A little more than a year ago, on Christmas Eve 2018, I published a piece on The Challenges and Rewards of Gold and Silver Vestments. In that article I commented:
Very frequently gold and silver tend to be considered "incompatible" in some way -- use one or the other the thought would go. Of course, as with anything, if colours are not coordinated with sensitivity and a keen artistic eye, they may well come across poorly... However, when done with a keen artistic eye, the results... can be quite spectacular.The example I used for that article was an antique chasuble which utilized a very pale gold with silver embroideries but just the other day a new example came to light. The example in question was made recently by Sacra Domus Aurea and I believe it continues to demonstrate the point of the original article; namely, how powerful this combination can be when done well. Unlike the antique example, this contemporary example utilizes a much brighter, more metallic gold, but with the same desirous result. Let's take a look.
A slightly closer view will give you a good sense of the textures and colour variations of the gold damask and silver galloons:
And here too is another view which shows the stole and maniple:
To my mind, this combination is at once noble and simple, yet also very visually striking. While one could use gold galloons in a design such as this as well of course, it seems to me the end result would be far less powerful -- not to mention much more flat and visually uninteresting. The combination we see here, by contrast, results in something much more ornamental and thus, I think, much more festal as well.
