The bicycle the author has been riding around London. (Courtesy Glenn Adamson)
Lately, I’ve been riding a 65-year-old bicycle around London. It was manufactured by a company called Birmingham Small Arms, which branched out from weapons production when it realized that the tooling required for gun barrels could also be used in making bike frames. The particular model I have, a “Golden Fifty,” was bought by my father-in-law when he was a teenager—and even then, it was secondhand. He has kept it in working order ever since, and recently passed it on to me.
Like Theseus’s ship, the bicycle has quite a few replaced parts—seat, chain, brakes, pedals, tires. But the frame is entirely original and, although it may have reached official retirement age, it’s still serviceable, if a little heavy when going uphill.
It’s also beautiful, at least in my eyes, with a striped gold-and-blue surface that’s been scratched and scuffed all over. I would never, ever repaint it. That would destroy not just its rough-and-tumble appearance, but an accumulated personal history, something that money just can’t buy.
The word for this kind of surface, rich with meaning and association, is patina. The idea has a long history—according to Pliny the Elder, the Greek painter Apelles finished his works with a thin wash of black “to prevent the brilliance of the colors from offending the eyes”—but it has always been a shifty subject, a game of appearances. Counterfeit or not, our enduring fascination with patina only underscores the value of the real thing, and of what an object, capable of withstanding time and frequent use, has to offer.
The valuation of patina seems to have originated in Baroque Italy, part of a new respect paid to objects of antiquity. (The word itself comes from ancient metalwork; a patĭna, in Latin, is a kind of dish.) Artists responded to this new taste for the old. The groundbreaking female painter Artemisia Gentileschi, among others, used a yellow-tinted varnish originally developed for lutes, while Guido Reni supposedly did the opposite, leaving his pictures purposefully overbright so that they would eventually darken to the correct color balance.
Already by the 18th century, however, the manipulation of surfaces in this way was becoming controversial. William Hogarth, for one, fulminated against the artificial aging of paintings by his contemporaries: “Instead of mellow and softened,” he complained, “[they] always read yellow and sullied, for this is doing time.’’ He even made a satirical print depicting an allegorical figure impaling a canvas with his scythe, a pot of varnish at his feet. The Greek quotation at the top reads, “Time is not a great artist, but weakens all he touches.”
Such criticisms notwithstanding, rich patina was increasingly equated with being plain-old rich. For the landed gentry, it was a way to indicate longstanding lineage. For mercantile arrivistes, of course, it was a means of imitating the gentry, or at least indicating sophisticated taste.
An elevated version of this attitude can be found in the preservationist writings of John Ruskin—“It is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture”—while at the other end of the high-mindedness spectrum we find the fascinating André Mailfert, a self-described “professional makeup artist,” or maquilleur, based in Paris and Orléans. His memoirs—which, given his occupation, should admittedly be regarded with suspicion—describe an extraordinary repertoire of fakery. Mailfert would cobble together pieces from new and old parts, then roast them over an open fire to mellow their surfaces. His varnish recipes include a goodly amount of dust, gathered from the attics of period-appropriate churches.
It was only with the arrival of the Impressionists—whose direct-from-the-tube colors struck period observers as terribly garish—that the cult of patina was openly challenged. From that point on, art history would be defined by a fundamental, if largely implicit, contrast of surface qualities. Traditionalism is signified by patina, avant-gardism by its absence.
Still today, this distinction is constantly reinforced. Traditional statuary, of the kind encountered in public parks, is typically made in patinated bronze; modernist sculpture tends to be naked or brightly painted steel. Different standards of cleanliness are applied to “Old Masters” and modernist paintings, the former presented in mood-lit galleries against dark walls, the latter almost invariably displayed in bright white spaces.
Patina, then, is a remarkably deep subject for something only skin deep. As a visual proxy for temporal duration itself, it is a means by which patrimony is both established and exploited. And this remains true now.
Even as culture continues to accelerate, rushing headlong into an uncertain future, the traces of time and use retain their strange power. What could be more postmodern than a pair of pre-distressed jeans? More utterly contemporary than a paint name like “antique pewter,” “vintage vogue,” or “heritage red”? (All are currently among Benjamin Moore’s most popular colors.)
Look online, and you can see the high-tech products that most define our moment, for better or worse—the Tesla Cybertruck and the iPhone—with “rust bucket” stylings, a fake overlay of rusty metal and peeling paint. Similarly, YouTube yields helpful tutorials for giving your personal firearm a “post-apocalyptic” look using layers of Rust-Oleum. (One commentator suggests an alternative: “Throw it on a gravel road, drag it after your car. Shit done, yo.”) The entertainment complex in which such aesthetic ideas have been generated—Star Wars, Mad Max, and so on—expends vast resources on props, sets, and costumes that look like they’ve had a life, which is precisely what they lack.
The late 19th century was known as the Gilded Age, an allusion to Mark Twain’s 1873 novel of that title, a satire on the thin pretensions of the day. Many critics have argued that we’re living through a similar period of fraudulence, with one group of political scientists even speaking of a “patina of mistrust,” in which widespread public skepticism about governance allows misinformation to spread unchecked. Certainly, there is good reason to associate surfaces with such slipperiness.
Despite all the misrepresentation that clouds its history, though, patina really is worth paying attention to. Time is money, as they say, but the reverse isn’t quite true. You can’t buy genuine experience, either of people or of things.
When seen in a true light, patina is both a signifier of individual concern and an index of care. My bicycle, for example, only looks the way it does because my father-in-law kept it in decent condition for all these years. This points to the best way to think about patina: not as a record of mere passing time, but rather of responsibility taken for the world around us. What could be less superficial than that?