By Crispin sartwell

The English word "patina" derives from the Greek term for dish, and initially referred to the tray, often bronze, which was used to distribute the host during the eucharist. Because such trays became venerable or precious objects - not because of any intrinsic value or even beauty, but because of their association with the body of Christ - they were preserved over long periods of time. And because they were preserved, they developed the signs of age: the particular mottled green surface of old bronze, along with the signs of use and wear.

These signs of age on bronze came to be referred to as its "patina," which in turn came to be valued in itself as something beautiful, to the point at which bronze-workers and sculptors found ways of reproducing it on new work. And then by extension, "patina" came to refer to any surface situation that arose through age, use, or weathering, as opposed to a surface applied, as a glaze or paint.

The patina of a bronze tray, we may suppose, turned the tray from a utensil into a relic, into something that had a spiritual significance in itself. The tray became venerable, because of its age and use, like an elder or an object associated with a saint. The kind of value that such a tray assumed is in part a function of its age, and old objects are venerated, collected, and displayed in many cultures. That is in part because they stir the historical imagination: one imagines their use by many people, many hands, over a period of decades or centuries or millennia. Perhaps the object is associated with some particular person, or culture, or era that itself is an object of veneration, or perhaps the object is passed down within a family or a village, and comes to represent the history of that particular family or village to its contemporary members.

The sign that the object is indeed old and hence is to cherished in these ways is its patina: its distressed surface. And the patina of each object is unique: a patina is always detailed, as opposed to, for example, a newly-lacquered surface; it can be absorbing because of its random richness, its scratches and blossomings of rust, for example. The patina of an object emerges through the interaction of its material to its world, through, we might say, its nature and experience.

So the patina is in part the emerging of the nature of the material: its self-expression. Bronze has a typical almost powdery green expression which can be expected to emerge under certain conditions because of the nature of bronze. The way an object makes a patina is a Zen discipline, a long process or apprenticeship by which the object comes to be itself, or comes to settle into itself. The nature of the material emerges into visibility in its patina. Thus, we might think of patina as a kind of truth, or integrity, or honesty of an object: its surface reflects its depths: it expresses on its surface its real nature and history.

I have a molded stoneware crock, absolutely plain, without maker's mark or signature. It was brown-glazed sometime in the mid-nineteenth-century. It is now almost black, and the glaze has silvered and deepened into something that makes the surface of this extremely humble object almost mysterious. It seems to have a swirling depth floating above the brownish glaze that is not something that could simply be painted on. And if you look closely in the right light, it reveals a thousand diamond points of reflection, like a night sky. Now this is a perfectly modest vessel, intended for canning, not hand thrown but molded, one thinks, carelessly, certainly glazed carelessly - the glaze just poured on, spots are missing, and the glaze has different thicknesses in different spots. It is not perfectly round, and the thickness is not uniform. Stoneware crockery is fired at an extremely high temperature for a very long time, and in the process, this particular crock emerged with bubbles and malformations. It was never intended to be an aesthetic object; I can imagine the look on the face of the people who made it if I told them I found it beautiful. But age has deepened it, has extruded what was within it and taken in what was around it. The surface of the crock has become deep in a plain way.

Old painted wood is a particularly lovely thing. Paint is itself not a patina: a freshly painted object is the opposite of a patinated object. But the way paint wears in the weather introduces a patina; a particularly clear example are the old red barns that adorn much of the American countryside. As the paint flakes and the metal fittings rust, or even as the barn falls apart, it introduces a yearning that is part nostalgia, part pure visual pleasure. As the barn ages it becomes more visually rich or complex, and as it settles into the countryside it becomes more and more a natural object rather than an artifact; it reminds us that we too are natural, that our work uses natural things and returns to them.

The patina also responds of course to the world, to the way the object is used and the conditions under which it is stored or displayed. The green powdery patina of bronze streaks in the rain, and itself wears in certain patterns under certain environmental pressures. It consists of oxidation, that is, it is the effect of oxygen on the metal, though this effect is combined with that of various other substances in various cases; the object comes to be what its surrounding make it; it shows the traces of what touches it. This is particularly clear in cases where what touches it is human beings: in stone stairs worn from long use, or wooden and metal and ceramic objects that have been handled many many times, perhaps through generations. In the stone art of suiseki, a certain patina is highly valued, and though the process can be abbreviated, the favored approach is to rub the stone daily with bare hands for a period of thirty to fifty years; the oils of the hand give the stone a glow that appears to pervade or saturate it.

We might say that the history of an object is part of that object or is embodied in the object. Or: what an object is is its history. We might think of physical objects as slowly-unfolding events rather than as stable bits of the world or our experience. Old glass has a very particular feel and look that is hard to describe: it has flowed and separated into differently-reflective and translucent/transparent portions. To hold an object in your hands and know it's old is to have a globally different experience than to hold a similar new object, and it unites us to a history of things and of persons of indefinite duration. This is of course not to say that a patina cannot be simulated, and distressed surfaces have in fact at various times been a sort of wabi-sabi vogue. But it is to say that the objects that persist across generations actually bring the times of their persistence to us, offer time to us in a physical embodiment.

A British wag remarked in 1933 that "what Americans lack is patina." What he meant, of course, was that Americans had a certain brashness, crassness, and stupidity that might rub off with time. And of course in a physical and a metaphorical sense, persons too gain patina in the course of their lives, which is in part to say that they become more intensely themselves, that their bodies come to express who they are and what they are and where they are. There is the flawless beauty of youth, the nubile 19-year-old at the peak of sexuality and sexual attractiveness. But there is also - potentially also sexual - a mellowness of age expressed in crow's feet, a voice with some gravel and bottom, a knowing look in the eye.