power. This equation rests, at least partly, on the essential
and unchanging material properties of gold: on practical considerations
such as its longevity and t he possibility of producing extremely fine
leaf that can be applied to surfaces of great complexity, but also,
and perhaps more importantly, on its apparent ability to emit light. •