GOLD
Track 1: Introduction to Giovanni Corvaja
My name is Giovanni Corvaja and I’m a goldsmith. I am very happy just to be a goldsmith,
because gold is the passion of my life. I began working in this material, in gold, I began working
in gold since I was a teenager, a young teenager.
At the age of thirteen I enrolled in a school of goldsmithing and after the first few works in
silver I immediately started working with very small quantities of gold, and I got hooked by
this wonderful material.
To me, working with gold is a great privilege that as a goldsmith we have, and is also every
time a surprise and a pleasure.
An object in gold starts being a miracle already because it is gold. Gold to me is a miracle of
nature. In this collection of work, I see the true alchemy of gold.
[1.21 minutes]
Track 2: The tradition of working with gold
The knowledge of working with gold and with metal in general is a very old and ancient
knowledge that has been passed from generation to generation since the Neolithic period,
probably.
The ancient Egyptians believed that this knowledge was a revealed knowledge, revealed by an
angel to the goddess Osiris, and this goddess betrayed this secret by revealing it to a human
that she fell in love with.
It was meant to be passed from master to pupil and not to be written. In fact, the first texts
of written metallurgy were actually written by people escaped from Egypt.
I believe there is no self-taught craftsman, it doesn’t exist, the concept of a self-taught
craftsman. What we know and what we do is what we have learnt from our masters and it’s a
continuous improvement and learning from the past. And that is why the tradition of the craft
is such a valuable and important thing, and in most of these objects that we are seeing, we see
the celebration of craftsmanship.
[1.37 minutes]
Track 3: What a goldsmith needs to know
Working with gold presents some particularities. I find it quite hard to say if there is
something difficult about working with gold because it’s such a pleasurable activity and it’s like
playing, that it’s impossible for a craftsman to complain about his job.
What you definitely require as a goldsmith is a lot of knowledge in a lot of different
disciplines. To understand and to manipulate such a complex material you need to have
information and knowledge about metallurgy, about mechanic, about physic, about chemistry
and put all these together.
To do new things, you need to invent new systems and new techniques and this is actually
what keeps the job interesting and always rewarding, because you are working every day with
something that is going to teach you something and is going to be something new. So you are
applying all your knowledge on to something and this something which is difficult to consider
it a thing, but is more of an entity, is giving back to you some new knowledge.
[1.35 minutes]
Track 4: Gold is eternal
My personal feeling is that here in this exhibition we are celebrating a victory. We are
celebrating the victory of an eternal war that humankind has always fought against time. And
here we have one of those very rare victories against time and what it is that permits us to
call it a victory is the tool that we are using, gold.
Gold is eternal. Gold does not change, does not tarnish, but doesn’t even dissolve or
disappear, it just stays as it is put. We have objects [...] we can see objects here 3,000 years
old. These objects, they speak to us exactly like they spoke 3,000 years ago, they haven’t
changed at all. What they tell us is a message of beauty, of power sometime, of mystery. A
very poetic message too, they switch our imagination onto fantastic stories.
[1.29 minutes]