Humans have worked gold since 4,600 B.C., as attested by the oldest gold treasure in the world excavated at the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria. But it was the Egyptians, as far as we know, who in 2,500 B.C. began to pound it into delicate sheets to cover mummies and their cases, and the walls of royal tombs. Gold leaf is defined as a sheet of gold hammered into the thickness of around 1/10,000 of a millimeter, or 0.1 micron. A human hair, by comparison, is 750 times thicker. Gold can be worked to such phenomenal thinness because it has the highest ductility and malleability of any of the 118 known elements. In the spring issue of Craftsmanship Quarterly, we meet Marino Menegazzo, the world’s greatest goldbeater.