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

all put in a crucible in a darkened room, and seven drops of the
“blessed Stone” are added one by one. As the seventh drop falls,
a flame of fire will come out of the crucible and spread itself
over the whole chamber (fear no harm), and will light up
the whole room more brightly than the sun and moon, and
over your head you shall behold the whole firmament as it
is in the starry heavens above, and the planets shall hold to
their appointed courses as in the sky. It will stop by itself, in
a quarter of an hour everything will be in its place. 16
Paracelsus also wrote a chapter on the possibility of making a
single substance out of the seven metals. He called it electrum
(normally electrum is an alloy of gold and silver), and he thought
that a goblet made of it would defend against illness and
poisons. 17
In painting, this dream is the ideal of perfect consonance
among all colors and media, and not just between the principles
of water and stone. But harmony is not possible, as painters
know, because some ingredients are inherently inimical to
others. There are inharmonious textures and dissonant colors,
and in the end it is the personalities of each substance, and not
the temperament of the whole, that prevents the kind of cosmic
harmony that Jurain and Paracelsus imagined. Some alchemists
sensed that more difficult relation. Constantine of Pisa was
among the first, and he captured it in a poem about the elements.
Since he was a medieval writer, he couldn’t admit that his free
verse was a poem: he calls it a “table,” as if he were just listing
properties. 18 But it is a poem, and it has a startlingly beautiful
last line:
Saturn can be bound
Lead is fetid, and it can be fused
Jupiter can be disjoined
Copper is leprous
Mars might be fluid but never melts
Iron is squalid and falls apart
The sun is soluble
Gold gleams, it glitters, it is pure and perpetual
Venus is corruptible and meretricious
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