Gold art
There are a lot of places where we can find the awesome result of gold and art fusion. Today we will visit five corners of the world where we can see it.
The first visit will be to The Gold Museum in Bogota, Colombia, because it has the biggest Pre Hispanic gold work collection.
The museum has a collection of 55,000 pieces and 4.000 of them are gold and tumbaga pieces.
The next stop is for people who love painting because we are going to the Neue Galerie in New York. There we can see one of the most expensive painting in the world: Portrait of Adele Bloch- Bauer I, a 1907 painting by Gustav Klimt.
Klimt took three years to complete this 54" x 54" painting and was made of oil and gold on canvas.
In June 2006 the work was sold for US$135 million to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York City.
The story of this painting is so amazing that it inspired a movie.
For our next visit is necessary you take your coats because we will penetrate into the cold Russia, exactly into the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg.
It is well known the luxuriance of Russian tsars, therefore we will take a look to the Gold room collection of antiquities that includes a large number of gold artifacts: bracelets, rings, earrings, female and male clothing decorations.
Among the religious objects are rich icons once owned by the imperial family. All of them are clad in gold mounts, adorned with brilliant-cut diamonds or the most precious gemstones such as emeralds, sapphires, rubies and pearls. German jewelers produced a 46 piece gold toilet setting for Empress Anna Ioanovna. It includes gold teapots, coffee-cups, wash-stands, candlesticks, trays and caskets.
Also we can see a great number of articles, snuff-boxes, watches and chains and gold sword hilts that Catherine the Great kept there.
This museum comprises over three million items, a treasure that we cannot miss.
After this walk we can leave the coat and wear something comfortable because we are going to visit the Wat Traimit temple in Bangkok, Thailand.
There is the world's largest massive gold seated Buddha, measuring nearly 3 metres in height and weighing five and a half tons.
In 1930 an old temple was destroyed and the Buddha was housed in Wat Traimit. The statue was very deteriorated but, because of the belief of the people, they couldn’t throw out it. In this pagoda was not enough place for the statue and it was 20 years out site of the temple under a sheet roof. In 1955 a new building was built and when it was being moved to its new location, the ropes broke, and the statue fell hard on the ground. At that moment, some of the plaster coating chipped off, allowing the gold surface underneath to be seen. When all the plaster was removed, it was found that the gold statue actually consisted of nine parts that fit smoothly together.
In our last stop, we will enjoy of the nature in its pure state from the Kinkaku-ji, in Kyoto.
In 1397 shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu built this rest palace and when he died it was converted into a Zen temple.
It is called the Gold Temple because it has three stories and the top two stories of the pavilion are covered with pure gold leaf.
It is one of the most popular buildings in Japan and is designated as a National Special Historic Site and a National Special Landscape.
We hope that you enjoyed our route and thank you for travelling with us!
