Artisan for a Day

Todays art tour took us into the small workshop of a private company that restores various secular and non-secular works off art. I think our professor met them through the Dom's shop, since they've done quite a bit of work for the Cathedral. Visiting this tiny little building tucked away in a corner of the former Ubermunster Lady's Convent was an experience I never imagined I'd be having here.
It's been overcast today, like October finally remembered how it's supposed to be behaving. The cold has crept in with the clouds, and all four of us (me, our profi, Liz, and Tiff) seemed quite glad to get inside. Tho the left of the door was a pile of over 250 plaster molds. We were rushed upstairs to put away our things, shown a couple of the current secular projects (including an original Albrecht Durer print, which is still a fairly common thing to get in Nurnburg), and then told to wait downstairs and amuse ourselves with the plaster molds and the book describing them.
It turns out that the molds were rescued from an attic after the artist, whose last name was Kirch but whose first I've forgotten, died. One of the apprentices told us the funny story while we waited. Kirch, like I said, had died, and his possessions fell into the hands of an elderly woman. She was apparently not a very personable person, and when she died she left all her inheritence to her poodle rather than any surviving family. A museum rescued the art, but wasn't interested in the plaster, so our local Regensburg artisan got it instead.
Like I said, the plaster took up most of the left side of the room, really probably 3/4 of the room total. Molds ranged from ash-trays to busts to reliefs of saints, and only a copy of Kirch's hand-written notes corrosponding to the numbers on the outside of each mold provided any form of organization. I hate to think of what the apprentices have to do when they need one of those molds.
The artisan got back not long after that, and thank goodness he did. I was really afraid one of us would drop or damage a mold. After what happened in Neufarrplatz, I don't think I could handle seeing anything else break.
Of course, he turned out to be much more trusting of us than we are of ourselves. He gave us a quick demonstration of how gold leaf is put onto a piece, in this case a baroque pedestal head, then he turned to the next sheet of gold leaf and offered it to our group. We thought this was a poor attempt at humor, until our professor explained: "He says he can spare to waste a sheet on you, try it."
How can I refuse an offer like that?
So I lifted the little pink paper page of the leaf-book, looked at the .0008mm thick sheet of gold, placed my tool on it and blew lightly to get it to wrapped around, and cut it into slightly less neat sections. Then I took the paintbrush, wet it with the glue (which is some sort of alcohol mixed with water), and spread it thickly on a ungilded portion. Getting the wide brush to catch the gold was the hard part. It was a matter of creating static electricity, which I apparently just don't have enough of. The chief artisan chuckled, rubbed it on his shaved head, then snatched the piece up on it expertly. I laid it rather clumsily, looked immensely proud, and tried a couple of more. I never quite got the knack of it, but by the time I'd passed the tools to Tiffany I realized that for the next however-many-years-it-lasts a pedestal I gilded will hold a German churches art.
How cool is that?
Now I'm off to meet the US ambassador. Seriously. We have a reception in about an hour.
Homesickness is fading, I'm loving it here once more.