Tutankhamen

[poliphilo]

I hate gold.

No, that's too extreme. It has its uses- as adornment, detail, garnish, highlight. I don't grudge medieval angels and saints their haloes of gold leaf.

But it's so wrong as a material for sculpture. The way it throws light around, the way it shouts its colour. Texture, modelling and contour are obscured by all that surface noise. 

The Greeks got it right- the metal you use for sculpture is bronze. 

The Egyptian ruling classes had no taste. No spirituality, no inner life. Their art is about power and ownership- nothing else. 

They thought they could take it with them.

Look at me in the Field of Reeds- throwing my weight around, flashing my gold.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A lovely metal- sleek and subtle and deep- everything gold is not.

[sculptruth.livejournal.com]

Well put, your description of bronze. This was the metal in which the Greeks recognised their pathos.

I love this post and the way you arrange words into thoughts. Even if you are all flashy in the reeds. :)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I don't believe it would be possible to express pathos in gold.

[sculptruth.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of pretty objects can be fashioned from gold, but anything in that material will always carry a sort of preciousness for me, more akin to a trinket than a figure burdened with a story, history, and time.

Perhaps it's gold's greatest flaw, the inability to carry any record of time having passed. No patina, no rust, no mark at all except for where it may have been chipped or scraped. It lacks character, and meaning. All shine and no philosophy.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Gold is incorruptible- inhuman, even a bit spooky.

I won't wear it.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

ooh that is very profound. Gold does not age, so carries no history of the object concerned. Thank for that insight. People on the other hand, patinate a lot, especially king Tut's rather leathery mummy.

I guess all the gold was then about incorruptible life and down with death!