No one has ever accused New York City of understatement.

Yet it was in the service of subtlety that five gilders — such artisans still exist — could be found clambering in mid-September over the Sherman Monument at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, in Grand Army Plaza.

At first, their work seemed counterintuitive. Or at least counterproductive. At the end of August, they had painstakingly covered every bump, hump, appendage and protuberance in the heroic equestrian statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman by Augustus Saint-Gaudens with 1,200 square feet of 23.75-karat gold leaf.

That left the 110-year-old sculpture as breathtakingly brilliant as a newly struck proof coin.

But then they came back to tone the whole thing down with a glaze of burnt sienna, burnt umber and lamp black pigments. The glaze was darker than muddy espresso as the gilders brushed it on to the sculpture’s undulating surfaces, stippled it into the pores and crevices of the bronze and wiped it gently away with rags.