What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

WHAT PAINTING IS 99
probably stumbles over the more complex compounds. So
alchemy can help answer our question about artists' substances
by showing what the body knows, as opposed to what the mind
memorizes.
Taking mercury first, as the alchemists nearly always did: its
sign is very like the sign for Venus or copper —they are both
feminine and “volatile.” Mercury is apt to move around, and
show a lively desire to combine with other metals. 1 It is also
called quicksilver because it looks like cold liquid silver, and the
alchemists thought it could dissolve gold, silver, and other
metals. It is a penetrating liquid, they said: it can seep into stones
and find precious metals. If a sample of powdered rock is heated
with mercury, the mercury will attach itself to whatever gold
there might be and draw it out. 2 Quicksilver is associated with
fluids, especially semen, blood, and the humid breath: it is
“primordial humidity” (humiditas radicalis). Mircea Eliade reports
that Hindu alchemists call it the “semen of Shiva.” 3 For Andreas
Libavius, a late sixteenth century alchemist, mercury is the
“material, vaporous principle” of water itself, as if mercury were
what made water wet. 4 More sober metallurgists like the
medieval Marius report that mercury has “an abundance of
water” in it, so that “it is very similar to cold water and ice and is
readily congealed”—that is, made into amalgams. It has only a
small portion of fire in it, since it does not burn easily, nor scorch
the tongue like fiery substances. Its high water content, he
observes, also “forces it to scatter if it is thrown into a fire.” 5
The sources paint a picture of mercury as a principle of
wateriness, a kind of liquid more fundamental than water itself.
It washes itself into crevices, ferrets out hidden things, melts and
dissolves whatever appears solid. In painting, therefore, mercury
is the very principle of the solvent—the turpentine, turpenoid,
benzene, or mineral oil. Its liquidity has no limits: the more
powerful the solvent, the thinner the paint layer can be. Benzene
can make very thin matte layers of paint that dry almost
immediately and can be put down one over another. Other
volatile oils like turpentine are less strident and carry the gloss of