Donna Bilak (Bard College), “Mining, Alchemy, and Environmental Transformation: The Earth as an Alembic”
This talk presents a thought experiment: Can early modern alchemical imagery catalyze a new analytical and interpretive framework that can help us to reconsider, and better understand, our relationship with materials and the natural world? Specifically, how might the potent alchemical image of Earth as an alembic elicit new ways to think about mining and human impact, altered ecosystems and environmental degradation? Historical precedent exists for connecting alchemical process with the workings of nature. Early printed distillation books by Ryff (1545), Rößlin (1546), and Lonicer (1564) cast alchemical arts as an imitation of nature in depicting the macrocosm as concentric, zoned circles that demarcate the spheres of earth and water, clouds, and the sun; corresponding text relates this image to the rising of vapors and falling of liquids within the alembic. Five hundred years later, we live in a different epistemic system yet alchemical imagery about change and corruption among the four elements is salient to present-day issues around sustainability: What goes on inside of the alembic can be understood as emblematic of extractive processes and environmental contamination. The chemistry and ongoing history of mercury-gold amalgamation mining provides a case in point. This form of extraction is alchemy in action. It causes mercury to rise in vapors and condense in toxic heavy metal, presenting us with a story of unintended human consequences—that contrary to the early modern idea that mercury is volatile and beneficial, the project of material transformation and purification used in this form of metallic extraction is not something that purifies, but is something that insinuates and pollutes. From my dual perspective as historian and goldsmith, I argue that alchemical imagery has significant present-day implications in prompting us to think deeply about environmental restoration, to create a thoughtful exchange between nature and people, and be used to forge a more humane and sustainable future. How might an alchemically inflected perspective allow us to re-think our practices of making?
Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London), “John Dee in the Garden of the Hesperides”
In his Rerum chymisticarum epistolica (Frankfurt, 1595) Andreas Libavius criticised John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica for impiously explaining the preparation of the philosophers’ stone by comparisons with the passion of Christ. Oddly, there is no mention of Christ in the text of any of the 24 theorems which make up the work – so what is Libavius criticising? The answer can be found in a diagram which Dee refers to as his “Hesperidean gardens”, in which he draws parallels between the life of Christ, the glorified resurrected body, and the alchemical work. These Christological parallels are, however, not discussed in the theorem itself, which merely says that the “fruits” of the “holy art” of alchemy can be seen in this diagram “as in a mirror” (quasi in speculo). In this paper I will be looking at the importance of the diagram in Dee’s Monas as a visual bearer of alchemical information and consider some of the difficulties involved in ‘reading’ his diagrams.
Leah DeVun (Rutgers University), “Nonbinary Gender and the Art of Alchemy”
This paper focuses on the idea of the “androgyne” in alchemical writings from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. It shows how certain authors described the active alchemical agent (the philosophers’ stone or elixir) as an “androgyne” or “hermaphrodite,” that is, a combination of male and female qualities. In addition, certain alchemical authors incorporated Christian imagery into their descriptions of metal transmutation, and they introduced the idea of an alchemical “Jesus hermaphrodite” who united not only male and female, but also human and divine, and who ushered in an age of social and religious transformation. Finally, this paper turns to the reception of “androgyne” images in contemporary art, considering how modern queer and transgender artists have recently appropriated premodern alchemical imagery to think about both gender and societal transformation in the present.
Marina Escolano-Poveda (University of Liverpool), “Zosimos Aigyptiakos: Identifying the Imagery of the ‘Visions’ and Locating Zosimos of Panopolis in His Egyptian Context”
The first alchemist for whom we have biographical data, Zosimos, lived in the Panopolis (current Akhmim) of the late 3rd–early 4th centuries CE, a region in which evidence of the practice of traditional Egyptian religion is attested well into Late Antiquity. The images that Zosimos employed in his presentation of alchemical procedures and apparatus offer us an insight into his cultural context. This lecture will examine a series of passages from the works of Zosimos of Panopolis from an Egyptological perspective, contrasting them with textual and iconographic sources from the Egyptian temple milieu of Graeco-Roman Egypt. The results of this inquiry will be used to elaborate a nuanced presentation of Zosimos’ identity.
Peter J. Forshaw (University of Amsterdam), “‘In Contumeliam gloriae Dei’: Rosicrucian Condemnation of Theoalchemy, Culprits and Consequences?”
The first Rosicrucian manifesto, the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), though favourable towards Paracelsus, condemns “ungodly and accursed gold-making,” and Chymical ‘books and figures’ that are ‘an insult to God’s glory’. The following year, the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) warns against pseudo-chymists who “deceive men with monstrous figures and enigmas,” and the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz (1616) similarly censures “blasphemous and seductive pictures.” In Symbola aureae mensae (1617), the Rosicrucian apologist Michael Maier, well-known for the alchemical emblems in Atalanta fugiens (1617), disapproves of those who “most impiously and sacrilegiously” attempt alchemical readings of the “Creation of the world, nativity, passion, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.” This paper considers the likely targets for this ire, examining theoalchemical images in, for example, Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, Aurora Consurgens, Rosarium Philosophorum (1550), and Pandora (1582), with a focus on analogies between the generation of the Philosophers’ Stone and the life of Christ; looks at some editions of works post-dating the manifestos, including Johann Daniel Mylius’s Philosophia reformata (1622), with its modified Rosarium images; and a change of focus towards alchemical secrets in the Book of Revelation in eighteenth-century manuscript copies of Le Livre des figures hiéroglifiques d’Abraham le Juif.
Marlis Hinckley (Johns Hopkins University), “Alchemical and Philosophical Diagrams in the Pseudo-Lullian Liber de secretis naturae”
The Liber de secretis naturae, one of the earliest and most influential pseudo-Lullian alchemical texts, drew on the visual and philosophical language of the Catalan philosopher Raymond Lull to construct a novel approach to questions of material change. Diagrams are central to its approach; the Tertia distinctio, the work’s most innovative section, is structured around the exposition of three central figures. These figures draw on Lullian and Kabbalistic precedents to encode and illustrate the alchemical procedures described in the text, as well as using shape and color for both their specific and general symbolic value. As such, the diagrams provide one way of illuminating the text’s philosophical and pseudepigraphic lineage. Given that they also vary between manuscript redactions of the text, they also provide a way of tracing different readings of the Liber over the first century and a half following its composition.
Janna Israel (Princeton University Art Museum), “The Imagery of Alchemical Instrumentation”
This study asks how images in early modern alchemical and experimental texts legitimize the information presented. In particular, this study evaluates images of instruments and tools used in processes described to explicate information provided in books and begin to examine the network of imagery in which they operate.
Didier Kahn (CNRS, Paris), “Alchemical Eccentricities in a Latin Roman à clef from the mid-Seventeenth Century”
I will present and comment on the description of an alchemical laboratory, an alchemical ballet, and an alchemical political allegory in the Latin novel “Peruviana” by C. B. Morisot (1644-1646) dedicated to King Louis XIII’s brother, Duke Gaston d’Orléans. In this novel, the history of the reign of Louis XIII and Richelieu is transposed in a fictitious Peru and allegorically explained as the making of gold. As a whole these three examples show the full potential of alchemical imagery and the prestige attained by alchemy at the court of the King’s brother.
Sharifa Lookman (Princeton University), “Between Metallurgy and Alchemy: On Scientific Designations in Early Modern Images and Objects”
In both the 1550 and 1568 editions of his Vite degli Artisti, Giorgio Vasari describes a series of prints completed by Sienese artist Domenico Beccafumi: “he printed some very capricious stories of alchemy showing how Jupiter and the other gods, wanting to congeal Mercury, tied him up and put him in a crucible, while Vulcan and Pluto stirred up the fire around him.” This citation is generally considered a reference to an extant series of ten woodcuts by Beccafumi. These prints depict scenes of a metallurgist and philosopher duo cultivating and taming the seven core metals, who are first personified as gods in the mines and then as craft matter in the workshop. Over the centuries, and on behalf of Vasari’s rather sticky categorization, scholarship has broadly classified these prints as “alchemical” images despite their lack of typical chymical subject matter. This raises significant questions: what, precisely, qualified as a representation of alchemy and alchemical process when Vasari was writing in the cinquecento? Moreover, within the early modern scientific imaginary, did the artisan’s workshop have alchemical cognates discernible to non-practitioners, or did metallurgical and alchemical processes have such substantial visual overlap that one bled into the other in secondary depictions? Expanding on the Beccafumi case to employ a range of other artists’ prints and sculptures, this paper expands how designations such as “alchemical” and “metallurgical” are applied to images and objects, both by their makers and later audiences.
William R. Newman (Indiana University Bloomington), “Alchemical Illustrations in the Manuscript Corpus of Isaac Newton”
An examination of Isaac Newton’s alchemical drawings shows that they ranged from the remarkably crude to the meticulous, and from straightforward technical illustrations to elaborate allegories. The striking degree of variation in style and content that Newton’s drawings display mirrors the divergent goals that the celebrated natural philosopher had for the visual representation of alchemy. The present talk will explore the affiliation between purpose and content in Newton’s alchemical illustrations by examining them in relation both to their textual sources and to Newton’s manuscript commentary.
Lawrence M. Principe (Johns Hopkins University), “Alchemical Imagery and Experimental Practice (Part 1): Origins, Varieties, and Purposes”
Imagery is one of the most prominent features of alchemical communication. Well beyond the more extravagant and beguiling illustrations that attractively decorate some treatments of the subject, alchemical imagery comes in many forms and is deployed for sometimes divergent purposes by its authors. Likewise, the origins of alchemical imagery are manifold, and both connect alchemy to and distinguish it from other sorts of contemporaneous knowledge and means of communication. This talk aims to provide a rudimentary taxonomy of alchemical imagery and explore some of the diversity of its origins and deployments.
Jennifer M. Rampling (Princeton University), “Alchemical Imagery and Experimental Practice (Part 2): Philosophical Solvents and the Ripley Scroll”
Abstract tbc.
Melissa Reynolds (Princeton University), “Learning to Look: Imagery Beyond Alchemy in English Manuscripts”
The vibrant images in the Ripley scrolls illuminate a tradition of alchemical practice dependent on visual cues to the interpretation of chemical ingredients. Images were not merely incidental or ornamental to alchemical writing, they were integral to its function. The same could be said of the medical and astrological imagery that circulated in England contemporaneous to the Ripley scrolls, which similarly guided users through a practice of interpreting the natural world and the human body. In portable physician’s almanacs or vernacular medical compendia, fifteenth-century practitioners encountered marvelous creatures transposed over the human body or brightly colored flasks of urine meant to elucidate the particular ailments of a given patient. These images, integral to fifteenth-century medical practice, taught English practitioners how to look beyond the physical, tangible qualities of the body and its products and instead to recognize the body’s relationship to a world densely populated by signs and symbols. For the fifteenth-century practitioner, learning to diagnose an illness, develop a course of treatment, or even prognosticate about the future entailed learning how to look: at the images that filled their manuscripts and, through them, at the body as a reflection of the natural world.