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

WHAT PAINTING IS 107
It’s important again not to rush to give an answer based on
modern chemistry, but to keep in mind how the world seems to
the naked and naive eye. According to the phlogiston theory, for
example, things that burn easily such as charcoal, phosphorus,
sulfur, oils, and fats are rich in phlogiston, and they can even
lend it to neighboring substances. 19 Therefore kindling transfers
flame to logs. Inflammability becomes a substance that can be
traded, rather than an insubstantial quality. According to Georg
Ernst Stahl, originator of the phlogiston theory, what remains
after burning wood is not ash but two things, a colored substance
(substantia colorans) and a raw substance (substantia crudior), so
that, counting phlogiston, a log has three substances in all—
unless one is just a quality. 20 The separation of substances and
qualities has always been a vexed question, and it was seldom
resolved in a rigorous way. And the subject is even more
complicated than that, since substances and qualities are not the
only properties that have been ascribed to things. Marcelin
Berthelot, an historian of Greek alchemy, points out that there are
at least four ways to understand fire: it can be a material element
(la matière particulière), a state of things (l’état actuel), an action
(l’acte dynamique), or a hypothetical element (I’élément suppose).
That is to say, fire can be a substance, a property, a process, or the
“hypothetical element whose union with bodies” causes them to
burn, more or less as the phlogiston theory had it. Jean-Paul
Marat, most famous as a martyr of the French Revolution, wrote
a book of alchemy in which he claimed to make fire visible—
meaning not the material element, but the hypothetical one. 21
It is easier to think of fire in the first sense, as a material
element, the particular “matter of a burning body.” That is what
we mean when we say, “Don’t touch the fire,” as if fire were a
substance just as the candle wick or the candle wax are substances.
The “material element” is compatible with modern science, since
the bright yellow of a candle flame is incandescent carbon atoms,
which have been liberated from the wax—and so in that sense,
fire is a substance and not at all an evanescent spirit or quality.
In the second sense, fire can be the state or condition of a
substance that is “undergoing combustion,” as in the phrase,
“The house is on fire.” In that case fire is a property, and not a
substance. And in the third meaning, fire can be the act of
combustion in general, as when we say, “Fire up the engine.” 22
Then it is again intangible, but in a different way. Together, the