Artists across history have woven astonishing and delightful designs from precious metals. The V&A’s new galleries dedicated to the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, which opened this week, display ornate silver cups from Renaissance Germany, gold snuffboxes whose contents titillated the noses of 18th-century aristocrats, and even a superb silver swan made by Asprey of London in 1985.
Yet gold and silver glimmer through human history as both dream and nightmare. As I admired a cup made in the shape of a falcon with gold, silver and gems wrapped round a coconut that forms its body, a lovely thing made in Ulm in 1600, I couldn’t quite stop thinking of the image of Donald Trump meeting Nigel Farage in Trump’s realm of gold. Has he ruined this material, considered beautiful by human beings since prehistoric times?
There have always been anxieties inherent in the cult of gold. The superbly crafted, sensuously shaped 16th- and 17th-century goblets, ewers, mugs and platters that abound in the Gilberts’ collection are strongly reminiscent of the luxury goods in Rembrandt’s painting, Belshazzar’s Feast. As Belshazzar, ancient King of Babylon, serves wine from vessels looted from the temple in Jerusalem, a heavenly hand appears and writes his doom on the wall. Rembrandt makes the golden words of God outshine the gold of the stolen treasures that have now become the tableware of the damned. Gold is both holy and unholy in this painting: a symbol of greed and a glimpse of the divine.
That same doubleness pervades Titian’s painting Danae, in which the god Jupiter comes to his lover in the shape of a shower of gold. As Danae lies naked on her bed, gold coins materialise in a golden mist. The gold is divine – it is the manifestation of an actual god – yet it is also profane cash. The model for Danae is thought to have been a famous Roman prostitute so the coins joke cynically about paying for sex. Titian reveals all the suggestiveness of gold – it can symbolise god, money and, as an adornment of the body, sex.
It is also often tragic. Hoards of gold in north European myth are guarded by dragons. The legendary hero Beowulf was killed after he entered a dragon’s gold-stuffed lair. In two renowned modern versions of a dark age myth, Wagner’s Ring cycle and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, gold rings cause no end of trouble.
When the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered an extraordinary beaten-gold funeral mask at Mycenae in 1875, he instantly decided it must belong to none other than King Agamemnon, who led the Greek attack on Troy only to be murdered in his own house on his return home. Surely the unfounded modern association of this mask with Agamemnon reflects a sense of gold as tragic: Agamemnon’s death is the theme of the Oresteia by Aeschylus, and Schliemann was the contemporary of Wagner and Nietzsche, whose book The Birth of Tragedy first appeared in 1872.
Gold can be erotic, heavenly, kingly – or hellish. If it has those meanings in art, what does it mean for Donald Trump? Is it just a crass image of wealth – pure bling – or does it also have something more grandiose about it? The world’s future may depend on what he sees in all that gold he likes to have around him. Hopefully it is just profane, because if he craves gold for its divine and monarchical qualities, look out. A man of gold is unlikely to bring about a golden age.
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