The politics of the gilded body in early Florentine statuary

The written history of Renaissance sculpture has encouraged us to see through gold surfaces. Attention trained to focus on the vehicle of ‘form’ can overlook gilding as skin deep. This is partly a consequence of the colour blindness of sculptural theory as it was developed in the later fifteenth and sixteenth century and of the way precious metalwork was excluded from a restricted definition of the arts of ‘disegno’. When, in 1775, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs approached Tuscany’s Grandduke for permission to remove brown varnish from the city’s Baptistery doors to reveal their gilding, he was rebuffed on the grounds that the gold surface was too fragile and that ‘even if the doors were of solid gold they would only be more beautiful to the eyes of the greedy, and more magnificent, but they would not satisfy a draughtsman/designer (disegnatore); just as an unpatinated bronze does not satisfy because of the false lights that confound one’s sight’.1 The disdain for gold