Silver

Silver is the pale, reflective grey-white of the metal, and its symbolism is dominated by its ancient pairing with the Moon, as gold is paired with the sun. Where gold is warm, solar, masculine and incorruptible in the traditional scheme, silver is cool, lunar, and associated with the feminine, with reflection, intuition and the tides; the alchemical and astrological tradition assigned silver to the Moon among the seven metals. It is the colour of moonlight, of mirrors and of still water, so it carries senses of clarity, purity and reflection, both literal and moral, to be untarnished.

Silver has real protective folklore: it was held to repel evil and, in later legend, to be the metal that could kill werewolves and witches, and it has genuine antimicrobial properties long used before they were understood. As a secondary and reflective value silver often signals the runner-up to gold, the second place, yet its association with the Moon gives it an independent dignity in the esoteric traditions rather than mere inferiority.

Silver as a colour is a problem of surface rather than of pigment, and it is the reason there is far less surviving silver in old art than there once was.

There is no good silver pigment. Grey paint does not read as metal, because what makes a metal look metallic is a specular reflection that changes as the viewer moves, and a matte pigment cannot produce that. The only way to get silver onto a surface was to put silver on it: silver leaf, beaten thin and laid on a prepared ground, or shell silver, powdered metal in a binder, applied with a brush.

Silver leaf tarnishes. Exposed to air and to the sulphur compounds in it, the surface forms silver sulphide and turns first yellow-brown and then black. Gold leaf does not, which is the whole reason gilded medieval work still looks gilded and silvered work of the same date frequently looks like a dirty grey stain. A great deal of what now reads as a damaged dark passage in a panel painting or an illuminated manuscript was originally bright silver.

Workshops knew this and worked around it. Tin leaf was cheaper and tarnished less, and was often glazed with a yellow varnish to imitate gold. In East Asian lacquer, silver powder was used within a sealed lacquer surface that protected it.

The lunar and nocturnal symbolism recorded in the traditions therefore rests on an appearance that was always temporary. Silver in use is a colour that has to be maintained, which is itself part of what it came to mean.