Restoration

The twenty-second entry is la doratura, gold laid on in leaf thin enough to move in a breath, and the two languages have taken that image to opposite conclusions. English made it a reproach. « To gild the lily » is to decorate what is already beautiful and so to spoil it, and the phrase is a welding together of a line in King John that pairs gilding refined gold with painting the lily: the play says both, the idiom kept one flower and one metal. Most of what English built on gilding carries the same suspicion of surface — « a gilded cage », « the gilded age », « gilt-edged » for a thing whose shine is the selling point. Italian went the other way. Dorare la pillola is to gild the pill, which is to soften bad news for the person who has to swallow it: an act of tact, and English sugars the pill rather than gilding it. So the same gold leaf is a criticism on one side and a courtesy on the other, and on this page it is neither — here it is a technique, and a guazzo says which one.