Points on a Field: Gentile da Fabriano and Gold Ground

Abstract

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 climatic, pictorial and metallurgical, physical and ethereal.