photo by Erla Zwingle LIKE WORKING WITH SPIDER SILK The earliest smelters used earthen jars as crucibles, but the refining process was slow: five days and nights to achieve the purity of the gold that Marino pours after just half an hour. Knowing the exact weight he begins with lets him judge the leaves’ diminishing density as he goes. Before beating his gold into almost translucently thin squares of leaf, Marino Menegazzo weighs the gold on a balance scale measured in grams. The drawers and cutters are gone, the gilders are dwindling, and Menegazzo is the last artisan in Europe who is still beating gold the traditional way. There were also scores of gold-cutters, and tiraori, or drawers of gold wire for fabric and jewelry. Just behind the goldbeaters, other crafts flourished in the 18th century there were 71 workshops in Venice that did nothing but stamp gold leaf onto leather.

The façade of one palace on the Grand Canal once shone with so much gold leaf-22,000 sheets-that it was nicknamed simply Ca’ d’Oro, the “House of Gold,” a nickname it holds to this day. Venetians produced sheets of gold to gild icons, Gothic palaces, Baroque picture frames, furniture, books, walls, and the numberless gleaming mosaic tesserae that cover the walls and ceiling of the legendary basilica of San Marco. The craft came to Venice in about 1000 A.D., brought by masters from Byzantium. In Venice, where he was born and still works, there once were 340 goldbeaters hammering away in 46 workshops, an extravagant number in a famously extravagant city. The Egyptians were the first to use this procedure, which was performed by the priests of the god Ptah. Gold in its natural state can contain any number of other elements, so it must be refined by smelting at 1,062 degrees C (1,943 F). But he doesn’t have to dream of gold-as a battiloro (batty-LOW-ro), or goldbeater, he has spent 40 years pounding the noblest of the eight “noble” metals into gossamer tissue that gleams from churches, monuments, doors, and domes around the world. While it’s possible that Marino Menegazzo’s mother also told him this, it’s unlikely that she meant it literally. The Egyptians called gold “the breath of God.” The Inca called it “the sweat of the sun.” (The somewhat less poetic Aztecs called it teocuitlatl, the “excrement of the gods.”) The ultimate measure of anything, of course, is “the gold standard.” And Italian mothers, tucking in their children for the night, wish them sogni d’oro: “Dreams of gold.” But gold is more beautiful than any of them, and we seem to be born craving it.

German mummies covered in gold