Art and Alchemy [Paperback]

Partly because of alchemy’s dismissal from the Parnassus of rational sciences, the interplay between this esoteric knowledge and the visual arts is still a surprisingly neglected area. This collection of articles, covering the time span from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century, challenges the current neglect. The contributors cast new light on a range or related topics, including alchemical gender symbolism in renaissance, mannerist, and modernist art; alchemical ideas of transformation in Italian fifteenth-century landscape imagery; Netherlandish seventeenth-century portrayals of alchemists; and alchemy’s tortured status as a forerunner of photography.

Preface

Introduction

     Jan Bäcklund and Jacob Wamberg

 

MATTER

1: The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy: The Formative Period c. 1150-1350

     Aksel Haaning

 

2: A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Themes in North Italian Quattrocento Landscape Imagery

     Jacob Wamberg

 

3: The Material Ethereal: Photography and the Alchemical Ancestor

     Laurie Dahlberg

 

GENDER

4: Fluctuating Identities: Gender Reversals in Alchemical Imagery

     M.E. Warlick

 

5: Artists, Alchemists and Mannerists in Courtly Prague

     Sally Metzler

 

6: Guilt or Gold: Alchemy and Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris

     Elizabeth K. Menon

 

7: The Paracelsian Magus in German Art: Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn

     Urszula Szulakowska