Gold is considered a divinely valuable material in nearly every culture on earth, and luckily for artists, it’s extremely malleable. Gold leafing is the practice of hammering out extremely thin sheets of gold, down to .1 or .2 microns, and using it to coat objects, or apply to an image, and artists and craftsmen have been doing it for millennia. Ancient Egyptians lined their pharaoh’s tombs with gold leaf. Greek sculptors clothed statues in gold garments and armed them with gold-leafed swords, medieval monks emblazoned hand-copied bibles with gold-leaf illustrations, and more recent artists like Gustav Klimt added gold to their paintings for that glossy hint of the divine.
