#gold

The story behind it, from what I can find, is a princess shut in a tower by her father and a god who gets in by turning himself into a shower of gold. It's a small canvas too — under a metre either way, which you'd never guess from a photo of it.

Nobody's actually sure who these two are, or which couple from the Old Testament they're dressed up as — the title only got attached by a dealer a couple of hundred years later and stuck. Van Gogh supposedly said he'd give ten years of his life to sit in front of it for a fortnight with nothing but a dry crust to eat.

He belonged to a group in Vienna who'd walked out on the official art establishment and built their own place to exhibit in, from what I've read. This comes from the stretch afterwards when he was deep into gold and pattern, and doing big pictures about the stages of a life.

The story behind it came from a Byron play about an Assyrian king who, with defeat coming, has everything he owns destroyed in front of him rather than let anyone else have it. Apparently the critics went for it hard when it was first shown, and it did him no favours with the officials who handed out state commissions.

This is where the phrase about the writing on the wall comes from — a king throws a feast using treasure taken from a temple, and a hand turns up mid-party to spell out how it ends for him. The Hebrew, according to Wikipedia, came from a learned neighbour in Amsterdam, and it's laid out in columns rather than the usual direction, which people have been arguing about ever since.

It's a set of hinged panels made for a chapel, painted on the outside as well — so most days it stayed shut and looked like a much plainer thing entirely, and only opened for feast days. It's been carted off and stolen more than once over the centuries, and one lower panel went missing in the thirties which, from what I can find, has never turned up.

This came just after a long public row in Vienna over some ceiling paintings he'd been commissioned to make for the university — they got called ugly and obscene in the papers, and he ended up handing the money back. Supposedly he wanted to title this one 'To My Critics', and the woman grinning out over her shoulder was the reply. He was talked out of the title.

There's actual gold leaf on this, plus silver and platinum — his father was a gold engraver, it's said, so he knew the trade before he ever painted. When it first went on show it was listed under a plainer name, just 'lovers'.

For years this was shown under a different biblical woman's name — people kept taking it for Salome — and that's supposedly why the right name ended up hammered into the metal at the top. A goldsmith brother of his made that frame, from what I can find, so the frame and the painting were meant to arrive as one object.

The man on top isn't meant to be anyone in particular — an ordinary bloke in a plain shirt, which is supposedly the whole point. You'll come across it in one of the old squares in Salzburg, hemmed in by buildings a few centuries older than it is.