The Last Gold Beater in Venice

In Venice, a person is surrounded by gold.

It clothes the statue of the archangel Gabriel atop the bell tower on St. Mark’s Square and glistens in the mosaics on the facade of St. Mark’s Basilica, aptly nicknamed “the Golden Church.” It sometimes appears in the artisanal glass from the island of Murano, on gondola ornaments, the better-quality masks for Carnival and even on top of rice dishes and desserts in restaurants across the city.

All of these examples use beaten gold, thin sheets of the precious metal, also called gold leaf. And much of it comes from the workshop of Marino Menegazzo, widely acknowledged as the last goldbeater — or battiloro, in Italian — to produce golden leaves using traditional techniques in Venice and one of very few remaining in Europe.

The art of gold ornamentation is believed to have been developed by the ancient Egyptians, then used by the Greeks for their chryselephantine statues — made of gold, or chrysos, and ivory, or elephantine — such as Zeus at the Temple of Olympia or Athena Parthenos at the Parthenon.

Historians say the technique first was seen in Venice in the 11th century and flourished during the republic’s 18th century heyday. But then the decline in the number of skilled artisans began.

“In the 1700s there used to be about 300, but now it’s only me,” Mr. Menegazzo said during a video interview from his warrenlike workshop.

Mr. Menegazzo learned his craft in the 1970s from his father-in-law, Mario Berta, whose family had been in the industry for generations.

The Mario Berta Battiloro workshop opened in the 1920s; it now is operated by Mr. Menegazzo; his wife, Sabrina Berta, Mario Berta’s daughter; and their daughters, Eleonora and Sara.

Inside the dimly lit shop, housed in what was once the residence of the 16th century painter Titian, Sara Menegazzo pointed to a wall where a square of gold measuring 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters (two-tenths of an inch by two-tenths of an inch) had been mounted on a black background. It was made from one gram (.035 ounces) of the precious metal.

“From one gram of gold, we get 50 sheets of gold,” Ms. Menegazzo said.

Golden Leaves

How? It all starts with a 100-gram gold ingot, which the Menegazzo family buys from a supplier in the nearby city of Vicenza. The ingot is melted and reformed into smaller ingots, each about six centimeters wide.

A smaller ingot then is run — the industry uses the term laminated — through a rolling mill to yield a three-meter-long gold sheet two centimeters wide and less than a millimeter thick, looking quite a bit like a long golden ribbon.

Using a standard pair of scissors, Ms. Menegazzo cuts the sheet into two-centimeter squares, each about the size of a small postage stamp, the dimension that her father considers best for further processing.

Ms. Menegazzo noted that the golden sheet she was handling during the video interview had a champagne color — various colors can be produced if other metals, mainly copper, are mixed into the gold before the initial ingot is poured.

All the little squares then are arranged neatly — a total of 330 slid, one by one, between leaves of glassine or crystal parchment paper already tied together on one side to create what is called a booklet. It is beaten for about 30 minutes with a mechanized mallet that dates to 1926, and then Mr. Menegazzo beats it by hand for 30 minutes more, using a convex-head hammer weighing about eight kilograms (17.5 pounds).

During this beating, he moves the booklet horizontally and in circles so the pressure is even. “Through the strikes, the two-centimeter golden squares heat up, melt and expand into a round sheet with a diameter of about 10 centimeters,” Ms. Menegazzo said.

Each of the circular golden sheets then is removed from the booklet with wooden tools — “because you can’t touch gold with your hands, otherwise it melts,” she said — and transferred to a table where it is cut into four parts, like a pie.

The wedges are layered into another booklet made of transparent plastic sheets and beaten again by hand, first with a hammer weighing three kilograms and then with others up to one weighing eight. These rounds last for anywhere from 50 minutes to two hours, depending on conditions.

Finally the gold leaves, each now measuring eight centimeters square and much thinner than a human hair, are removed from the booklet and stacked up perfectly using a carrello, the Italian name for a special tool with two blades on a wooden handle. Then they are placed, 25 sheets at a time, into silk paper packets, ready to be sold 54 to 85 euros ($59 to $92) per packet, depending on the gold’s market rate.

The only exceptions are the 24-karat gold sheets meant for cosmetics or for consumption; they require sterilization in the business’s ultraviolet machine.

The Menegazzos, who declined to disclose the workshop’s annual revenue, say they make about 500,000 sheets of gold leaf a year. Almost all of them go to clients, but some are used in products sold on their website, such as gold facial kits, which start at €74, and packets of edible gold, about €76.

They also offer hourlong tours of the workshop, charging €52 for as many as five people and €11 per person for groups of six to 12.

Brilliant and Durable

Gold is naturally resistant to corrosion and can last forever, part of the reason it is so popular for architectural decoration and use on outdoor statues.

And the family prefers to focus on production for such artistic use. The Gabriel statue on St. Mark’s bell tower and the Madonna statue in the Duomo in Milan, for example, are sheathed in their work.

For the 2018 Homo Faber event, an exhibition showcasing rare craftsmanship that is held every two years in Venice, Mr. Menegazzo worked with the Dutch designer Kiki van Eijk to create the impression of sunlight over table objects through a rectangular sheet of his 24-karat gold leaf.

Alberto Cavalli, the acting curator of Homo Faber, which is staged by the Michelangelo Foundation, wrote that Mr. Menegazzo “perfectly embodies our definition of ‘rarity,’ noting that the atelier was the last remaining gold-leaf beater in the city.

Mr. Menegazzo has often collaborated with the Dutch sculptor Ans Joosten, who was introduced to his work by her son, who studied in Venice. Last year, for example, she added a mask covered in his golden leaves to a statue commissioned by the Theaterhotel De Oranjerie in Roermond, the Netherlands.

“His gold feels like a second skin on the marble and reflects the light, which, in my opinion, is not possible with any other comparable product,” Ms. Joosten said in a phone interview, adding praise for its “texture, that has the gentleness of air.”

Ms. Joosten said that when she met the Menegazzo family last year in Venice, she was struck by Mr. Menegazzo’s comment that his gold had a soul. “I then understood that, we were both highly aware of the human capacity to create life together with pure earthly materials,” she said.

An Unsure Future

Sara Menegazzo said that artists recognized the quality of the family’s beaten gold. “It is silkier, and it looks less metallic than the golden leaves produced through machines,” she said.

But the lower prices of machine-made golden leaves have taken a toll on the business’s revenues and future prospects. In the 1990s, it employed 14 people, but now there are only the four members of the family.

Mr. Menegazzo has had apprentices, but none have had the patience to complete the four-year training.

“The last one who was with us had too many muscles, too much strength,” he said, “but this job is not about physical strength, it is about the technique and the patience to adapt to the daily variations of gold, which is a lively metal affected by the weather.”

At 70, Mr. Menegazzo is beyond retirement age in Italy and is not sure how much longer he will work. “Without government’s support for young apprentices in this craft and without youth willing to learn, it will all probably end with me,” he said.

But Venice has been faithful to its last battiloro. Some of his gold leaf, for example, adorns a gin cocktail called Elegance, served at the bar of the Aman Venice hotel.

Antonio Ferrara, the bar’s manager who also is a bar consultant and who created the cocktail, said the glinting detail paid homage to the architecture of the 16th-century palazzo that the hotel occupies.

It is adorned with numerous frescos with golden detailing, including by the 17th-century Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and one such fresco is right above the Aman’s bar.

“I serve my cocktail over a mirror saucer that reflects the fresco above the bar, and everyone is enchanted,” Mr. Ferrara said.