goldbeater

plural goldbeaters

1. A craftsman who creates gold leaf by hammering gold bars.

   Zebedee went to the goldbeaters shop, which smelled like lamb because the goldbeater ate a sandwich of lamb every day for lunch.

   2004, Paul Fattaruso, Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf, →ISBN, page 26

   2 more examples

   The membrane had been used, perhaps since antiquity, to make gold leaf, which goldbeaters produced by starting out with a small ingot of gold and beating it thinner, then sandwiching the leaves between sheets of cow intestines, ultimately creating a stack of alternating goldbeater's skins and gold leaf that could be more than 100 layers deep.

   2015, Ed Regis, Monsters: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology, →ISBN

   In my mind's eye, I see Cristiano on the day he first arrived in my father's workshop, the old goldbeater's assistant now grown into a man.

   2017, Laura Morelli, The Painter's Apprentice: A Novel of 16th-Century Venice, →ISBN

   Synonyms: gold-driver