A very pretty effect may be obtained in a small and not very formal manuscript by painting into the spaces left for the capitals little squares of red and blue, and painting upon these the letters and ornament--all in gold powder--very freely and quickly. The kind of treatment is rather crudely suggested by fig. 113. The pleasant appearance of the pages--as though they were scattered over with tiny squares of cloth of gold and red and blue--is produced with comparative ease, while the use of leaf gold might entail an expenditure of more time and pains than the book was worth. In the finest class of manuscripts, however, these matt gold letters would be somewhat informal and out of place.
Gold is always raised and burnished as bright as possible, unless there is a special reason for using matt gold.
The height to which it is raised varies, according to the effect desired, from a considerable thickness to the thinnest possible coat of "size." Extremely thin and extremely thick raising are both objectionable (see p. 150): roughly speaking, a suitable height for any ordinary purpose is between 1/100 and 1/32 of an inch.
The surface, in the case of large forms, is generally made as smooth and perfect as possible, so that, as Cennino Cennini says, the burnished gold "_will appear almost dark from its own brightness_"; and its [p185] brightness is only seen when the light falls on it at a particular angle. The gilding of a manuscript, however, is slightly flexible, and a large gilded surface is likely to be bent, so that some part of it is sure to catch the light.
Small surfaces highly burnished very often do not show the effect of, or "tell" as, gold, unless they catch the light by accident. It is well, therefore, where the forms are small to have several on the page, so that one or another will always shine out and explain the rest. And while the proper craftsman tries always to get the best finish which he reasonably can, the natural, slight unevennesses or varying planes of small gilded forms may be of advantage to the whole effect. The pleasant effect of such natural variations may be seen in thirteenth-century Initials, where numbers of little gold pieces are fitted into the backgrounds, and their changing surfaces cause the whole to be lit up with little sparkles of light. A parallel to this may be found in the hand-tooling of a book-cover, which sparkles with gold, because the binder could not press in each piece of gold-leaf absolutely level. On the other hand, the "deadness" of a machine-stamped cover is largely due to the _dead level_ of its gilding.