The gilder's art.

Pots and pots of brushes of all sizes, steel dental tools, clamps, a two-burner hotplate containing an unrecognizable melting ooze incorporating a hefty clove of garlic, and glass containers holding a wide array of colored clays. These are just some of the accouterments of the gilder's art that can be found in a walk-up studio in lower Manhattan where Giovanni Bucchi, a wiry and ebullient Roman, plies a complex craft that is hundreds of years old. The resident deity is a small gilded wood statue of Archangel Michael created in Florence in the seven-teenth century, which greets one immediately upon entering. Its age is apparent, and in more than a few places its gilding has cracked or flaked off to reveal the gesso beneath. Michael is affiliated with many professions including gilders, as well as airborne things. This could not be more fitting for someone who works with gold leaf, which is as light as a dandelion's seedball.

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In Europe gilders still train under the apprenticeship system, and Bucchi spent thirteen years learning his craft in the workshops of master gilders in Italy, Germany, and France before moving to the United States in 1989. Since his arrival in New York City he has worked on conservation projects as wide-ranging as the mid-eighteenth-century gilded doors from the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi in Genoa (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and a card table made in New York City by Honore Lannuier about 1815.

The techniques used to apply gesso remained relatively unchanged until about 1785. Recutting the gesso after it has been applied is a gilder's signature, and today an experienced craftsman like Bucchi can identify the place of origin and approximate date of the gilding on a piece of antique furniture.

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The painstaking and labor-intensive process of water gilding requires several steps. Since Bucchi works with antiques, many of his tools, and all of his recipes, are also old. Gesso, in Bucchi's case, is made from rabbit-skin glue mixed with calcium carbonate and a clove of garlic--a natural fungicide that prolongs the life of the size, or glue. The gesso is applied in several layers. After it has dried, the surface is rubbed with reeds until it is smooth. The gilder must then recut any ...