Gold A History of Art in Three Colours

This is the BBC Television Service. We now present another programme

in our series of experimental transmissions in colour.

We live in a Kaleidoscopic world...

..but colours are more than mere decoration.

Colours carry deep and significant meanings for us all...

..and in this series

I want to unravel the stories of three colours...

..three colours which in the hands of artists have stirred our emotions,

changed the way we behave

and even altered the course of history.

Blue -

the arrival of Lapis Lazuli from the East made blue

the colour of our dreams...

..a colour that's transported us to worlds beyond our horizons.

White,

once the virtuous colour of ancient marbles,

came to embody our darkest instincts.

But in this programme, I want to tell the story of a colour

we've worshipped since the very beginning -

one that at first may not seem like a colour at all.

So this is the gold vault

beneath the Bank of England.

And in this room there are about 65,000 bars

of solid gold

and each one of them is worth

almost half a million pounds,

and I just can't resist picking one up.

The first thing you notice is the weight -

it's extraordinarily heavy.

And you can see on the front there

it's 99.99% pure gold.

I really don't think I've ever held anything so valuable in my hands before.

But gold has another quality too - its colour,

this glorious, radiant yellowness.

And I think this colour

is one of the most alluring

and beguiling colours of them all.

This is a tale of our timeless obsession with all things golden.

Across the millennia,

we have used gold to revere the things we've held most sacred.

And reflected in our works of art, we see the story of ourselves

and our changing beliefs and perceptions.

I'm aware I'm playing with colour.

Not just with words, but I'm playing with colour.

'From honouring our ancient Gods...

'..to the worldly Kings and Queens of the Renaissance,

'we'll reveal the techniques which craftsmen have used.'

Look at that.

'From the fine arts of icon painting

'to the darks arts of alchemy...

So this was a desperate time for him. He had to think about how to escape with his life.

'..we'll see how in the consumer age,

'gold came to represent little more than wealth itself

'and we'll see how one painter attempted

'to restore the colour of gold

'to divine status.'

Nobody knows when humans first took gold from the earth.

We can only imagine their wonder at what they saw.

This is perhaps what gold looked like

when humans first set eyes on it

and you can see why they fell in love with it almost immediately,

not because of its rarity because they didn't know it was rare,

and not because of its versatility because they didn't know what it could do.

They fell in love with it because of the way it looked -

its wonderful, radiant, warm yellowness.

And there was only one thing in the universe that looked anything like this substance

and that was the sun.

Ancient people came to believe that gold and the sun were one and the same,

so when they honoured the sun,

only the colour of gold would suffice.

A golden sun disc, 2000 BC...

..a ceremonial necklace, 800 BC,

and the most remarkable of all,

a sun chariot from 1500 BC -

now the star exhibit at the National Museum of Denmark.

This is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in a museum.

It's utterly breathtaking.

Because what we have here is essentially

a 3,500-year-old miniature model chariot

in virtually mint condition.

I can see there's this utterly delightful bronze horse

with its ears pricked up attentively,

and it's standing on these four wheels

and dragging this great disc behind it

and that disc is the sun.

For the people who made this, the sun was a great, golden goddess

that was being carried by this divine horse every day

across the sky from east to west and back again at night.

It is believed the elders of the community, the priests,

would pull it around back and forth

to teach people the importance of the sun.

It's decorated with all these exquisite patterns

that represent the radiating rays of the sun,

the pulsating light, and its movement through the years.

It's an explicit connection between the colour of gold and the colour of the sun -

both of them have this warm, radiant yellowness,

both have this terrific sparkle,

and both of them have this eternal shine,

because 3,500 years later everything else has deteriorated

but the gold on this disc like the sun outside this room

is still shining.

The desire to honour the sun with gold is as old as civilisation itself.

But one civilisation would come to be identified with golden treasures like no other.

The ancient Egyptians were unique.

While many cultures had to hunt down gold in far-off lands,

trade or barter for it...

..here in North East Africa, the Egyptians found gold everywhere.

Now the ancient Egyptians were very, very lucky.

Their territory was blessed with seemingly unlimited reserves of gold.

There were hundreds of deposits dotted all over the place.

The richest of these deposits were here in these mountains

of the Eastern Desert and here, farther south into Sudan and Nubia,

and what's more, the Egyptians were very good at extracting that gold.

They had huge teams of men working day in, day out

bringing out of the earth.

For that reason,

Egypt quickly became the world's first great gold-producing state.

But to understand the exquisite gold work in ancient Egypt,

we have to leave Cairo and head south into the desert.

This is Saqqara, home to some of the oldest tombs in Egypt.

And here is some remarkable evidence of the reverence

the Egyptians had for their goldsmiths.

4,000 years ago, the grand vizier, Mereruka,

was interred in these chambers.

In life, he was entrusted with the production

and protection of Egypt's gold.

And carved onto the walls of his tomb,

are depictions of his invaluable work.

These relief carvings depict the entire Egyptian gold-making process

from start, all the way to finish.

The first step is recorded here

and this involves the weighing of the gold.

What I find interesting about that,

is the Egyptians had plentiful quantities of gold

and yet still it was so valuable

that the pharaoh didn't want even a single little bit unaccounted for.

But the two most remarkable images, I think, in this entire relief,

are these two here.

I think they're remarkable for two reasons.

First, the hieroglyphs, you can see there and there.

Usually, we presume ancient hieroglyphs

to impart some solemn wisdom but not these ones,

because this man is saying to that man, "Oh, isn't this beautiful?"

This man is saying to that guy,

"Get a move on with your work, slowcoach."

It's just an amazing moment, an amazing moment of humour

and life and reality

from thousands of years ago.

But the other remarkable thing about these images here,

is all four goldsmiths are dwarfs.

All across ancient Egypt, dwarfs are depicted as gold workers

because they were actually perceived by ancient Egyptians

as possessing magical powers.

So it seems utterly logical that who would you get to work

with your most precious and special material?

You would get your most precious and special people.

For millennia, the great creations of these goldsmiths

were mostly lost to view.

They were melted down by grave robbers

or simply lay undiscovered deep beneath the sands.

But in the 20th century, one British archaeologist

was determined to bring them to light.

Howard Carter was a maverick who had come to Egypt in search of gold.

It was he who made the greatest archaeological discovery

of all time.

On 26th November 1922,

Carter broke into the tomb of Tutankhamen.

A gasp of wonderment escaped our lips,

so gorgeous was the sight that met our eyes...

..everywhere, the glint of gold.

The golden treasures of Tutankhamen

were never intended to be seen by human eyes,

but Carter removed them from their resting place

and bundled them off to the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

The hoard contained Tutankhamen's throne, jewellery of every sort,

golden slippers and this huge sarcophagus.

It contains 110kg of solid gold

and is the largest gold object ever found in Egypt.

But the most astounding treasure

made by the ancient Egyptians, is this -

the death mask of Tutankhamen.

It's in solid gold, of course, 11 kilograms of it

and this mask would have sat right on top of the dead pharaoh's face.

The craftsmanship is exquisite.

The gold is inlaid with precious stones, lapis, feldspar

and carnelian and the eyes modelled with obsidian and quartz.

It's a surprisingly tender portrait of the man, actually,

because he's got these big ears and fleshy lips

and these wide innocent eyes that are painted pink in the corners

just to bring them to life.

But the question for me is why is this mask in gold?

Why were the coffins in gold? Why were the shrines in gold?

Why was almost everything in Tutankhamen's tomb in gold?

Well, I don't think this is a statement of wealth,

no matter what we think about gold today,

because the dead Tutankhamen certainly needed to impress no-one.

It's in gold because he believed, just like his contemporaries,

that gold had magical powers.

And think about it - here is a substance that has the same colour

as the all-powerful sun, it never tarnishes, never corrodes,

never rusts, it shines for eternity.

I think Tutankhamen was hoping

that some of that might just rub off on him,

it might bring him back to life, give him a little bit of eternity

and transform him into an eternal invincible, immortal sun god

in his own right.

The desire to honour the sun god had pushed the Egyptians

to the greatest heights of craftsmanship.

And the ancient civilisations that followed

continued to use gold to reveal the divine.

This Etruscan brooch depicts a fabled chimera...

..the face of the Greek Goddess shimmers in gold...

..and this mythical serpent coils to form a Roman armlet.

But as twilight fell on the ancient world,

new ideas emerged.

They demanded we suppress our reverence for gold

and they would have profound implications for art.

Rome

this was the scene of the revolution,

when all pagan gods were banished

and replaced with a single creator.

It was 312 AD when the Roman Emperor Constantine saw the light.

For a rich and powerful ruler,

his conversion to Christianity was little short of a miracle...

..because his new religion spoke directly to the poor

and to the needy.

Christianity was unoriginal in many ways

but the one really new idea it had was its distaste for wealth,

for extravagance and for ostentatious display.

Indeed, passage after passage in the Bible condemns those

who are seduced by worldly luxuries like gold.

And in fact, it even declares that it would be easier for a camel

to pass through the eye of a needle

than for a rich man to get into heaven.

And thus, in the earliest Christian art, Christ is shown as perhaps

the first poor god in history - a modest and humble shepherd.

But within just a few centuries,

something strange started to happen.

Across the Christian world, a new art form emerged

that showed how early Christians who had once renounced gold

now couldn't resist its allure.

This is a Byzantine icon

and images like this were produced as early as the 5th century

so really, really early in the history of Christianity.

But, you know, what really surprises me about this

is how much gold there is on it.

Christianity, after all, constantly criticised people

for being seduced by material wealth.

So why would this artist deem it appropriate

to put so much gold on this painting?

I think the reason is that gold here is representing not material things,

it's actually there to represent immaterial things.

It's perhaps the most immaterial thing of them all.

Aidan Hart is an artist

who keeps the tradition of icon painting alive

and he's steeped in the mysteries of gold in Christian art.

I pray, of course, first, and then while I'm painting,

it's always a sort of inner prayer -

particularly the Jesus prayer, this is very important.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.

I'm aware that I'm praying with colour.

I'm not just praying with words but I'm praying with colour.

It's a very silent work but very articulate

and I will die but the words will carry on.

I will be forgotten but the icon will keep speaking.

Before that soaks in, I now lay the gold.

The background of an icon is generally gold.

It represents the all-pervading presence of God.

It reflects light, it gives light. It's radiant with God.

Radiant with light therefore radiant with gold, if you like.

The light in an icon is dynamic.

The light might be dancing off the golden background

so the gold is not just representing God looking at us and sitting on a throne,

God is mingling with us, transforming us, communing with us.

Through the light and the moving light of an icon,

God is intertwining, as it were, with his creation.

A life with God is dynamic, not static.

These paintings were supposed to be seen by candlelight

and when you bring a candle right up to this painting,

the colour of the gold is absolutely transformed.

It goes from this murky brown

to this absolutely brilliant shimmering yellowness

and it seems to be alive.

It sort of dances and, you know, no other colour, no other substance,

responded to light, reflected the light quite like gold,

and that is why for the Christians,

gold became the colour of the light of God.

The golden light of icon paintings was intoxicating

and the Christians were desperate for more of it.

They yearned to be fully immersed in the divine light of heaven.

The basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna

was built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD.

It is a masterpiece of early Christian art.

Inside, the walls are encrusted with gold.

But this gold is applied

with one of the great inventions

of the Byzantine Age.

This is a gold tessera.

There are tens of thousands of these all across that wall

and what they do is amazing.

They trap all of the light in this church,

and then the glass like a lens amplifies that light.

But it's not the monotonous, unchanging, blinding light of electricity.

The light sparkles and it glitters and it glistens.

No wonder they loved them so much.

They must have thought when they looked at that,

that they were looking right into the kingdom of heaven.

The early Christians who had once renounced all things golden,

had, like the ancients before them,

used the colour ingeniously to bring themselves closer to their God.

And for a millennium, Christian artists continued to use gold

to feel his presence.

But in the Renaissance, heaven seemed to lose its monopoly on gold

and gold would become a potent force in more worldly affairs.

From the 1500s, there was a flowering of wonderful golden jewels...

..flights of fancy made to satisfy the vanity of kings,

queens,

and their courts.

Now, this exquisite little thing really typifies the top end

of Renaissance gold work and it shows on the front,

the inimitable features of Queen Elizabeth I,

in solid gold, of course, and these golden cameos

would be handed out by the Queen to her most trusted courtiers.

So while it's gold, it's no longer really about the sacred.

What it's really about is power, politics and, above all, status.

The great kings and queens of the Renaissance scoured Europe

seeking the finest goldsmiths in a bid to outshine their rivals.

And there was one place whose reputation for gold work

eclipsed nearly all the others.

This is the Ponte Vecchio in Florence

and in the Renaissance it was one of the great centres of gold work.

The finest goldsmiths in Italy would line up along this narrow street,

much as they do today in fact,

and from here they would sell their wares to the kings and queens

and the rulers and the rich people of Europe.

And when these people arrived here,

most hoped to get their hands on the work of one man.

He was called Benvenuto Cellini.

Cellini's father wanted him to become a musician

but Benvenuto wanted to be an artist.

At the age of just 13, he forced his way into the goldsmiths' workshops

here on the Ponte Vecchio.

It's no surprise that there's a huge statue of him here.

He's the only goldsmith to get a statue.

That is because Benvenuto Cellini quickly became the greatest goldsmith of them all.

Cellini was fastidious in recording his many ingenious techniques

and his writings remain a bible of the goldsmith's art.

Paolo Penko is a Florentine goldsmith

who has been following the teachings of Cellini since he was a boy.

Cellini's legacy lives on at the studio of Paolo Penko,

but of Cellini's gold work,

only a single piece has survived the centuries,

yet it is thought to be the Mona Lisa of sculpture.

The story of its creation is remarkable if only

because Cellini was never as pure as the gold with which he worked.

Cellini was a troublemaker.

He murdered three people and he tried to kill many more.

He was charged for rape, he was charged for sodomy

and he was constantly on the run,

constantly getting into fights and brawls,

and he was even partial to a little bit of theft.

On one occasion, he was accused of stealing jewellery from the Pope.

But there was one king who would forgive Cellini everything

to have him at his court.

King Francis I of France was one of Europe's most flamboyant and art-loving monarchs.

He wanted to make his kingdom the centre of the Renaissance,

and in 1540, he invited Cellini to Paris.

Shortly after Cellini arrived in Paris,

King Francis invited him in for dinner

and said he would pay him 1,000 scudi, which was a vast sum of money at the time,

if Cellini would make him a solid gold salt cellar.

Now when most people think of salt cellars,

they think of objects like this.

But Cellini was no ordinary person

and he instantly set to work on one of the most ambitious projects of his career.

He sweated over the salt cellar for three long years,

but the result of his labours was a masterpiece.

Cellini's salt cellar is now in Vienna where it's being carefully restored.

It's a rare opportunity to see Cellini's masterpiece

just as he saw it in his own workshop.

So this is it, the Saliera.

I must say, it's incredibly exciting

to see it in this way.

You really get an idea

of how Cellini

put this masterpiece together

because it's all in its constituent parts as he would have seen them.

The two most recognisable parts

are these two magnificent

solid gold nudes.

On the left,

we have the god of the sea, Neptune or Mare,

and you can recognise him from his terrific little trident.

Next to Neptune would have been

this magnificent gold and enamelled boat,

a boat that may well have

a grumpy self-portrait

of Cellini on the front.

It was in that boat that King Francis would have put his salt.

Salt was an incredibly important substance in the 16th century

and Francis probably got about 10% of his annual revenue from salt tax.

It was quite important to have it in a great gold dish on the table.

Opposite Neptune would have been the goddess of the earth,

known as Terra or Ceres, and she is there squeezing her breast,

which may well be a symbol

of fecundity and fertility,

or just Cellini having a bit of a joke. We don't know.

But she had next to her

this absolutely exquisite

triumphal arch, and inside that, Francis would have put his pepper.

Now, these two figures and these two vessels

would have then gone on top

of this...

unbelievably colourful, brilliant surface.

Neptune would have sat on this side, which is a more nautical side,

and the goddess of the land would have sat on this land section

where we can see rocks and plants and animals.

This would have gone onto this ebony base.

I must say

that standing in front of it today,

I'm just bowled over by how brilliant this work of art is.

All the techniques known to 16th-century goldsmiths

and all the techniques written about in Cellini's manual,

all of them are applied here and applied with consistent brilliance.

He's also responded to all these different genres.

There's a landscape there, animals,

and these two great Michelangelesque nudes.

There's architecture, there's even, perhaps, a self-portrait.

This is a kind of

distillation of the whole history of art

into one condiment dish.

When Cellini presented his work to the king,

it is said that Francis squealed with delight.

So perfect was the piece

that Francis could barely bring himself to touch it.

But there was one king who would have grabbed the Saliera with both hands.

In the deep, dark forests of eastern Europe,

there lived a ruler whose lust for gold outshone all others.

But his obsession would turn him from the fine art of the goldsmith

to the dark art of alchemy.

He was Augustus the Strong,

and in 1694, he was made Elector of Saxony.

Augustus was something of an outdoorsman.

He was famed for being able to break horseshoes in two with his bare hands.

His favourite sport was fox tossing,

a grotesque activity in which he catapulted the poor creatures

as high into the air as possible.

On one particularly gruesome day's contest,

Augustus and his friends tossed 687 foxes,

533 hares, 34 badgers

and 21 wild cats to their deaths.

Here in Dresden, the capital of his kingdom,

is an equestrian statue of Augustus himself.

And they call it the Golden Rider.

Here is Augustus the Strong, looking like some ancient Roman Emperor,

gazing out over his great eastern European kingdom.

And, you know, I think it's a rather fitting monument to him

because there was nothing that Augustus wanted more

than to be seen as one of the great rulers of European history -

up there with Justinian, as great as King Francis,

and he knew that the secret to achieving that ambition was gold.

Among Augustus's baroque palaces that still dominate Dresden today

are more relics of his reign...

..and one of them is an extraordinary golden work -

a fantasy vision of the glittering court Augustus aspired to create.

This immodest piece was created by Augustus's favourite goldsmith,

Johann Melchior Dinglinger.

It took him seven years to make and it depicts

the court of the great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.

He was Augustus's contemporary

and reputed to be the richest man in the world.

There are 132 exotic courtiers.

Dinglinger used over 5,000 precious stones

and, of course, lavish quantities of gold,

but this was the closest Augustus could get to such splendour...

..and as he gazed on it, how envious he must have been.

But Augustus would hatch a plan,

a dark plot to fill his coffers with unlimited amounts of gold.

It was 1701 when, in one of his many castles,

Augustus got wind of an extraordinary rumour.

Somewhere deep in Prussia,

a teenager had gone and achieved something

that no-one had ever achieved before -

something many people thought was completely impossible,

and something that finally seemed to bring within reach

Augustus's dream of unlimited gold.

Friedrich Bottger was a 19-year-old alchemist.

He had apparently performed the miracle of transmutation,

turning lesser metals into glittering gold.

At one of these demonstrations, he's supposed to have transmuted

a number of silver coins

into an ingot of pure gold.

Now, that kind of news

cannot be kept secret.

Augustus wasn't sure whether to believe it or not.

Just to be on the safe side, he had Bottger kidnapped

and thrown deep into the dungeons beneath his castle.

History is scattered with examples of alchemists

who ended up on the gallows, being executed,

because they seemed to have really thought they could attain transmutation.

Then, of course, they couldn't actually live up to that.

It was here in this network of subterranean chambers

underneath Augustus's castle, that Bottger was sent.

The doors were bolted, all the windows were bricked up

and inside, Bottger laboured day and night

to manufacture the gold that Augustus wanted so badly.

Bottger finds himself between a rock and a hard place.

He's being watched all the time.

At some point, he's going to have to produce something that will satisfy his captor.

Really, this must have been a desperate time for Bottger.

He had to think about how to escape with his life.

To keep the noose from his neck,

Bottger would have used every trick in the alchemist's recipe book.

"Take all of the aforesaid black faeces or black dragon

"and spread them on a marble or other fit stone

"and put into the one side thereof a burning coal

"and the fire will glide through the faeces

"and consign them into a colour very glorious to behold.

But this colour was as close as Augustus would ever come to the alchemist's dream.

After 12 years of imprisonment,

Bottger, of course, had failed to conjure up a single speck of gold.

Only some sycophantic poetry saved him from the gallows.

But Augustus had one golden object

that perfectly captures the failure of his grand ambitions.

It's a sun mask

that he rather liked wearing at his many balls and pageants.

Now, one of the most remarkable things about the mask

is Dinglinger modelled it precisely on Augustus's features.

So by looking at the mask, we can see what Augustus the Strong

actually looked like.

One thing I'm particularly surprised by

is how small and chubby his face was,

but for me, this isn't really about reality,

it's a fantasy and that's why that mask becomes so powerful and so revealing.

It embodies that desperate desire of Augustus

to enter the pantheon of the great gods and the great kings,

but the truth is, underneath that glowing mask,

he wasn't rich enough and wasn't powerful enough to be one of them,

and that's why this mask is made of copper

with a little bit of gold put on the top of it.

Augustus's vision of unlimited gold had failed to materialise

but in a little over 100 years,

the alchemist's dream would come true.

And this miraculous discovery took place...

..in Birmingham.

In the 19th century, Birmingham was far and away

the most inventive place on the planet.

Now let me just give one example, in that period,

this city registered three times as many patents

as any other city in the world.

Indeed, it seemed that hardly a day would pass here

without someone inventing something.

But for me, one of those inventions was more remarkable

than all the others because for the first time

it promised to bring gold within the reach of everyone.

That remarkable invention was the brainchild

of one George Richards Elkington.

George Elkington was a typical product of industrial Birmingham.

He was inventive, he was industrious

and he was obsessed with taking out patents.

He patented virtually everything he ever produced.

The bi-focal, for instance, but Elkington's most profitable licence

was issued on 25th March, 1840, when he patented

a way to make gold objects out of almost nothing.

Years before Edison had even invented the electric lightbulb,

Elkington was harnessing electricity to make gold objects.

He called the process electro-plating

and it was a marvel of the industrial age.

At the centre of Elkington's factory stood a huge machine

that rotated 500 times a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week

and around that machine were these vast troughs of bubbling brown liquid

and those troughs transformed ordinary objects into gold.

Now, contemporaries were astounded by the process.

Some of them thought it was magic, some of them thought it was alchemy,

some thought it was some technology from a distant future

but nearly all of them thought it was a miracle.

One day in 1844,

Elkington was graced with a visit from Prince Albert

who had come to see the miracle for himself.

And for this special occasion,

Elkington had prepared a most wondrous spectacle.

Elkington plucked a small rose from his lapel.

He then delicately lowered it into one of his troughs of liquid.

He waited.

The crowd waited and when the time was just right, he withdrew it.

The crowd was amazed. A round of applause broke out

because Elkington's rose had been turned to gold.

And as they looked closer, they grew even more amazed

because by chance, a small cobweb had been on Elkington's rose

and the cobweb too had been turned

into the finest threads of gold.

Albert was captivated,

so captivated that he became an electro-plating addict.

On his return to London, it is said that he had

his very own electro-plating suite installed at Buckingham Palace

finally fulfilling every ruler's dream of unlimited gold.

With a royal seal of approval,

Elkington's factory went into overdrive.

Within a few years, he was employing 10,000 people

and his gold was sent across the world,

to India, to Uruguay and even to Egypt.

Elkington was churning out gold objects

on a scale never seen before.

Why do you think people like electroplating so much?

Cheap. It's exactly what they're liking!

Because if everything was made out of solid metal,

it would cost a fortune, where this will look like it's made out of solid gold

but it's really not!

That there is gold. That's what the actual gold looks like.

-What?!

-Yeah.

That's actually gold. I don't know how they make it like that.

I'm not going to pretend to know. But that there would do...

..hundreds and hundreds of items of work, just that small amount.

And then, comes out and it's gold.

It's a really thin amount.

You wouldn't be able to buy a packet of cigarettes

with the amount of gold that's on there.

HE LAUGHS

Because that's just a colour. It's a gold colour,

so people buy it for what it looks like more than

what the value of the actual gold is.

-People think it is real gold.

-Yeah.

-I think a lot of people would be fooled.

-Yeah, a lot of people would.

Fool's gold!

'Elkington's fool's gold

'had the Victorian public enchanted.

'They peered into Elkington's glittering showrooms

'from Newcastle...

'to London's fashionable Regent Street.

'But the public didn't just look.

'They could now own a little bit of gold

'for the very first time.'

This was the most revolutionary technology

and what it did was democratise gold.

It brought gold into ordinary people's homes.

'And Elkington's ingenious new technology

'allowed him to make perfect copies

'of the most priceless and exquisite treasures ever to have been found.'

And these are based on a really extraordinary original,

an object discovered in Afghanistan,

and Elkington made numerous, numerous reproductions of them.

What's amazing is this probably served

some incredibly important religious function thousands of years ago,

but now it was simply for display.

Perhaps you could even use it as a toothbrush holder.

'As his electroplating empire expanded,

'one city was hooked

'on Elkington's golden wares.

'The dawn of the 20th century was Vienna's gilded age.

'Even as the Austrian Empire crumbled,

'their lust for gold remained.

'But here there lived an artist

'who was determined

'to make gold sacred once again.

'Gustav Klimt produced a series of glittering paintings.

'But one of them shines brighter

'than all the rest.

'..The Kiss...

'..known as the last word on love...

'..but I think it tells us just as much about gold.'

Klimt has thrown

almost every single kind of golden substance he could find

on to this one canvas.

In fact, there are eight different kinds of gold leaf alone

on this picture and then many more different kinds of gold paint,

and every single thing has been applied in a different way

so he has put some gold leaf down flat,

other times he's put gold on top of bits of plaster and shellac

to create these wonderful jewel-like textures.

So the whole thing becomes incredibly opulent.

It's almost like you're opening a bag of jewels

and looking inside to see all these fantastic treasures within.

He's looked back to the great Egyptian sun gods...

..the great Byzantine mosaics.

He had been to Ravenna, he'd seen those fantastic mosaics.

He's drawing on decorative gold work of the Renaissance, like Cellini.

So why is Klimt doing it?

Why so much gold in so many ways

with so many references and meanings?

Well, I think it's part of his desperate attempt to bring back gold from the brink

because he has lived through a period when gold has become debased,

it has become cheap, it's become tacky,

and he's trying to say, "No, gold is the most precious thing we have.

"It's the most numinous, spiritual, other-worldly thing we have,

"and therefore we have to devote it

"to the most important things in the world."

And for Klimt, the most important thing was love.

'It was a beautiful idea.

'But today, Klimt's grand ambition

'has been undone by the popularity of his work.

'Endlessly reproduced,

'The Kiss has become just another golden idol

'of our consumer century.

'Now most of us can have a little bit of gold in our lives.

'And our obsession with it remains undimmed.'

You know, I think the reason that we're so obsessed with gold

is that gold reflects the things

that every society holds most sacred.

So for the ancient Egyptians it was the sun and the afterlife,

for the Christians it was the light of God,

and for the Renaissance Kings it was power and status,

and for Gustav Klimt it was love and sex.

But this gold here underneath the Bank of England

suggests that for us perhaps the most sacred thing

is money.

And, you know, when this beautiful substance is locked away,

seen only as a number, as a price,

as a statistic on a spreadsheet,

I can't help feeling that maybe something is lost.

And maybe somehow

gold has lost its shine.

'In the next episode...

'..a colour from across the seas.

'From Giotto's heavenly visions

'to Titian's sensual delights...'

This is an utter barn storm.

'..from Picasso's melancholy yearning

'to Yves Klein's dreams of escape...

'..it's the colour of the great beyond, of the for ever unattainable...'

We were going to show those dirty Commies that we were better.

'..it's the story of blue.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd