In recent years, many books that focus on gold have emerged in the publishing adventure. Not, of course, gold as a precious metal, which many peoples, from antiquity to today, have used as raw material to create jewelry and other valuable objects.

All these books – and I believe without exception – have almost exclusively taken care of their images. They searched for and found the most impressive products of goldsmithing and adorned their pages with them: crowns, rings, necklaces, earrings, masks, goblets, gilded furniture, garments embroidered with gold, slippers, and earrings.

As for the texts that have occasionally accompanied these 'golden' editions, one cannot say that they attempted to delve into the essence of the precious metal. To go beyond, in other words, the shine of the material and seek the relationships that this shine could have with the goldsmith, the gold digger, or the owner of the golden object.

To go beyond technique and seek the need, whether it was social or simply commercial, for one technique or another to be conceived and applied.

(...) [Excerpt from the preface text]