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

108 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND?
four meanings Berthelot lists give a sense of how difficult these
questions were before modern chemistry. In the first sense fire is
a tangible and perceptible (fire has a color and a smell, and it
hurts), but it can also be taken as the single essential definition of
fire; and fire can also be a state (the second definition); an act (the
third definition); or an intangible, imperceptible quality (the
fourth definition).
This is a conceptual swamp where qualities are tangled with
substances, and properties with states. The alchemists debated
the nature of qualities; sometimes they thought of them as
clothes that could be taken off, leaving the pure “body” of the
object, and other times they thought qualities were the body
itself. The historian of science Pattison Muir divided his History
of Chemical Theories into two sections, the first titled “The History
of the Attempts to Answer the Question, What is a
Homogeneous Substance?” and the second “The History of the
Attempts to Answer the Question, What Happens when
Homogeneous Substances Interact?” To him alchemical
substances are “qualities…of classes of substances,” implying that
no alchemist ever knew a true substance (that is, a pure
molecule, or an element with a certain atomic number and
weight), though some of the alchemist’s “qualities” are very close
to contemporary chemical descriptions of elements. 23 The
question, “What is a homogeneous substance?,” was solved for
modern chemistry by a series of texts beginning with Joachim
Jungius and Robert Boyle. 24 As soon as there was a stable
definition of element, the question of substance ceased to exist.
Searches for substances became searches for elements. The
Slovakian historian of chemistry Vladimír Karpenko has made a
study of the mistaken claims chemists have made to have
discovered new elements. He lists over a hundred forgotten
“elements.” (Often they have wonderful names: anglohelvetium,
crodunium, dubium, eurosamarium, glaucodidymium,
hydrosiderum, incognitum, neokosmium, nipponium,
oceaneum, wodanium, and even jargonium. 25 ) But he begins his
study in the mid-eighteenth century because before that time,
there was not yet agreement on the nature of a substance or
element.
The moral I draw from these debates, which fill volumes in the
history of chemistry, is that where alchemy and painting are
concerned, there is no good reason to distinguish substances,