Gold
- HEX
- #FFD700
- RGB
- 255 215 0
- HSL
- 51° 100% 50%
- CMYK
- 0 16 100 0
Gold or Mustard?
A bright, warm yellow, cleaner and lighter than mustard.
Art
Gustav Klimt's The Kiss is oil paint and real gold leaf. Klimt, the son of a gold engraver, painted it at the height of his golden phase, after the gold-ground Byzantine mosaics he saw in Ravenna in 1903.
Symbolism
In medieval icons and altarpieces, gold leaf stood for heavenly light rather than for a color. Alchemists chased gold as the perfect metal and wrote it with the sun's sign, a circle with a dot. Heraldry calls gold or and lets it stand in for yellow.
Culture
Olympic gold medals haven't been solid gold since 1912. Today's are silver, plated with at least six grams of gold.
Science
Gold is too soft to grind: the bits weld back together. So medieval gilders beat it from coins instead, about a hundred leaves from one ducat by Cennino Cennini's reckoning, and rubbed it with a smooth stone or an animal's tooth until it shone like a mirror. To make gold paint, they first mixed it with mercury to make it brittle.
History
Gold leaf lost its place in painting. Around 1435 Leon Battista Alberti urged painters to imitate gold with paint, because flat leaf looks bright from one angle and dark from another and breaks a picture's lighting. Over the 1400s real gold shrank to halos and rays of divine light.
Language
Gold is the color yellow wanted to be. Latin aureus meant both golden and bright yellow, and heraldry calls yellow or, gold. The brilliant arsenic mineral orpiment takes its name from auripigmentum, 'gold paint'. Romans thought gold could be smelted from it, and Pliny says the emperor Caligula tried. It holds none.
Kin
- Byzantium: Klimt's gold was inspired by the mosaics of Ravenna
- Silver: Alchemy's sun and moon; heraldry's two metals
- Yellow: Same root, *ghel-; heraldry treats them as one
- Azure: Gold lilies on azure: the arms of the French kings
- Amber: The Amber Room: fossil resin panels backed with gold leaf
Sources
- Belvedere, Vienna, 'The Kiss' (oil and gold leaf on canvas)
- Britannica, 'Gustav Klimt'
- International Olympic Committee, 'Are Olympic gold medals made of gold?'
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Gage, Colour and Culture (1993)
- Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color (2019)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.