Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  These silver objects continue a thread that runs from the silver bow carried by Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon and virginity and protectress of women, to William Blake, for whom there were ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’. But the element seems especially at home in the early twentieth century, during the years known as the Belle Epoque. By this time, households of even quite modest pretension could afford silver tableware thanks to the expansion of mining in North and South America, or if they could not, then there was at least silver plate. It was said of these new mines, as it was said of Mediterranean deposits during the Classical period, that the molten metal would run free from the soil at the source when forest fires broke out. Argentina–the only country named after a chemical element–was briefly the tenth wealthiest of the world’s nations based on this resource.

  Silver no longer possesses the social cachet that it did a century ago and its commodity price has plummeted. But, surprisingly perhaps, it has lost none of its symbolic value. The Silver Ring Thing, for example, is a movement begun in 1996 in the United States to promote chastity among Christian teenagers, although, acknowledging the reality of the situation, the ‘para-church youth ministry’ behind it all has made the strategic move, useful for recruitment no doubt, but unlucky for the symbolism, to admit not only the chaste but also the regretful, who are encouraged to ‘embrace a second virginity’.

  Silver also remains a familiar qualifier of branded consumer goods, where it is generally understood to convey a sense of pureness or even a cleansing property. The British Sugar Corporation produces a granulated sugar called Silver Spoon that betrays its customers’ dyed-in-the-wool consciousness of social class as well as playing with ideas of refining and refinement. Silver labels products ranging from light beers and mineral waters to cosmetics, especially when these are targeted at younger women. It was entirely in keeping that Revlon should mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its girlish perfume Charlie by rebranding it Charlie Silver, for example.

  Perhaps because of its abundance of associations, and the fact that so many of them are tied up with the youthful vicissitudes of getting laid, silver is, according to a curious piece of research by Santiago Alvarez, a professor of chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the chemical element most cited in song. One of these songs, Don McLean’s famous paean to van Gogh, ‘Vincent’, even manages an echo of Der Rosenkavalier with an image of a silver-thorned rose lying in the virgin snow.

  Silver was the brightest and whitest of the elements known in antiquity. Its Latin name argentum is derived from the Sanskrit arjuna, which means white. This is no great claim from a time when so few metals were known. Gold and copper are coloured, which left only lead, tin and iron, which are all greyer, and mercury, which, though liquid and therefore often not regarded as a true metal, is nevertheless comparable in colour and so earns the name quicksilver. What is more remarkable, and helps to explain this element’s enduring symbolism, is that silver is still one of the brightest and whitest elements in the modern periodic table, which contains more than eighty metals.

  A polished silver surface has evenly high reflectivity of nearly 100 per cent across the full range of the visible spectrum of colour. It is the preferred coating for the mirrors in reflecting telescopes for this reason. (Aluminium, in comparison, reflects only about ninety per cent of light across the spectrum.) The reflectivity of silver dips slightly to ninety-five per cent in the violet, and this small diminishment of reflected violet light is what gives the metal its characteristic warm tinge of yellow. Silver, then, deserves its status as the pre-eminent gleaming white metal, and this quality alone could perhaps be held to account for its symbolic importance. But there is a further reason that explains why this element has retained and even consolidated its powerful significance through the ages of tinplate, stainless steel and chrome.

  More than any other metal, silver signifies purity and especially virginity not simply because of its white lustre, but because of that lustre’s almost human propensity to lapse into tarnished blackness.

  Gold does not tarnish, which is why it is associated primarily with immortality. The alchemical symbol for gold is the never-ending line that is a circle, which represents not only the sun but also perfection. Silver’s is a half-circle–an icon of the moon, but a symbol too of incompleteness or imperfection. Silver was regarded as incomplete simply because it wasn’t (yet) gold. The alchemists reasoned that it wanted only for greater yellowness, which they sought to transfer from yellow materials as varied as copper, saffron, egg yolk and urine. The imperfection lay in its evident mortality, the tendency for a pure body of silver to become corroded over time and to end in a black death.

  Unlike many metals, silver is not readily oxidized. But the sulphide coating that forms whenever a polished silver surface is exposed to sulphur in the air–which happens anywhere that candles or fires are burnt–is not brown like the oxides of iron and copper but a fine, deep black. A good layer of tarnish renders the surface of a silver object as black and matt–that is to say, as unreflective of light–as it once was shiny and white.

  Silversmiths have traditionally sought to accentuate those qualities of the metal that enhance its connection with purity and femininity, favouring bright, smooth surfaces and fluid, voluptuous shapes. They were encouraged in their work by the metal’s low melting point and high malleability, which make it easy to cast and cold-forge. Silver vessels intended for washing or drinking frequently depict water in their relief work and are decorated with such things as dolphins and mermaids. One especially extravagant eighteenth-century English ewer and basin in the Victoria and Albert Museum adopts the four Aristotelian elements as its theme and uses their contrasting properties to create a masterpiece of this sort of workmanship in which silver flames lick and silver rivulets flow with astonishing suppleness.

  Even in more egalitarian times, silver remains a metal ‘for items of luxury and decoration’, in the words of one history of the material, ‘best suited not to the monotony of a machine-induced finish, but to the caressing touch of the hand’. The mass-manufacture of silverware has now declined, and there has been a revival of craft interest in the metal. Craftspeople today, however, are as likely to work the metal against expectation as to stay within the boundaries of tradition. Silver is an especially tempting material for polemical or satirical treatment because it has for so long been identified with the upper classes. In 2008, I happened across an exhibition at London’s Contemporary Applied Arts gallery called ‘Tea’s Up’, a riotous display of handmade tableware that ripped apart the complacent niceties of the posh English tea party. China was broken and wrongly reassembled, silver spoons were reduced to crumbling wisps like archaeological fragments, cups and saucers were rendered as useless wire-frame outlines. One set of pieces was titled with ironical chutzpah after battle cries from the class war–‘’Oi Polloi’, ‘Queenie’, and so on. Others were named with memorable vulgarity after states induced by stronger drink than tea. A wobbly-legged silver jug called ‘Trollied’–a colloquialism for being drunk–sticks in the mind. The author of these works, David Clarke, clearly struggles with the hypocritical virtue that hovers around silver. ‘It’s what I react to,’ he tells me. ‘At times, I get totally irritated by its almost religious associations. I respond in a devilish manner to corrupt the purity.’ ‘Trollied’ turns out to be a relatively mild exercise. In other works, Clarke bakes silver with brine or mixes it with lead, which eats into it like a cancer. The resulting work is chemically alive, changing in response to the atmosphere. In summer, the salt causes copper from the solder to bloom green, while in winter the piece reverts to grey. ‘It sets up a dilemma. What do you do: save the silver or enjoy the moment? Silversmithing is such an entrenched tradition. It is ripe to feast from. It is important for the future of silver that it has this chance. The discipline dies if it stays self-congratulatory.’

  This project of subversion demands an exploration of silver’s black ‘other�
��, and Clarke duly plans to turn his attention to tarnish–‘not the pure side of silver, but the dirty side!’ Meanwhile, the artist Cornelia Parker has gone to the extreme of making tarnish alone the essence of the work. In a series called Stolen Thunder, she has rubbed the dirt film from various silver and other metal objects on to handkerchiefs. It is not beautiful art–they are just dirty handkerchiefs. But they are made more arresting with the information that the absent objects belonged to well-known figures–Samuel Colt’s soup tureen, Charles Dickens’s knife, Horatio Nelson’s candlestick, Guy Fawkes’s lantern. In some complex way, the tarnish seems to represent the price paid for the sparkle of celebrity. The easy chemical change of the metal to black tarnish and the effortful physical transformation back to shining metal by ritual polishing has written into it a narrative of death and resurrection, corruption and redemption. The handkerchiefs are evidence that Parker has spent time restoring some of the lustre to famous and infamous careers; and the viewer is invited to ponder the morality of that act. ‘Silver for me is ten times more fascinating than gold because it has this duality about it and all the gradations between the two,’ the artist tells me. ‘You have to polish it to keep it shiny, and yet you’re losing it, taking off a layer at a time. There is a taint about it, an original sin.’

  It is not only its tendency to blacken that sullies silver’s reputation, it is also that it passes through so many hands in the form of money. This usage of the metal deepens its ambivalence in culture, as Shakespeare was aware. It is paradoxically the relative abundance of silver which has enabled it to fulfil this function. Gold, the obvious token of wealth, is simply too scarce. As coinage spread, it quickly became clear that there would never be enough gold to supply the demand for currency. Silver was rare enough to be valuable, but common enough to be a practical material for minting, and so this metal slipped into its now familiar role as the symbol of tradable value.

  Emperors may lust for gold, but empires rise and fall in proportion to their access to silver. It was ironically the silver mines of Laurion at Cape Sounion that sustained Athens in its golden age. Later, a combination of slave revolts in the mines and expensive military campaigns against Persia meant that, in order to keep the economy going, the silver had to be stripped even from the Victory statues on the Acropolis. Finally, in 406 BCE, copper coinage was introduced.

  The Romans, too, used silver for coin. They never really counted mining among their technological accomplishments, but they knew well enough how to exploit established mines in the territories they controlled, such as Iberia, and to take advantage when subject populations made new discoveries, as they did in the mountains of central Europe. Much of this newfound silver made its way eastward in exchange for silk and spices during the decadent final years of the empire.

  The real price of silver reached an all-time high in Europe in the late fifteenth century, and this made the search for new reserves worthwhile. The Spanish discoveries of gold and silver in Mexico and South America soon afterwards funded the expansion of a new empire. Although it is the fabulous gold that is remembered, Spain imported six times as much silver in monetary value. The bounty of the New World led to a period of silver surplus that, boosted by further silver finds in North America during the nineteenth century, continues today, with the result that silver now is worth less than one-hundredth of what it was at its peak in 1477.

  Gold and silver are fairly interchangeable in the Christian liturgy. Goldsmiths habitually worked with both metals, silver was frequently gilded or alloyed with copper to make it look like gold, and gold and silver were used together to produce more decorative designs. All this helped to blur any distinction between the two metals. And in the yellow candlelight of a church interior, gold and silver start to look much the same–equally resplendent and generically precious.

  More significant than the material of objects such as the chalices and patens used during Holy Communion and even the bishop’s crozier was the style of their design and their degree of decoration. These could reveal a religious denomination at a glance. During the medieval period, goldsmiths vied to demonstrate their skill with pieces ever more elaborately crusted with ornament. But during the Reformation these fancy objects were seen as unacceptable ‘popish plate’ and melted down to be refashioned on plainer lines. Silver was now judged more seemly than gold, and it was finished without decoration, the gleam of a smooth expanse of the polished metal offering glory enough to God. As part of the same changes in liturgical practice, the congregation began to share in the Communion, which previously had been enacted by the priest alone. In the pure reflecting surfaces of the plainer silverware, worshippers might find themselves confronted at the height of the ceremony with that rare sight, in the days before mirrors were widely known, of the image of their own face framed in virtuous silver. And by drinking from silver, communicants may have received more than spiritual beneficence: chemical archaeologists have recently begun to recognize that the small amount of silver reacting with the organic ingredients of wine may have given it antiseptic properties, rather like the bacteria-battling silver nanoparticles that feature in today’s refrigerators.

  Although the Romans had discovered how to deposit silver on to glass in such a way as to produce a reflective surface, and the secret had been rediscovered in the Middle Ages, it was a skilled job to produce a surface large enough to check one’s appearance, and mirrors remained luxuries beyond the reach of all but the nobility until well into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s deposed King Richard II calls for a mirror that he may see himself ‘bankrupt of his majesty’. He looks, and then dashes the glass to the ground: ‘A brittle glory shineth in this face; / As brittle as the glory is the face’. When the Prince of Arragon opens the silver casket, he is dismayed to find not the likeness of Portia he is seeking but the ‘portrait of a blinking idiot’–in short, he too sees himself in a mirror. He is the idiot for having chosen wrongly, finding only silver contained within silver, a looking-glass within the casket.

  These two ancient qualities of silver–its propensity to tarnish from white to black, and the ability of its polished surface to reflect light so perfectly that one can see in it one’s own face–come to a surprising convergence in the modern world. For like the mirror image, the photograph is an optical record captured in silver. From the beginning, pioneers of photography used light-sensitive salts of silver as their means to create black-and-white images. Yet strangely, nothing seems to have been written about the symbolic importance of silver, long established and widely agreed after all, in this major contemporary role. How does the choice of silver, the elemental embodiment of purity, virtue and the feminine, add meaning to the photograph? How do its values relate to the values of the camera’s eye, its truthfulness and all-seeingness? Does the photograph, like the regal mirror, bring a necessary message of disillusion? Or does it have the power to purify the sitter? Certainly, from the very beginning, photography was pursued with each of these motives, as a means of documenting reality, and as a means of presenting an ideal. Yet when it comes to silver–the bridge between these two technologies of (human) image-making–the great commentators on photography such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes are silent. What sport they might have had with the chemical semiotics of the photographic process. For here, pure silver appears unexpectedly as the black knight, not the white. Photographic image-making depends on the chemical transformation of silver salts into silver metal by the action of light, and this time it is the pure silver, released first as single atoms and then as tiny clusters, that appears black.

  It was in 1614 that one Angelo Sala, a physician from Vicenza, first recorded the natural darkening of nitrate of silver when exposed to sunlight. A century later, silver salts were being used to dye feathers and furs permanently black, and in 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze from Magdeburg made photographic images of words by placing paper stencils over the surface of a bottle containing a mixture of chalk and aqua regia contaminated with silver. De
spite this demonstration, and despite painters’ widespread use of the camera obscura for the accurate rendition of landscapes, and despite even a detailed prevision of photography in Charles-François de la Roche’s 1760 novel Giphantie, it seems that nobody thought to bring these optical and chemical processes together and record an image of themselves or their fellow man for another hundred years. Photography could have been invented much sooner than it was.

  Though the honours for its invention are contested, and in truth claimable by no one figure, the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was the first to create original pictures using an optical apparatus that we would recognize as a camera and a silver chloride medium. Louis Daguerre continued his work using silvered plates sensitized with iodine vapour to produce a film of silver iodide which was then exposed to the scene to be recorded. The silver iodide was converted back to silver where the light struck it to create a negative image. Deposited directly on the silver mirror surface, however, this negative could be made to appear as a positive image simply by altering one’s angle of view. Many others made important contributions, Humphry Davy, William Fox Talbot and John Herschel among them, but neither the artists, dashing between the sunlit world and the dark room, nor the chemists observing silver’s abrupt transitions from white to black and black to white ever paused to consider the deeper meaning of the metal under their gaze.

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