Crazing. You know what it is if you’ve ever looked at your grandparents’ chinaware and discerned a web of hairline cracks fracturing the glaze.

It is an unwelcome sight in ceramics.

It is an alarming sight in a 24-foot-high equestrian monument at a gateway to Central Park, a monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that had just been regilded with 1,200 square feet of 23.75-karat gold, at a cost of $500,000.

But there they were: spidery veins that officials of the Central Park Conservancy began noticing last October in the wreaths attached to the granite base of the William Tecumseh Sherman monument at Grand Army Plaza. At first, it seemed to be a moisture problem, said Douglas Blonsky, the president and chief executive of the conservancy and the administrator of Central Park.