Gentile and Gold Ground

Journal of early
modern history 23 (2019) 191-226

brill.com/jemh
Points on a Field: Gentile da Fabriano and

Gold Ground
David Young Kim

University of Pennsylvania
[email protected]
Abstract
This essay considers gold grounds in early Renaissance panel painting as sites of the
possible, here understood in the word’s double meaning as artistic power and mimetic
potential. After examining how gold ground in art historiography is depicted as a zone
oscillating between worldliness and otherworldliness, the discussion focuses on the
process and meaning of gold ground in Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte (c. 1390) and
Gentile da Fabriano’s Virgin and Child (c. 1405, Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’umbria),
with focus placed on the technique of granulation (opus punctorium). Also explored
is how gold money and gold pictures exist in a relationship of exchange and mutual
reinforcement, both depending on the faculty of sight to recognize them as bearers of
value. Gold ground unfolds a spectrum of material, medial, perceptual, and devotional
possibilities, which facilitates continuous passage between worlds, artisanal and cli-
matic, pictorial and metallurgical, physical and ethereal.
Keywords
Cennino Cennini – Gentile da Fabriano – gold – gold ground – granulation

groundwork – malleability – opus punctorium
…
Si vous aviez vécu autant que moi vous sauriez qu’il n’est qu’une seule
chose matérielle dont la valeur soit assez certaine pour qu’un homme
s’en occupe. Cette chose … c’est L’OR. L’or représente toutes les forces
humaines … l’or contient tout en germe, et donne tout en réalité.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15700658-12342636

Downloaded from Brill.com11/14/2020 11:58:00AM
via University of New South Wales
192 Kim
If you had lived as much as I have, you would know that there is only one
sole material thing whose value is sufficiently certain for a man to bother
with it. This thing … is GOLD. Gold represents all human forces. … Gold
contains the germ of everything, and, in reality, it gives everything.
Honoré de Balzac, Gobseck (1830/1842)
∵
Introduction
The world opens itself up to the individual willing to seek it. So declares
the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in his germinal account Die Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien (1860). Part IV of the book, entitled “The Discovery of
the World and of Man,” begins with a sentence that is long, ponderous, and tri-
umphant in tone: “Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe
checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development
and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned
to the discovery of the outward universe, and to the representation of it in
speech and form.”1 Burckhardt does not go on to discuss at any length how
works of art might exemplify the dichotomy between medieval imprisonment
on one hand, and on the other, Renaissance freedom. Yet he does confront this
set of polarities in his other writings, for instance, in his extended essay “Das
Altarbild” (The Altarpiece), composed toward the end of his life and published
posthumously in 1898. Here Burckhardt sets painting on gold ground—panels
covered and decorated with gold leaf—against the Renaissance picture’s open-
ness and spatial unity. “The altarpiece,” he states, “now completely released
from gold ground, has been the birthplace of true air, and true clouds in paint-
ing.” Liberation from gold ground leads landscape to a “so beautiful and festive
existence (Dasein).”2 The notion of existence in this context is not put in rela-
tion with metaphysical thought or rapturous wonder, as it was in the writings
1 Jakob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel, 1860), 280-82;
and Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by
S. G. C. Middlemore (London, 1878), 285. On Burckhardt’s borrowing of the formulation “The
Discovery of the World and of Man” from Jules Michelet, see Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, A New
Kind of History and Other Essays, trans. K. Folca (New York, 1973), 261ff.
2 Jacob Burckhardt, Das Altarbild. Das Porträt in der Malerei. Die Sammler, vol. 6, ed. Stella von
Boch (Basel, 2000), 44-45: “das Altarblatt, jetzt voellig vom Goldgrund losgesprochen (mit
einzelnen seltenen Ausnahmen bei Mariotto Albertinelli), ist die Geburtsstaette der wahren
Journal of early modern history 23 (2019) 191-226

Points on a Field: Gentile da Fabriano and Gold Ground 193
of Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.3 Instead, Burkhardt lo-
cates the evidence and historical emergence of enthusiastic existence in the
background of the Renaissance picture. In the landscapes of such artists as
Francesco Francia, views of nature open up the altarpiece to the world.4 For
Burckhardt, these surpass gold grounds, whose flatness and closure represent
a traditional preoccupation with the other world at the expense of this one
(Figs. 1 and 2) This opposition between gold ground and nature, otherworldli-
ness and worldliness resonate with “Auf Goldgrund” (1860/82), a poem writ-
ten by Burckhardt’s admirer and compatriot Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The
first stanza recounts a journey from gallery to countryside, used as a pretext
to analogize the relationship between the fictive and natural world: “I went
late today to the museum, where the saints, the supplicants stand out against
the gold grounds. Then I strode through the fields, towards the hot glow of the
evening.”5
Whether or not they agreed with Burkhardt that gold ground represented
a limited preoccupation with the present world, cultural historians writing in
the early decades of the twentieth century would reinforce the notion of gold
ground as otherworldly, representing divine light and transcendent space.6
Luft und der wahren Wolken in der Malerei gewesen, ja auch die Landschaft ist nur hier zu
einem so schoenen und feierlichen Dasein gelangt.”
3 Immanuel Kant understood Dasein, literally meaning “being there,” in a dynamic sense. As
opposed to Nichtsein (nonbeing), Dasein is synonymous with the real and actual (wirklich).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe deployed Dasein in ecstatic terms. His presence in 1789 at the
Battle of Valmy, the watershed conflict for the French Revolution, enabled him to say ich war
dabei! (“I was there!”). Pascal David, “Dasein / Existenz,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables. A
Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton, 2014), 195-200.
4 Burckhardt groups Francia along with other artists such as Cosimo Tura, Stefano da Ferrara,
and Lorenzo Costa who place the Virgin Mary on a throne that reveals a landscape view
through an opening in the steps. Burckhardt, Das Altarbild, 45: “Welche Eifer hat zB: die
Schule von Ferrara bethaetigt, als sie sogar die Marienthrone frei auf Stuetzen schweben
liess, um unter denselben noch einen landschaftlichen Ausblick zu gewinnen.”
5 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Gedichte (Leipzig, 1882), 54: “Ins Museum bin zu später/ Stunde
heut ich noch gegangen, / Wo die Heilgen, wo die Beter/Auf den goldnen Gründen pran-
gen./ Dann durchs Feld bin ich geschritten / Heißer Abendglut entgegen, / Sah, die heut das
Korn geschnitten, / Garben auf die Wagen legen.” Notably in his first version of the poem,
Meyer described the painting as having a pale background. For discussion of the various ver-
sions of Meyer’s poem and its relation to a realist aesthetic, see Claudia Stockinger, Das 19.
Jahrhundert: Zeitalter Des Realismus (Berlin, 2010), 105-7.
6 For historiographic discussions of gold ground, see Thomas Zaunschirm, “Die Erfindung Des
Goldgrundes,” in Gold, ed. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Thomas Zaunschirm (Vienna, 2012), 10-
27; Michael Viktor Schwarz, “Goldgrund im Mittelalter—Don’t Ask for the Meaning, Ask for
the Use!’,” Gold, 28-37; and Lauren Jacobi, “Reconsidering the World-system: The Agency and
Material Geography of Gold,” The Globalization of Renaissance Art (Boston, 2017), 129-57.
Journal of early modern history 23 (2019) 191-226Downloaded from Brill.com11/14/2020 11:58:00AM

194 Kim
FIGURE 1
Taddeo Gaddi, Madonna with child and angels,
tempera and gold leaf on wood, 1330-35. UFFIZI,
FLORENCE. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
FIGURE 2
Francesco Francia, Madonna
and Child Enthroned with
Saints Lawrence and Jerome,
oil and tempera on can-
vas, 1490. HERMITAGE,
ST. PETERSBURG. bpk
Bildagentur / Hermitage / Roman
Beniaminson / Art Resource, NY.

Alois Riegl in Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) described Byzantine gold

mosaic as an “ideal spatial ground.”7 The Danish art historian Julius Lange
(Ausgewählte Schriften, 1912) claimed that gold ground in certain instances pre-
sented “a picture of God’s kingdom, the fire of heavenly love.”8 Writing in the
wake of the October Revolution, the Russian Orthodox priest and polymath
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky described gold ground in Byzantine icons as in-
timating the vision of an invisible world through molten metal.9 Otto Spengler
propagated the numinous connotations of gold ground in his popular book
of world history The Decline of the West (1918). For Spengler, gold ground “is
an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit … For a
thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one
metaphysically—and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations
of the Christian legend.”10 Ensuing scholarship would reiterate this notion
of gold ground as an “echo of Paradise,” “timeless space,” or a “field of divine
immanence.”11
7 Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome, 1985), 12-13; and Riegl, Die
Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn, 2 vols (Vienna, 1901),
1:8: “Der Goldgrund der byzantinischen Mosaiken hingegen, der den Hintergrund im
allgemeinen ausschliesst und damit zunaechst einen Rueckschritt zu bezeichen scheint,
ist nicht mehr Grundebene, sonder idealer Raumgrund, welche die abendlaendischen
Voelker in der Folge mit realen Dingen bevoelkern und in die unendliche Tiefe ausdehnen
konnten.”
8 Julius Lange, “Et blad af koloritens historie (1893),” in Udvalgte Skrifter af Julius Lange,
ed. Georg Brandes and P Købke (Copenhagen, 1901), 136-56, here 145: “En udelukkende
symbolsk Betydning har Guldglansen i Helgenglorien, der jo er som en udskaaret Del af
en hel Guldgrund, det vil sige af den himmelske Glans, der følger de hellige ogsaa paa
Jorden som Betegnelse af deres Værdighed. Dog har Guldgrunden i Middelalderens Kunst
ikke alene Betydning af Empyreet i en stor Mængde Tilfælde træder den i Stedet for den
jordiske Luft idet de enkelte Ting og Figurer paa Billedet ere malede med naturlige Farver
medens alt det som den senere Kunst vilde male som Luft er gengivet ved Forgyldning.”
9 Pavel Aleksandrovič Florenskij, Die Ikonostase. Urbild und Grenzerlebnis im Revolutionären
Russland, trans. Ulrich Werner (Stuttgart, 1988), 138: “Aber es gibt nicht nur eine sicht-
bare Welt—und sei es für den vergeistigten Blick—, sondern auch eine unsichtbare, die
Göttliche Gnade, die wie geschmolzenes Metall in vergöttlichter Realität dahinströmt.”
10 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Vol. 1 Form and Actuality, trans. Charles Francis
Atkinson (New York, 1926), 248. Note also the implications Spengler draws from the grad-
ual disappearance of gold ground: “When ‘natural’ backgrounds, with their blue-green
heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early Gothic, they had at
first the appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they
implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with
which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared
not exhibit.”
11 Wolfgang Schöne, Über das Licht in der Malerei (Berlin, 1954), 25; Wolfgang Braunfels,
“Nimbus Und Goldgrund,” in Das Muenster 3 (1950): 321-34; and Rico Franses, “When All

196 Kim
Recent scholarship has flipped the coin to explore gold’s worldliness as op-
posed to its otherworldliness. Anne Dunlop proposes that gold ground paint-
ing has the capacity to present “a microcosm of God’s created universe.” When
contained in the field of painting, gold and other precious materials, such as
lapis lazuli, appeared as “materials of an ambiguous and complicated status,
neither fully animate nor inanimate, present and yet tied to a world elsewhere.”12
Gold ground, for instance, might allude to early modern networks of trade and
travel. We can consider King Mansa Musa of Mali as one of the chief protago-
nists in the systems of connection undergirded by gold. Part of the lore about
this ruler surrounded his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-25, when his abundant
distribution and use of gold caused a massive deflation of its value.13 In his de-
scription of Musa’s travels, the historian al-’Umarī wrote that the Malian King
“left his country with 100 loads of gold,” by some estimates approximately sev-
enteen tons.14 The famed Catalan map (1375) shows Musa near the gold mines
of West Africa, wearing a gold crown, holding a scepter, extending in his hand
a large gold nugget toward a Saharan merchant (Fig. 3). Less a figural portrayal,
the image of the West African king functions as an allegory of the source and
sovereignty of gold as a faraway and valuable commodity. As a devout king,
Musa practices charity to such an extent that gold is devaluated: otherworldli-
ness impinges upon worldliness.15
That Is Gold Does Not Glitter: On the Strange History of Looking at Byzantine Art,” in
Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed.
Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Burlington, VT, 2003), 13-24.
12 Anne Dunlop, “Materials, Origins and the Nature of Early Italian Painting,” in Crossing
Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Carlton, 2009),
472-76.
13 Tor A. Benjaminsen and Gunnvor Berge, “Myths of Timbuktu from African El Dorado
to Desertification,” International Journal of Political Economy 34, no. 1 (2004): 31-59; and
S. Nixon, Maria Filomena Guerra, and Thilo Rehren, “New Light on the Early Islamic West
African Gold Trade: Coin Moulds from Tadmekka, Mali,” Antiquity 85 (2011): 1353-68.
14 For estimates of the amount of gold dispensed during Musa’s pilgrimage, see Michael
A Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
(Princeton, 2018), 92-143; and Joseph M. Cuoq, Recueil des sources arabes concernant
l’Afrique Occidentale du VIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1985), 275-79.
15 Mapamundi. The Catalan Atlas of the Year 1375, ed. Georges Grosjean (Dietikon-Zurich,
1978). On the map’s deployment of figural and iconographic conventions to portray
Mansa Musa, see Jean Michel Massing, “Observations and Beliefs: The World of the
‘Catalan Atlas’,” in Studies in Imagery. 2, the World Discovered, ed. Jean Michel Massing
(London, 2007), 1-22; and Rebekka Thissen-Lorenz, “Space, Power, Chart: The Catalan
Atlas (Ca. 1375),” in Representations of Power at the Mediterranean Borders of Europe (12th-
14th Centuries), ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Mirko Vagnoni and Megan Welton (Florence,
2014), 103-17.

FIGURE 3 Attributed to Abraham Cresques, Mansa Musa holding a gold ingot from the
Catalan Atlas, 1375. PARIS, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE.
© BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Translation of the text: This Black lord is called Musa Mali, Lord of the Black
people of Guinea. So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is
the richest and most noble king in all the land.
Alongside conceiving gold as divine symbol or global commodity, a third

vein in the scholarship has stressed gold’s status as a physical substance. As
Cornelius Claussen sees it, the understanding of gold ground as “a sign for tran-
scendence or pious narrow-mindedness,” corresponds more with Romantic
notions of the Middle Ages than with the historical medieval period.16 Ernst
Gombrich already disputed the conventional understanding of gold ground in
his review of Josef Bodonyi’s Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der
spätantiken Bildkomposition (1932/33). Rather than understanding gold ground
as a sign of divine space, Gombrich raised the possibility that these grounds
were essentially “materials, metal, that is to say, in fact: Gold.”17 While Bodonyi
16 Peter Cornelius Claussen, “Goldgrund,” kritische berichte 35, no. 3 (2007): 64-67.
17 Ernst Gombrich, “Review of Josef Bodonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes
in der Spätantiken Bildkomposition (1932/33),” Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen
Literatur 5 (1932/33): 65-76, here 67: “Dann wäre eine weitere Eigenschaft der Goldfarbe
deutlicher hervorgetreten, die der Autor nur streift und auf die O. Pächt den Referenten

198 Kim
and other scholars insist on the otherworldly and unrealistic character of gold
ground, Gombrich suggested that, in opposition, one ought to emphasize
the “Dinghaftigkeit” (thingness) of gold, its weight, prestige, and costliness.18
Along these lines, Ellen Beer, in an article unassumingly entitled “Marginalien
zum Thema Goldgrund” (1983), urged scholars to ask not what gold necessar-
ily meant but what it was. She called for understanding gold as a material—a
precious material to be sure—but a physical substance all the same. Gold’s
“material character,” as Beer phrased it, lent itself to artistic handling as seen in
punch work, incisions, and relief-like effects in manuscript illumination, met-
alwork, and painting.19 More recent primarily German-language contributions
have taken up Beers’ charge, exploring the materiality of gold as it pertains to
the symbolic, aesthetic, and multimedial aspects of mosaics, ivories, textiles,
and frames.20 In the case study at hand, the work of Gentile da Fabriano is seen
as speaking directly to these issues, albeit on a second order, since the plastic-
ity of gold as a material and medium manifests itself in juxtaposition with the
medium of painting and its illusionistic aims.
Stephen Campbell has described how paintings function as “objects in the
world as well as evocations of the world,” staging “the relationship between
representation and physical reality.”21 Gold ground stages one such middle
aufmerksam gemacht hat: daß sie nämlich im eigentlichen Sinne des Wortes keine Farbe
ist, den Farben des Spektrums gleichwertig, sondern Materie, Metall, d. h. eben: Gold.”
18 Gombrich, “Review of Josef Bodonyi,” 61: “Denn während B. und andere den außernatürli-
chen wirklichkeitsfremden Charakter des Goldgrundes im Bilde eindringlich schildern,
dürfen wir auch, polar dazu, seine Dinghaftigkeit betonen.”
19 Ellen J. Beer, “Marginalien zum Thema Goldgrund,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46,
no. 3 (1983): 271-86.
20 Iris Wenderholm, “Aura, Licht und schöner Schein: Wertungen und Umwertungen
des Goldgrunds,” in Geschichten auf Gold: Bilderzählungen in der frühen italienischen
Malerei, ed. Stefan Weppelmann (Berlin, 2005), 100-13; Vera Beyer, Rahmenbestimmungen:
Funktionen von Rahmen bei Goya, Velázquez, van Eyck und Degas (Paderborn, 2008),
187-201; Pia Rudolph, “Goldenes Mittelalter: Zur Verwendung von Gold im Hoch- und
Spätmittelalter aus kunsthistorischer Sicht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des
Goldgrunds,” in Farbe im Mittelalter: Materialität, Medialität, Semantik, ed. Ingrid
Bennewitz and Andrea Schindler, 2 vols (Berlin, 2011), 1: 283-96; Anna Degler and Iris
Wenderholm, eds, “Themenschwerpunkt: Der Wert des Goldes—der Wert der Golde,”
special issue, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 79, no. 4 (2016); and Ivan Drpić, “The Fictive
Mosaics of Medieval Serbia,” in Byzantine Monumental Wall Painting, forthcoming.
21 Stephen Campbell, “On the Importance of Crivelli,” in Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli
of Venice, ed. Stephen Campbell (London, 2015), 10-37, here 25. Elaborating on the work of
Robert Williams, Campbell in particular proposes thinking of painting as a “meta-object”
confronting techne, “the ethical value of craft, labor, and mimetic skill” seen in the related
arts of textiles and metalwork. The present essay emphasizes not so much the effects
and consequences of painting as “meta-techne” but rather where meta-techne emerges,

ground between painting as object and painting as illusion. This concern is not
unique to Gentile, of course. The other possible modalities that gold ground
assumes appear in the work of many fifteenth-century artists, among them,
Carlo Crivelli and Fra Angelico, both the subject of recent exhibitions at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The presence of gold ground in the work
of Fra Angelico invites us to see his work in the context of his activity as a
reliquary painter and manuscript illuminator, wherein gold ground facilitates
the medial dialogue between panel, page, and predella frame.22 Writing on
Crivelli, Alison Wright suggests the artist’s strategic use of gold undermines
the all-too-polarized distinctions between archaic gold ground on one hand
and illusionistic naturalistic painting on the other. Instead, gold ground and
the depiction of gold embroidery in Crivelli’s Madonna of the Swallow (after
1490), for example, work “to forge up-to-date icons or cult objects in which the
divine seems to be at hand.” In them, gold ground fills in the background of the
holy assemblage of figures, while simultaneously, gold brocade hangings act
as adamantly physical things with weight and heft, reflecting light and cast-
ing shadow. In this way, Wright suggests, Crivelli’s handling of gold resolves “a
clash between the object as ‘depicted’ and the material value of gold.”23
When it inhabits the Renaissance picture, gold ground continually inter-
weaves its range of associations: purity, rarity, and incorruptibility along with
chromatic and reflective properties and monetary value. It is, as Thomas
Zaunschirm has described, “a powerful lever which the painter can apply in
a whole variety of ways in order to intensify and structure the perception of
the picture.”24 Gold ground pivots between worlds, material and immaterial,
worldly and otherworldly. This essay explores how this contingent and dy-
namic nature of gold ground is a function of gold’s material behavior, its mal-
leability and ductility. These terms refer to gold’s propensity to be hammered
into thin sheets, stretched in multiple directions, and shaped and indented to
create forms, both thick and thin.
Malleability and ductility, I propose, constitute gold ground as a site of the
possible. In its derivation from Latin, the possible intertwines the ideas of “that
which can be done” and “that which can be.”25 Possum, originally potis sum,
namely in the ground, here understood as both the material substratum and the field of
representation in the Renaissance picture.
22 Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth, ed. Nathaniel E. Silver (London, 2018), 150-70.
23 Alison Wright, “Crivelli’s Divine Materials,” in Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of
Venice, ed. Stephen Campbell (London, 2015), 57-77.
24 Zaunschirm, “Die Erfindung Des Goldgrundes,” 36.
25 Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (Venice, 1612), s. v. “possibile:” “Lat. possibilis.
Quel che può farsi, quel che può essere.”

200 Kim
the verb “to be able,” in the third person becomes “potest”: with a personal
subject, “he is able,” and an impersonal subject, “it is possible.” Hence, the
nouns potestas and potentia and the adjective potens refer to the power that is
required to achieve the possible. Potestas refers primarily to political or legal
power, while potentia refers to ability, authority, or influence.26 In Renaissance
art literature, potentia, its vernacular equivalent, potenza, and the related sub-
stantive potere can denote the power of a creative force, including the artist
himself.27
The second idea of the possible replaces the element of causality with tem-
porality: potentialitas (in the vernacular potenziale or potenzialità) denotes
the state of being “not yet.” Aristotle described “the potential Hermes that the
sculptor perceives in the wood” (Metaphysics, 6.1048a32-33). Here, the artist’s
potentia enables him to see the wood in a state of potentialitas. What I term
“mimetic potential” describes the capacity of gold ground to inflect and achieve
representation on the painting’s material surface. Gold’s plasticity is conducive
to the production of chromatic and physical range. The artist’s power, in turn,
actualizes this mimetic potential.
Gold ground is elaborated as a site of the possible, where the artist’s power
realizes the material’s potential, in two well-known sources: the first is the
so-called Libro dell’arte, composed toward the end of the fourteenth-century
by the artist and writer on art, Cennino Cennini. The second is a gold ground
panel, Madonna and Child with Angels (c. 1405), by Gentile, whose engagement
with gold ground is often read in connection with Cennino’s text. In both of
these sources, gold ground becomes the terrain where the artist can explore
the conditions of the possible, dramatizing not what painting is, or should be,
but rather what it can be and become. Whereas one-point perspective posits a
26 Barbara Cassin, “Dunamis, energeia, entelecheia, and the Aristotelian definition of mo-
tion,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, 344-45; Michael Cole, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and
the Art of the Figure (New Haven, 2014), 1-30; and Frank Fehrenbach has explored the issue
of power and force through numerous publications and his research project Naturbilder
at the University of Hamburg. See most recently his essay “Sfondare: Landschaft als
Kraftraum,” in Kraft, Intensität, Energie, ed. Frank Fehrenbach, Robert Felfe and Karin
Leonhard (Berlin, 2018), 95-121.
27 Vasari, “Ragionamenti di Giorgio Vasari,” in Le opere (Florence, 1832-1838), 1326: “Queste
sono le dieci potenze, o gli attributi, che alcuni danno alla prima intelligenza, che real-
mente concorsono alla creazione dell’universo.” Vasari also uses the noun potere to de-
scribe the power of Michelangelo’s famed Pietà, and by extension, the power of art itself:
“Alla quale opera non pensi mai scultore né artefice raro potere aggiugnere di disegno né
di grazia, né con fatica poter mai di finitezza, pulitezza e di straforare il marmo tanto con
arte quanto Michele Agnolo vi fece, perché si scorge in quella tutto il valore et il potere
dell’arte.” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite …(Florence, 1550), 954.

measurable and contiguous spatial relationship with the viewer, gold ground
introduces a space and a viewing experience that is much more indeterminate.
At the same time, it presents viewers with perceptual and semantic possibili-
ties to grapple with, challenging them to make sense of the represented world
before their eyes.
Gold Ground and Artistic Power
While Cennino’s Libro is often described as a mere “recipe book,” art histori-
cal scholarship has also acknowledged the intellectual ambitions behind this
germinal text.28 Cennino may have even envisioned the work as an art literary
showcase, designed to win the attention of literati and courtiers at the Carrara
court in Padua, where the artist is documented to have been in 1398 and again
in 1401.29 Wolf-Dietrich Löhr sees the Libro and other Trecento art literary evi-
dence as part of the “growing attention for the painter’s practice, his mastery
and transformation of raw materials which serve as material and means.”30
In this view, Cennino represents a movement toward understanding artistic
power (potenza) as the agency that enables the artist’s hand to manipulate and
effect what Löhr calls the “metamorphosis of materials.”31
The material of gold along with its associated technique, gilding, demand
and demonstrate this artistic potency. The perquisite to handling gold leaf was
the ability to procure and properly assess this material. “When you want to
know about gold,” Cennino advises, “have a look when you buy it.”32 He fur-
ther specifies, “Take it from a good goldbeater and have a look at the gold.”33
Here Cennino refers to painters’ commercial relationships with goldbeaters,
specialized artisans with independent workshops who also provided gold and
silver leaf for a variety of purposes. Battiloro in Florence, for instance, were in-
corporated into the Arte di Por Santa Maria, the city’s silk weaving guild. Gold
28 Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven,
1997), 84-90; Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist
(New Haven, 2000), 177; and Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, “Handwerk und Denkwerk des Malers.
Kontexte für Cenninis Theorie der Praxis,” in Fantasie und Handwerk. Cennino Cennini
und die Tradition der Toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco, ed. Wolf-
Dietrich Löhr and Stefan Weppelmann (Munich, 2008), 153-77.
29 Lara Broecke, Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte: A New English Translation and
Commentary with Italian Transcription (London, 2015).
30 Löhr, “Handwerk und Denkwerk des Malers,” 160.
31 Ibid., 159.
32 Broecke, Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte, 174.
33 Ibid.

202 Kim
and silver thread, formed by attaching metallic strips with an adhesive sub-
strate and wrapping them around a core yarn, were integral for the production
of luxurious silk fabrics, such as brocade and raised velvets.34 In Venice, the
complete guild register, or mariégola, for the goldbeaters is unfortunately not
extant, but transcriptions of some of its contents found in other documents
indicate that goldbeaters, referred to variously as batiorii or battiloro, worked
with tiraoro (literally gold pullers) to provide gold leaf to textile weavers,
miniature illuminators, book binders, and leatherworkers.35 Aside from their
professional ties with painters, some goldbeaters were even related to artists:
Sandro Botticelli, who himself trained as a goldsmith, had an older brother
Antonio who owned for some years his own battiloro shop.36 As Cennino
suggests, goldbeaters possessed varying degrees of skill. A woodcut from Jost
Amman’s Book of Trades (1568), albeit a sixteenth-century source from north
of the Alps, offers a period representation of a goldbeater’s workshop (Fig. 4).37
Gold, often supplied in the form of minted coins, such as the Venetian ducat
or the Florentine florin, would be melted and flattened by rollers, emerging as
long strips ready to be cut into squares. The goldbeater then inserted these sec-
tions among parchment leaves, beating repeatedly and forcefully until the gold
achieved microscopic thickness.38 The verses beneath the woodcut describe
how the “Goltschlager” beats silver and gold for the handwork of illuminators
and painters as well as spinning gold into twisted strands for textiles.39
Cennino also addresses how the malleability of gold enables transforma-
tion from coin to artistic material. A Venetian ducat, he observes, can yield
up to one hundred forty-five leaves of gold, though it is better that not more
than one hundred leaves be derived from a single coin, for the sake of qual-
ity control and thicker leaves.40 Gold leaves were sold wholesale in bundles
34 Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), 312, 325,
385, 344-45.
35 Piero Lucchi, “L’ Arte dei ‘Tira’ e ‘Battioro’: sulle tracce della ‘Mariégola’ perduta,” in Con
il legno e con l’oro: la Venezia artigiana degli intagliatori, battiloro e doratori, ed. Giovanni
Caniato (Sommacampagna, 2009), 199-206.
36 Goldthwaite, Economy, 555. On documents attesting to Antonio’s activity as a goldbeater
and his rental of a bottega near the Parte Guelfa, see Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli (Milan,
2005), 18-19.
37 Hans Sachs, A Sixteenth-Century Book of Trades: Das Ständebuch, trans. Theodore K. Rabb
(Palo Alto, 2009), 64-65.
38 For a succinct discussion of the gold leaf application process and its role in period con-
tracts, see Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process
in Renaissance Italy (London, 2005), 49-64.
39 Sachs, Trades, 64-65.
40 Broecke, Cennino, 174.

FIGURE 4
“Der Goltschlager” (The Goldbeater) from Jost
Amman, Das Ständebuch (Frankfurt, 1568).
of one hundred, and extant contracts demonstrate that in certain cases paint-
ers purchased thousands of gold leaves to fulfill their commissions. The gilt
framing components (now lost) for Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks altarpiece, to
mention a particularly notable example, would have required approximately
twenty-thousand gold leaves.41
If gold ground testifies to an artist’s capacity to leverage his professional
contacts outside the studio, it also demonstrates how artists exercised their
ability to make use of gold’s material behavior in the world. Laying down gold
leaf swiftly on the moistened bole demanded expert timing and keen aware-
ness of the studio’s thermal conditions. Cennino recommends that the artist
gild in the winter, when the weather is mild and damp, because winter humid-
ity prevents the moistened bole from drying too quickly. The artist should also
take care that draughts do not blow the gold leaves away. The stone used to
burnish the gold ground should be held to the artist’s chest in order to warm it
and remove dampness. Burnishing too should occur in the winter; in the sum-
mer, he says, the artist should move quickly and “gild one hour, burnish the
41 O’Malley, Business of Art, 56-57.

204 Kim
next.”42 Cennino also provides advice for different weather conditions. “What
if,” he asks, “[the weather] is too cool and something comes up that means gold
ground needs to be burnished?” The panel should be kept “in a place which
experiences some warm currents.” And if too dry? “Keep it in a damp place.”43
Laying gold ground, like fresco painting, is a seasonal endeavor, subject to
the climatic conditions and the artist’s sensitivity to those conditions—hot
or cold, dry or damp. We might say that “pictorial intelligence,” knowing how
pictures are made, look, and work, also entails some degree of environmental
adaptation.44
The malleability of gold itself, its capacity to be hammered, pressed, and
shaped, invites the artist’s potere by opening up the possibilities of different
mark making. To mutate a term from Alfred Gell, gold ground is “tacky”; it at-
tracts techniques, patterns, and effects that remind us of those we see in the
adjacent arts of metalworking and textiles, notably in basins and silks from
North Africa and the Levant.45 Medieval Islamic vessels, such as the basin
made for Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun (d1341), produced in either
Cairo or Damascus 1330-40, were made of base metal and inlaid with silver and
sometimes gold; their gleaming and glittering surfaces seem to have been fash-

43 Ibid., 172. The emphasis on artists’ need to understand the environmental conditions in
which they work continues in the writings of Giorgio Vasari, notably in the Introduction to
the Three Arts of Design that precede the better known Lives. In the case of incorporating
colors in fresco painting, for instance, Vasari aligns the awareness of material properties,
moisture, and rates of evaporation with the all-important faculty of judgment. One needs,
he declares, “a hand that is dexterous, resolute, and rapid, but most of all a sound and
perfect judgment.” Whereas while wet on the wall, “the colors show up in one fashion,” he
points out that “afterwards when dry they are no longer the same.” On well-executed buon
fresco: “when exposed to the air, fresco throws off all impurities, water does not penetrate
it, and it resists anything that would injure it.” Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans.
Louisa S. Maclehose, ed. G. Baldwin Brown (London, 1907), 221-22.
44 On the concept of “pictorial intelligence,” defined as “a deep engagement with how pic-
tures work, how they produce (or, at times, frustrate) meaning,” see Michael Lobel, John
Sloan: Drawing on Illustration (New Haven, 2014), 5, 56.
45 See Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), 80-6. On
this media overlap, see Sylvia Auld, “Kuficising Inscriptions in the Work of Gentile Da
Fabriano,” Oriental Art 3 (1986): 246-65; Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic
Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600 (Berkeley, 2002); Giovanni Curatola, “Venice’s Textile and
Carpet Trade,” in Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, ed. Stefano Carboni (New Haven,
2006), 204-11; Marco Spallanzani, Oriental Rugs in Renaissance Florence, trans. by Anna
Moore Valeri (Florence, 2007); Alexander Nagel, “Twenty-Five Notes on Pseudoscript in
Italian Art,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 229-48; and David Young Kim,
“Lotto’s Carpets: Materiality, Textiles, and Composition in Renaissance Painting,” The Art
Bulletin 98 (2016): 181-212.

FIGURE 5 Basin, brass with silver and gold inlay, 1330-41. The inscription contains the
name and titles of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad (1293-1341), and his
epigraphic blazon al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. LONDON, THE BRITISH
MUSEUM.
ioned to convey the overall impression of gold (Fig. 5).46 Cennino’s language
itself invokes intermedial exchange: to instruct in the working of gold ground,
he deploys a battery of verbs that might refer to both painting and metalwork.47
The artist must “gild, burnish, scratch, stipple, and pick out details.” To render
figures in gold grounds, the painter ought to “get a needle attached to a stick
and start scratching … alongside the grounds which you have to gild.” To mark
out haloes, one begins by “picking out the figures against the ground, following
the little marks that you will see, which you incised with the needle.”48 As in
46 R. M. Ward, Islamic Metalwork (London, 1993), 71-94; and Marco Spallanzani, Metalli
islamici a Firenze nel Rinascimento (Florence, 2010). I am grateful to Marianne Shreve
Simpson for her suggestions on this point.
47 Notably the same or comparable language (“brunire,” “camosciare,” “granire”) is found
in Cellini’s treatise on goldsmithery. For translation and explanation of these techni-
cal terms, see Benvenuto Cellini, The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and
Sculpture, trans. C. R. Ashbee (London, 1898), 147-64.
48 Broecke, Cennino, 174-75.

206 Kim
metalwork, fashioning gold ground entails marking out, cutting, polishing, and
engaging with the material at close range.
Cennino draws particular attention to what he calls granare a rilievo, known
as granulation or stippling.49 Described by Cennino as “one of the loveliest
branches” of painting, granulation involves pricking the soft gold ground with
a needle-like instrument to form clusters of miniscule punch marks; conse-
quently, the point clusters catch and scatter light, or as he puts it, “sparkle like
millet grains.” By contrast, the surrounding burnished gold ground becomes
dark. Gold paradoxically becomes shadow. Cennino succinctly encapsulates
the general effect: “granulation amounts to brightening the gold since, on its
own, it is dark where it has been burnished.”50 Cennino himself pursued this
technique, as seen in the painting of a Beatified Bishop, now in Berlin (Fig. 6).51
In the bishop’s crook, point clusters articulate the lion’s limbs, fur, and mane.
Stippling in relief calls attention not only to the possibility of achieving mul-
tiple dimensions in gold ground but also to how this supposedly monotonous
gleaming surface can be worked to create subtle pictorial effects. Gold ground
as a multivalent chromatic and illuminated field achieves interplay between
light and shadow. Cennino points to the chromatic range in gold ground
when discussing the art of burnishing: “When will you see that the ground is
completely burnished? When the gold comes out almost dark, it is so shiny.”52
Granulation in gold ground shows that the pictorial quality of chiaroscuro can
emerge in various media aside from the expected domains of painting or relief
sculpture.
I will return momentarily to the interpretative issues at play in granulation,
but for now, the following point merits emphasis: to consider how gold ground
pivots between the “otherworldly” or “worldly,” we must first account for its
basic conditions and what sorts of artistic intervention it enables—in other
words, how it functions as the ground of the possible. The possible understood
as artistic potere, or power, indicates what the artist can do with professional
contacts, climatic conditions, and malleability. Invention is not restricted to
the painted parts of the panel alone. In gold ground, Cennino declares, the
49 Bastian Eclercy, “‘Granare’. Zur historischen Terminologie des Goldgrunddekors im

Traktat des Cennino Cennini,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 51
(2007): 539-54.
51 Stefan Weppelmann, “‘Storia o figura’: Objektstatus und Kontext der Berliner Tafeln
Cenninis und Überlegungen zur Werkstatt des Agnolo Gaddi,” in Fantasie und Handwerk.
Cennino Cennini und die Tradition der Toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco,
ed. Wolf-Dietrich Löhr and Stefan Weppelmann (Munich, 2008), 57-79.

FIGURE 6
Detail from Cennino Cennini, Bishop (Saint
Augustine?), gold leaf and tempera on panel,
about 1400. BERLIN, GEMÄLDEGALERIE,
STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN.
artist works with “a sensitive imagination and a light hand” (con sentimento
di fantasia, e di mano leggiera).53 Yet to what end does the artist use these
faculties?
Gold Ground and Mimetic Potential
To answer this question, I now turn to the second sense of the possible, that
is, the possible as potentia, or mimetic potential. Gold ground intimates vi-
sual form, generates analogies across media, and dynamically opens up pos-
sible worlds, both microscopically and macroscopically, for the acute viewer.
Material malleability generates semantic malleability.
The work of Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370-1427) provides a model for think-
ing about ground in these terms. In the most conventional and abridged de-
scription, Gentile is often heralded as a key art historical protagonist marking
the transition from the ornamental and crafted qualities of the “International
53 Ibid., 175.

208 Kim
FIGURE 7 Gentile da Fabriano, The Holy Family and the

Magi. Detail from the Adoration of the Magi
(Strozzi altarpiece), tempera and gold leaf on
panel, 1423. UFFIZI, FLORENCE. Erich Lessing /
Art Resource, NY.
Gothic” to the newfound naturalism of the Renaissance. A prime example is

his famed Adoration of the Magi (1423), executed for the Strozzi family cha-
pel in the church of Santa Trinita, Florence (Fig. 7).54 Hovering above the fig-
ures, many adorned with sumptuous fabrics and crowned with halos, is the
Star of Bethlehem. To convey the luminosity of this heavenly sign, Gentile de-
scribes, through a series of diminutive brushstrokes, light touching the tips of
leaves, the barren hills, and the darkened interior of Christ’s manger. Notably,
this naturalism is not wholly illusionistic, executed through paint alone. It
is fundamentally metallic. The Star is composed of a gold ground base upon
which layers of tempera are applied and lines are scratched to convey the
54 On the canonical status of the altarpiece in art historical narratives, see Keith Christiansen,
“L’adorazione dei Magi di Gentile da Fabriano,” in Gentile da Fabriano agli Uffizi, ed.
Alessandro Cecchi (Milan, 2005), 11-40.

FIGURE 8 Gentile da Fabriano, Detail from Nativity, tempera and gold leaf on panel, about
1420–1422. LOS ANGELES, THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM.
impression of shooting rays. Gentile scratched away the upper paint layer of
the Magi’s elaborate costumes to reveal the gold leaf that lay underneath and
to describe sumptuous damask silk fabrics. The artist also applied gold leaf
beneath the paint that renders the triangular awning above the Holy Family
to suggest light falling over the manger.55 This “naturalistic” mode of illumi-
nation was also pursued by Gentile in an earlier Nativity (c. 1420-22) (Fig. 8).
There he characterizes how celestial illumination emanating from the gold
ground irradiates the pasture where the shepherds watch over their flock. “An
angel of the Lord appeared to them and bathed them in light” (Luke 2:9). The
gold ground in the upper register reads as the source of light that falls on the
gleaming hills and fields in the landscape.56 Metallic leaf and the painting of
light are coterminous. An enabling reading of such passages must attend to the
complexity of gold ground as a site of mimetic potential, a field where making
55 Nicola Ann MacGregor and Sandra Freschi, “Il restauro dell’Adorazione dei Magi,” in
Gentile da Fabriano agli Uffizi, ed. Alessandro Cecchi (Milan, 2005), 173-80.
56 On the irregular and diffused lighting effects in the altarpiece, see the entry by Mauro
Minardi in Gentile da Fabriano and the Other Renaissance, ed. Laura Laureati and Lorenza
Mochi Onori (Fabriano, 2006), 148-49.

210 Kim
and representing, material and illusion, flatness and depth, light and shade
emerge, coincide and collaborate.
In one of Gentile’s earliest extant works, his Madonna and Child with Angels
(c. 1405), gold ground empowers the semantic charge that runs throughout
the entire picture (Fig. 9).57 Almost half of the panel’s surface area is cov-
ered with gold leaf, thus undoubtedly enhancing its visibility, even at some
remove. Frustratingly, the knowledge about the work’s execution, patronage,
and original display, which would enable a fine-grained reading of its con-
temporary reception, remains outstanding. Scholarship on the panel, how-
ever, has established, if not the facts, then the probable conditions behind
its making and exhibition. Based on style, the panel was most likely painted
during Gentile’s sojourn in Venice or elsewhere in Lombardy. Its intended des-
tination was further afield, in the Basilica of San Domenico in Perugia, a city
where the artist had long-standing family ties. Although the panel’s patron has
yet to be identified, he could have been a member of one of Perugia’s promi-
nent families, perhaps the Graziani, who resided in the Porta San Pietro dis-
trict close to San Domenico and regularly left legacies, commissioned works
of art, and endowed chapels for the Basilica. Bartolommeo degli Acerbi, the
prior of San Domenico from 1386, and a patron for other works of art for the
church, has also been proposed as a possible client. The panel’s original loca-
tion remains unknown, though it has been suggested that it was installed in
the Chapel of San Giacomo, now the Sacristy. Documented in the Novitiate in
1861, the panel remained in San Domenico until 1863, at which point it entered
the collection of the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia, where it is cur-
rently exhibited.
While the panel’s original location remains an open question, the promi-
nence of the gold ground, in addition to the detail accorded to virtually every
element in the picture, would have called for meticulous visual attention. This
remains the case in spite of the panel’s slightly damaged condition. Losses
are apparent in Christ, the Virgin’s robe, and most visibly in the lower zone
in the figures of angels. The elongated and curved panel was cut on top, and
unpainted portions in these upper areas indicate that it was originally set in
a trefoil framework as the central panel of a triptych. Despite these losses, we
can discern the figural components that interweave iconographic themes of
57 For the following remarks on the patronage, display, condition, and iconography on the
panel, I draw from Keith Christiansen, Gentile da Fabriano (Ithaca, 1982), 5, 83-84; Andrea
de Marchi, Gentile da Fabriano: un viaggio nella pittura italiana alla fine del gotico (Milan,
1992), 50-51, 90, fn 27; Fabio Marcelli, Gentile da Fabriano (Milan, 2005), 49-64; and the
entries by Andrea de Marchi and Vittoria Garibaldi in Gentile Da Fabriano and the Other
Renaissance, ed. Laura Laureati and Lorenza Mochi Onori (Fabriano, 2006), 94-97.

FIGURE 9 Gentile da Fabriano, Madonna and Child with Angels, tempera and gold leaf
on panel, about 1405. PERUGIA, GALLERIA NAZIONALE DELL’UMBRIA.
FotoCiol.

212 Kim
glorification, humility, and resurrection. The Virgin as Queen of Heaven sits

enthroned and embraces Christ, holding a pomegranate as a proleptic sign of
his Passion and eventual resurrection. Alluding to the Virgin’s humility and
purity, rose bushes with unopened buds surround and weave in and out of gilt
open tracery, ogee arches, and other microarchitectural features. This throne
stands in a hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, an iconographic amalgama-
tion of the Madonna Enthroned with the Madonna of Humility. In the panel’s
lower zones, seven angels hold a banderole that displays verse from the Regina
Coeli, a “call and response,” sung during Easter Vigil Mass. Other inscriptions
on the halo and the hem of the Virgin’s mantle reinforce the themes of Marian
exaltation and resurrection.
These last two elements in particular—the halo and the hem—demonstrate
Gentile’s awareness of Venetian and Northern European metalwork, and his
power to translate its effects on panel. Andrea de Marchi, in fact, has employed
the lexical compound orafo-pittore, or goldsmith-painter, to describe Gentile’s
ambition to paint with metal.58 In the Perugia panel, instances abound of
what we might call “metallic painting.” The Virgin’s blue mantle, now faded, is
painted on a sheet of silver leaf; passages throughout this area were delicately
scraped away to create patterns of floral ornament and script. Her stucco clasp
is gilt, figuring the sun and rays, evoking the verse “a woman clothed with the
sun” (Revelation 12:1), often applied to the Virgin. Gentile also used different
techniques, including mordant gilding, to suggest light glinting off the leaves
of the rose bushes, the throne’s miniature architectural ornament, the Virgin’s
blond tresses, and the scale pattern covering her red robe (Fig. 10).59 Here
Gentile applied fine lines and patterns of mordant, an adhesive substance,
over specific areas on the painted surface. Small pieces of gold leaf would be
placed over these passages and stick, with the excess gold being brushed away.
Of mordant gilding, Cennino states that, the gold used “should be the most
beaten out and the most delicate … that you can find.” When this technique
is expertly done, “your handiwork will come out like fine hairs, which is the
most beautiful work.”60 This simile alludes to ductility, the capacity of gold to
be stretched by the skillful artist into the thinnest of threads. Yet the analogy
is not only verbally or visually descriptive, but materially diagnostic too. For
58 Andrea De Marchi, “Interferenze possibili tra oreficeria e pittura nel Nord Italia, prima e
dopo Gentile da Fabriano,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere
e Filosofia 15 (2004): 27-47.
59 Marcelli, Gentile da Fabriano, 61-64.
60 Broecke, Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte, 195.

FIGURE 10
Detail from Gentile da Fabriano,
Madonna and Child with Angels, tempera
and gold leaf on panel, about 1405.
PERUGIA, GALLERIA NAZIONALE
DELL’UMBRIA. FotoCiol.
Gentile paints with metal. By means of the artist’s potency, the inert substance
of gold can produce figural naturalism.
The most remarkable example of Gentile’s deployment of metallic painting
occurs in the gold ground itself (Fig. 11). Here, the artist harnesses the mimetic
potential of gold ground, its capacity to disclose and dramatize the process
by which representation comes into view. The viewer discerns, though with
some difficulty, the diaphanous angelic forms inhabiting the area surrounding
Virgin and Christ. Only apparent when photographed in raking light or seen
in person, the two angels at the top hold a crown above the Virgin enthroned.
Four below hold lilies; their connotations of purity complement the unopened
rose buds in the garden below. To render these diaphanous forms, Gentile in-
cised slender lines in the gold ground to articulate the angels’ figural contours.
A circular punch ornamented the hem of their robes with a series of dots.
Between and spilling out of these schematic outlines, clusters of points read
as faces, hair, wings, and drapery, created by means of granare. As mentioned,
these pin-sized concave depressions catch and scatter light, while the sur-
rounding gold ground, smooth and burnished, paradoxically provides shading
by contrast. Stippling loosens the distinction between figure and ground given

214 Kim
FIGURE 11 Detail from Gentile da Fabriano, Madonna and Child with Angels, tempera
and gold leaf on panel, about 1405. PERUGIA, GALLERIA NAZIONALE
DELL’UMBRIA. FotoCiol.
that figure becomes literally nestled in the ground. What is more, gold ground
assumes the role of contour that defines figure. The constellation of points de-
scribe bodily volume while the ground left untouched stands in for contour
that surrounds and articulates the constellation’s parameters. Groundwork is
not only fundamental in the sense of a base foundation; it is defining.
As a site of mimetic potential, pounced ground becomes something beyond
itself by forging analogies with period metalwork. Frequently cited as a com-
parandum is a copper-gilt triptych of the Crucifixion between the Carrying of
the Cross and Christ Disrobed, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York (Fig. 12).61 Attributed to a Franco-Flemish goldsmith, the triptych is dated
to the early fifteenth century, thus roughly contemporaneous with the Perugia
Panel (Fig. 9). Appearing in embossed silver relief in the foreground are the
figures of Christ, the three Marys, and Roman soldiers. The two thieves as well
61
Erich Steingräber, “Nachträger und Marginalien zur französisch-niederländische
Goldschmiedekunst des frühen 15. Jahrhunderts,” Anzeiger des Germanischen
Nationalmuseums (1969): 30-35; and Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “A Metalwork Triptych
of the Passion of Christ in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,” Wiener Jahrbuck für
Kunstgeschichte 46/47 (1993-94): 27-36, 377-80.

FIGURE 12 Netherlandish or French, Triptych with the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, and
the Disrobing of Jesus, silver, gilded copper and enamel, about 1420. NEW YORK,
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY.
as the narrative scenes on the side panels feature what fifteenth-century inven-
tories described with the French terms “travail pointillé,” “greneté,” and “poin-
coinné,” or in Latin as “opus punctorium” or “punctile.”62 Just as in the graining
in Gentile’s Perugia panel, delicate depressions in the Franco-Flemish triptych
articulate volume by scattering light, creating areas of brightness that stand
out against the darker gold ground (Fig. 13). Gentile may have seen comparable
pieces of this refined metalwork in the form of reliquaries, processional cross-
es, and jewelry during his residence in the early fifteenth century at Northern
Italian courts and the city of Venice.63
62 On these techniques, see Frances Marjorie Graves, Deux inventaires de la maison d’Orléans
(1389 et 1408) publiés pour la première fois et précédés d’une introduction (Paris, 1926);
Victor Gay, Glossaire archéologique du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (Paris, 1887-1928),
vol. 1: 536, 620, 716, 782, 785, 796; vol. 2: 192, 355, 247, 250; and R. W. Lightbown, Secular
Goldsmiths’ Work in Medieval France: A History (London, 1978), 75-82.
63 French Gothic manuscript illumination might have provided another cross reference.
Several of the figural groups in the triptych recall compositions in Très Riches Heures du
Duc de Berry. Notably, Arnold, the youngest of the Limbourg Brothers, is documented in
1417 as serving as an apprentice to a goldsmith in Nijmegen. See Alexander, “A Metalwork
Triptych.”

216 Kim
FIGURE 13
Detail from Netherlandish or French, Triptych
with the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, and
the Disrobing of Jesus, silver, gilded copper
and enamel, about 1420. NEW YORK, THE
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art
Resource, NY.
The presence of opus punctorium in gold ground across media invites us to

deepen the analogies between painting and metalwork. This was a medium
that Renaissance painting supposedly disavowed, so the art historical narra-
tive goes, in its progression toward illusionism.64 Yet through opus punctori-
um, goldwork can achieve the effect of brushwork, suggesting volume through
modulating light and shade. This subtle chiaroscuro even verges on sfumato,
appearing to hover, though in fact it is anchored in stippled ground. Picture
and metalwork also approach relief: the points in the field generate oscillating
forms protruding into the foreground and receding deep into space. What we
see is a type of backwards or negative relief: the forms that project out into
space are due to cavities in the ground. The points in the field indicating vol-
ume also read as brilliant white or gray; opus punctorium thereby evokes mono-
chrome grisaille painting, a technique sometimes deployed to imitate bronze
64 Marco Collareta, “The Historian and the Technique on the Role of Goldsmithery in Vasari’s
‘Lives’,” in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art, ed. Michael W. Cole (Oxford, 2006), 291-300.

relief.65 Pounced ground is a fertile ground, propagating shoots of transmedial

references.
The common denominator to these transmedial analogies is the demand
for close, attentive viewing that punch work demands. The so-called “period
eye” must squint to draw visual incident from the ground, to grasp its poten-
tial. Humanist observers, in fact, commented on the necessity of close looking
when taking in Gentile’s stippled grounds. The Sienese humanist Sigismondo
Tizio in 1526 described this granulation in his history of Siena, a manuscript
which is now in the Vatican Library.66 His remarks pertain to the angels in the
background in Gentile’s fresco of the Madonna of the Notary.67 The painting,
once in the Campo in Siena, has been destroyed.68 However, the artist’s extant
fresco in Orvieto allows us to imagine the appearance and effect of the lost
Sienese mural.69 As Tizio describes,
65 As voiced later by the sixteenth-century painter and art writer Giovanni Battista
Armenini in his exposition on the different kinds and distinctions of colors. See Giovanni
Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, trans. Edward J. Olszewski
(New York, 1977), 186. The relation between opus punctorium and grisaille painting could
be further explored in relation to Cennino’s remarks, in Chapter 31 of the Libro, about
painting figures in lead white on a prepared paper support. See Almut Schäffner, Terra
Verde. Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Monochromen Wandmalerei der italienischen
Renaissance (Weimar, 2009), 81-88, 131-46; and Katharina Christa Schüppel and Irene
Brückle, “Zur Ästhetik des Monochromen um 1400. Zwei Zeichnungen Lorenzo Monacos
aus der Sammlung des Berliner Kupferstichkabinetts,” in Fantasie und Handwerk, 201-23.
66 Sigismondo Tizio, Historiae Senenses, ed. Petra Pertici (Rome, 1998), vol. 3.
67 The work was also mentioned in passing by Bartholomaeus Facius in his De Viris Illustribus
(1456): “His is a work in the Piazza at Siena, again the Mother Mary holding the Christ in
her lap as if she would wrap him round with fine linen. John the Baptist, the Apostles
Peter and Paul, and Christopher carrying Christ on his shoulder are here done with art
so admirable that it seems to be reproducing also even the motion and action of the
body.” (“Eius est opus Senis in foro, eadem Maria mater Christum itidem puerum grémio
tenens, tenui linteo ilium velare cupienti adsimilis, Iohannes Baptista, Petrus ac Paulus
Apostoli et Christoforus Christum humero sustinens, mirabili arte, ita ut ipsos quoque
corporis motus ac gestus representare videatur.” Michael Baxandall, “Bartholomaeus
Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De Viris Illustribus,” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 90-107, here 100-101.
68 For documents pertaining to the commission, discovered to be overseen by Jacopo della
Quercia, see Gabriele Fattorini, “Gentile da Fabriano, Jacopo Della Quercia and Siena: The
‘Madonna dei Banchetti’,” The Burlington Magazine 152 (2010): 152-61.
69 Keith Christiansen, “The Art of Gentile Da Fabriano,” in Gentile Da Fabriano and the Other
Renaissance, 19-52, here 46-47.

218 Kim
FIGURE 14 Gentile da Fabriano, Madonna and Child,

fresco, 1425. ORVIETO, DUOMO. Scala /
Art Resource, NY.
Gentiles Fabrianensis pictor eximius Virginis imaginem ceterorumque

sancotorum non hoc anno, ut fertur, pro foro publico apud tabelliones de-
pinxit, sed sequenti perfecit. In imis vero sub Virgine circulus est, in quo
Iesu Christi in sepulcro mortui consistentis, quam pietatem Christiani
vocant, a dextris ac sinixtris angeli duo sunt, aereo colore tam tenue picti,
tamque exili lineatura in tufeo lapide ut, nisi quis etiam ostensis acutissi-
mum figat intuitum, conspicere non valeat.
The distinguished painter Gentile of Fabriano painted an image of the

Virgin and other saints for the notaries in Campo not in this year, as is
said, but completed it in the following year. In the lower portions, under
the Virgin, is a circle, in which to the right and left of Jesus Christ lying
dead in the tomb, which the Christians call the Pietà, there are two angels
painted in a bronze color so finely and with so thin an outline in the

plaster that, unless someone fastens an extremely keen gaze on them

when they have already been pointed out, it is not possible to see them.70
In Tizio’s Latin, the gaze required to see the two angels must be “acutissimum,”
literally “most sharp,” derived from “acus,” or needle, a word befitting the stip-
pling technique. Without a gaze as sharp as the stippler’s needle, it is not pos-
sible to see his work. The hypothetical fulfillment of this indeterminate act of
looking is further qualified by the necessary presence of an expert, someone
who can point out the stippled ground to the observer. What is implied is what
we might call a “workshop of looking,” a practice of observation that is col-
laborative and pedagogical. Someone points out and someone else sees. Opus
punctorium asks for a community of viewers to make out and make sense of its
formal subtlety. The ground’s mimetic potential draws and demands an audi-
ence, one that has physical and visual access to what is close at hand.71
Angels in Angles
What is gained by fastening one’s gaze to Gentile’s gold ground? On a basic

level, the pounced ground reinforces the panels’ subject matter, given that the
angels bearing crown and lilies further exalt the enthroned and humble Virgin.
But something more is at play. The gold ground, undulating as it does between
radiance and darkness, flatness and diaphanous figuration, makes use of its
potential by injecting temporal and spatial dynamism into the panel. Here we
might recall Leon Battista Alberti’s well-known remarks on gold in painting. In
addition to criticizing painters’ using a disproportional amount of gold in their
panels, Alberti disapproved of the material’s dynamic qualities. Gold endan-
gered pictorial illusion since it appears differently according to lighting and
viewing angle: “one can observe that, after you have placed gold on a flat panel,
the major parts of those surfaces that one needed to represent as bright and
brilliant appear dark to observers; and other surfaces, perhaps, which should
70 Tizio, Historiae Senenses, 178. On this passage, see De Marchi, “Gentile da Fabriano,” 193-96
and his remarks in Gentile Da Fabriano and the Other Renaissance, 94-95.
71 Tizio later mentions how Gentile da Fabriano’s painting in the Campo was destined for
a public audience celebrating the election of Cardinal Antonio Casini and attending the
Council of Siena (1423-24). See Tizio, Historiae Senenses, 182; and Fattorini, “Gentile da
Fabriano, Jacopo Della Quercia and Siena,” 158.

220 Kim
be darker, appear more luminous.”72 Elaborating on Alberti’s remarks, Victor

Michael Schwarz aptly notes that gold ground introduces “an uncontrollable
piece of reality in the artful simulation of the picture.”73 In the Perugia panel,
however, this loss of control can unfold a vision of the celestial. Gentile’s dra-
matization of gold ground’s potential recalls a pun made by St. Bernard allud-
ing to the notion of angels as God’s eyes and ears. Urging followers of the Rule
to be steadfast, Bernard stated: “in every public place, in every angulus (corner),
respect thy angelus (angel).”74 His sermon could well describe Gentile’s angels,
given they are nestled in the upper corners of the panel. To see these angels,
the viewer needs to move around and look at the panel at an angle.
In this regard, one question that comes immediately to mind is whether the
potentia of gold ground acknowledges the devotional priorities of the panel’s
patron and destination in the Basilica of San Domenico. It is true that Gentile’s
highly worked gold grounds appear in a variety of contexts, lay and monas-
tic, domestic and ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that
Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas devoted a substantial portion of his Summa
theologica to angels. “Doctor angelicus” became his sobriquet. Of the many
topics he confronted regarding the nature, appearance, and actions of angels,
Aquinas speculated on their place, motion, and time (1:QQ. 52-53).75 His points
of inquiry covered such questions as “Whether in passing from place to place
the angel passes through intervening space?” and “Whether the angel’s move-
ment is in time or instantaneous”? Aquinas did not restrict them to a specific
place, arguing instead that they moved swiftly from indeterminate locations,
which he called the “wherefrom” and “whereto.”76 The celestial beings travel
through infinite space. Aquinas’s justification of this concept resonates with
the experience of viewing angels in stippled grounds. “Since the points in every
magnitude are … infinite in potentiality,” he reasons, “it follows that between
every two places there are infinite intermediate places.”77 As for their move-
ment over the variable of time, these swift moving immaterial beings exist in
many different nows, “since time is nothing else than the reckoning of before
72 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition, ed. Rocco
Sinisgalli (New York, 2011), 72. I have slightly modified Sinisgalli’s translation.
73 Schwarz, “Goldgrund im Mittelalter,” 29.
74 Meredith J. Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy
(Cambridge, 2014), 24.
75 Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. Literally Translated
by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Vol.1: No.2 (Qq.27-74) (London, 1911), 310-24.
76 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 322-23.
77 Ibid., 320.

and after in movement.”78 While I do not wish to draw too direct a parallel
between Aquinas’s angelology and Gentile’s work, the angels that emerge and
disappear from view in the Perugia panel find a ready analogy in Aquina’s de-
scription of angelic behavior. As messengers moving between “wherefrom” and
“whereto,” now and another now, in a field of infinite points, angels appearing
and disappearing via the malleability of gold and its reflective qualities drama-
tize the potential of ground to bring a celestial world in and out of vision, both
temporally and spatially. Whereas one-point perspective offers a rationalized,
fixed, and measurable depiction of the world, Gentile’s points on a field speak
to the possibility of a world whose appearance fluctuates, unable to be grasped
simultaneously. The line of vision from the viewer to the cluster of points in
the gold ground is not straight but beguilingly oblique.
The Ground of Incarnation
Does the potential of this gold ground ever become actualized? Attending to
the specific example of the Perugia panel, potentiality culminates in the ap-
pearance of the miraculous, the representation of Christ incarnate.79 Gentile’s
opus punctorium underscores the artist’s power to dramatize gold ground’s po-
tential through the holographic angels that appear and disappear from view.
Christ, however, is “there,” clear and present. Divine incarnation erupts the
otherworldly into the worldly. Gentile’s panel implicitly contrasts the indeter-
minate state of the numinous with the appearance of Christ in the flesh. Two
different pictorial modes represent these ontological states of potentiality and
actuality. While opus punctorium achieves tonality by paradoxically turning
gold ground into shadows and concave depressions into light, the tonal modu-
lation of paint renders the volumetric substance of flesh. Gentile seems to be
making an argument about how painting can depict the divine incarnation
through chromatic incarnation.
A long exegetical tradition, in fact, drew comparisons between the paint-
er’s coloring of a figure and the prophetic fulfillment of God’s law through
the birth of Christ. In his gloss on Hebrews 10:1, the early Church Father John
Chrysostom remarked that “for as in painting, so long as one [only] draws the
78 Ibid., 323.

79 For a comparable observation, see Marcelli, Gentile da Fabriano, 61: “I volti di Maria o del
Bambino nella pala di Perugia sono diventati materia, carne e pelle plasmate e sforiate
dal sole e dalle ombre, così come tutta la parte restante della tavola è stata il frutto di una
lucida alchimia di tecniche e materiali.”

222 Kim
outlines, it is a sort of ‘shadow’.” The application of colors, however, realizes

what outlines in a picture merely suggest: “but when one has added the bright
paints and laid in the colors, then it becomes ‘an image’.” In a similar way,
Chrysostom declares, “something of this kind also was the Law.” The divine
Incarnation realizes that which “was a shadow of good things to come.”80 In
this light, it is important to recall that along with the many chapters devoted to
gilding, Cennino’s Libro notably refers no less than forty-five times to what he
terms incarnatione, the task of applying colors to render skin tones and bodily
substance.81 In period sources, however, incarnatione more commonly referred
to divine incarnation. In Book VII of Dante’s Paradiso, Beatrice explains why
humankind could only be saved through the death of Christ: “All other means
fell short of justice / save that the Son of God / should humble Himself by be-
coming flesh [non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi]” (118-20). In the Perugia panel,
Christ’s divine enfleshment is made doubly apparent through its contrast and
juxtaposition with gold ground and the phantom forms of the angels floating
there. We might even say that Christ’s translucent robe, a nexus of hatched
and cross-hatched lines, is a veil that is drawn aside, revealing his body. Several
works, such as a panel by Nicola da Guardiagrele, closely follow Gentile’s for-
mat of stippled gold ground against figures.82 It is highly suggestive that these
panels feature what Leo Steinberg memorably called the “sexuality of Christ,”
whereby the Son of God’s genitalia is either exposed or prominently displayed
(Fig. 15).83 Gold ground provides, both in the literal and figurative sense, the
“background” to the depiction of Christ’s embodied humanity. Ground antici-
pates the coming of the figure.
80 Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia,
2000), 53-58 and 39-47; and Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Ornament and Incarnation in Insular
Art,” Gesta 55 (2016): 157-77, here 168-69.
81 Verbal and substantive instances of the word, searchable through the online version of
the text http://fonti-sa.sns.it/index.php (accessed April 1, 2018) include: incarnare (4), in-
carnassi (1), incarnata (1), incarnate (1), incarnato (1), incarnazione (23), incarnazioni (14).
For a recent discussion of the theological dimensions of flesh tones in painting, see Esther
P. Wipfler, “‘Mit solchen Farbschattierungen hat der Schoepfer seines Ebenbildes unsere
Natur Gekennzeichnet.’ (Gregor Von Nyssa) Schriften zur Theologie des Bildes als Quellen
zur Kunsttechnik,” in Inkarnat und Signifikanz: das Menschliche Abbild in der Tafelmalerei
von 200 bis 1250 im Mittelmeerraum, ed. Yvonne Schmuhl and Esther P. Wipfler (Munich,
2017), 42-50.
82 See the entry by Alessandro Cecchi in Gentile Da Fabriano and the Other Renaissance,
112-13.
83 See Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion 2nd
ed. (Chicago, 1996), 24, where he refers to Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece Madonna and
Child with Sts. Nicholas and Catherine (c. 1930-144, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) as representa-
tive of the growing convention to expose Christ’s sex.

FIGURE 15 Nicola da Guardiagrele, Madonna and Child, tem-

pera and gold leaf on panel. FLORENCE, UFFIZI.
Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali /
Art Resource, NY.
The Currency of Gold Ground
The lines from Balzac’s Gobseck cited in the epigraph could be summarized
as follows: “Gold, not God, makes all things possible.” Whereas the villainous
usurer in the Comédie humaine speaks of possibility in the sense of possession
and speculation, groundwork in the Renaissance picture gives another slant
to the meaning of gold’s possibility.84 In Cennino’s text and Gentile’s panel,
gold’s inherent malleability enables ground to become a site of the possible, a
field where artistic power and mimetic potential are at work. Ground u nfolds
84 On the character’s preoccupation with gold, called “the spiritualism of your present-
day societies,” see Allan H. Pasco, “Descriptive Narration in Balzac’s ‘Gobseck’,” Virginia
Quarterly Review 56 (1980): 99-108.

224 Kim
a spectrum of material, medial, perceptual, and devotional possibilities, which

facilitates continuous passage between worlds, artisanal and climatic, picto-
rial and metallurgical, physical and ethereal. The shimmering auriferous field
seems reluctant to settle in any one domain. Yet Gobseck’s declaration is ada-
mant about another property of gold that renders it a vehicle of possibility:
its monetary function, not its softness, but its status as hard cash. Of course,
when battiloro transformed hard coins into soft leaves, gold ceased to func-
tion as money, becoming instead an artistic material. In his notes on politi-
cal economy criticism, Karl Marx inserted the following observation: “Gold is
fixed capital; floating only in so far as it is consumed for gilding.”85 Gold’s value
as a universally accepted form of currency “floats,” as Marx saw it, meander-
ing and dissipating when hammered into leaf, awaiting a second life as a gilt
surface bearing artistic worth. Gold ground dramatizes the transformation of
exchange value into use value as an artistic material whose possibilities are
nebulous.
Could it be, however, that gold ground retains an imprint of its life as coin,
circulating in the world as hard currency? Gold money and gold pictures exist
in a relationship of exchange and mutual reinforcement. Both depend on the
faculty of sight to recognize them as bearers of value. The memory of mon-
etary gold in gold ground does not go deep. It remains on the surface. One
could describe a gold coin, with figures and text placed against a metallic field,
as a gold ground picture in miniature. A picture featuring figures crowned
with golden haloes against a gold ground could be seen as rendering a gold
coin in large. Both gold and picture act as currency insofar as they function
as media of interaction in and between worlds, although this occurs at vast-
ly different scales. The Venetian ducat, along with the Florentine florin, was
the commonly accepted currency throughout the Mediterranean: in 1532, the
French pilgrim Dennis Possot remarked, “from Venice to Jerusalem no one
takes money of gold unless it be of Venetian coin.”86 The 3.5 grams of gold
85 Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft),
trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1993), 642. Marx paraphrases Alexander Anderson, The
Recent Commercial Distress (London, 1847), 4: “Capital is divided by some into two differ-
ent kinds—fixed and floating; that is, fixed to the soil such as houses, lands … Floating
capital is all sorts of goods and commodities floating about for exchange or consumption
such as … furniture, tools. But the distinction into fixed and floating is more apparent
than real. Gold is fixed capital properly so called, although there is nothing under the sun
so floating perhaps; it yields an annual return as interest the same as land yields … it is
only floating capital as far as it is consumed for gilding and other purposes in art or manu-
facture for the sake of its beauty or other useful quality without reference to its value.”
86 Denis Possot, Le voyage de la Terre Sainte / composé par maître Denis Possot et achevé par
messire Charles Philippe, seigneur de Champarmoy et de Grandchamp, 1532, ed. Charles

FIGURE 16 Gold ducat of Giovanni Dandolo, doge of Venice, gold, 3.51 grammes, 1280-1289.
LONDON, THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
in the Venetian ducat traveled throughout the early modern world, bearing
the figures of Christ, St. Mark, and the Doge standing proud in relief (Fig. 16).
In a strange sort of reverse engineering, the gold in Gentile’s altarpiece is the
opposite of relief, given that the bodily forms are indented with the prick of a
needle. While small gold coins with their tiny images move through and across
all areas of the mercantile world, Gentile’s groundwork turns the logic of the
gold coin inside out—the viewer experiences an expansive image on a micro-
scopic scale. The representation of the infinitesimal, however, points to the
infinite height, depth, and breadth of the numinous.
Protestant apologists may have ridiculed Thomas Aquinas for asking the
question: how many angels can dance on a point of a needle?87 Gold ground
offered itself to artists and viewers as a site where forms come into and pass out
of appearance. It is a place of diaphanous forming worlds and worlds vanishing
Schefer (Paris, 1890), 87: “On ne prent monnoye ne or sinon que icelluy du coing de
Venise; mais l’or estranger, on le prent au poix et la monnoye non. Et portasmes de l’or et
de la monnoye de Venise de secque jusques oultre la Terre Saincte.” Cited and discussed
in: Nicole Chareyron, Pilgrims to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, trans. W. Donald Wilson
(New York, 2005), 38.
87 On the origin and afterlife of this adage imputed to medieval scholastics, see Peter
Harrison, “Angels on Pinheads and Needles’ Points,” Notes and Queries 63 (2016): 45-47.

226 Kim
from form. For its later art historical interpreters, gold ground became some-
thing else, a contested site in a cultural clash between advocates of positivism
and rationality and those of beauty and transcendence—and was claimed and
reclaimed to suit their ideological objectives. This debate over material, mime-
sis, and meaning in and beyond this world emerged from a ground wrought
panel c. 1405, where Gentile da Fabriano stippled, pounced, and painted in
twenty-four-carat gold.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson

for their kind invitation to contribute to this volume as well as their insight-
ful editorial comments. I am also grateful to the two anonymous review-
ers who encouraged me to qualify key aspects of the argument in important
ways. I benefited from presenting this material to audiences at UCLA, UCL,
Villa I Tatti, the Biblioteca Hertziana, and the Bildevidenz Research Group.
My thanks to André Dombrowski, Dario Donetti, Ivan Drpić, Sarah Guérin,
Nicholas Herman, Klaus Krüger, Christopher Lakey, Maria Loh, Alexander
Nagel, Alina Payne, Karen Redrobe, Rosemarie San Juan, Elizabeth Tucker,
Tristan Weddigen, and Alison Wright. This article is dedicated to Mia You and
Hugo van der Velden as a souvenir of our trip to Fabriano in 2006. All transla-
tions are mine, unless noted otherwise.


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Journal of early

modern history 23 (2019) 191-226

Points on a Field: Gentile da Fabriano and

David Young Kim

Cennino Cennini – Gentile da Fabriano – gold – gold ground – granulation

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15700658-12342636

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Alois Riegl in Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) described Byzantine gold

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Alongside conceiving gold as divine symbol or global commodity, a third

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Gold Ground and Artistic Power

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41 O’Malley, Business of Art, 56-57.

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42 Broecke, Cennino, 172.

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49 Bastian Eclercy, “‘Granare’. Zur historischen Terminologie des Goldgrunddekors im

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Gold Ground and Mimetic Potential

53 Ibid., 175.

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FIGURE 7 Gentile da Fabriano, The Holy Family and the

Gothic” to the newfound naturalism of the Renaissance. A prime example is

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glorification, humility, and resurrection. The Virgin as Queen of Heaven sits

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The presence of opus punctorium in gold ground across media invites us to

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relief.65 Pounced ground is a fertile ground, propagating shoots of transmedial

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FIGURE 14 Gentile da Fabriano, Madonna and Child,

Gentiles Fabrianensis pictor eximius Virginis imaginem ceterorumque

The distinguished painter Gentile of Fabriano painted an image of the

Journal of early modern history 23 (2019) 191-226

plaster that, unless someone fastens an extremely keen gaze on them

What is gained by fastening one’s gaze to Gentile’s gold ground? On a basic

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be darker, appear more luminous.”72 Elaborating on Alberti’s remarks, Victor

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The Ground of Incarnation

78 Ibid., 323.

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outlines, it is a sort of ‘shadow’.” The application of colors, however, realizes

Journal of early modern history 23 (2019) 191-226

41 O’Malley, Business of Art, 56-57.

42 Broecke, Cennino, 172.

49 Bastian Eclercy, “‘Granare’. Zur historischen Terminologie des Goldgrunddekors im

53 Ibid., 175.

78 Ibid., 323.