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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 135
crossed out his failed paintings in chalk, or tore them in pieces: it
is hard to destroy what has already been destroyed.) Like
painters, alchemists were loath to abandon their work even when
it showed no signs of life, and they made a science out of
reviving ashes and residue and resurrecting them. At the very
end of Ripley’s experiment, the battered dark powder suddenly
flares up into unexpected colors, and in the same way, the least
promising lump might be the cornerstone for a new method.
Very rarely, even the alchemists had to admit they had burned
every scrap of life from their samples, and then they called their
refuse scoria, recrement, or caput mortuum, Death’s Head. It was
sometimes drawn as if it were a modern sign warning against
danger , but more often the caput mortuum is a tiny
emblematic skull . The vessel becomes its pyre or a coffin, and
the substance that is calcined is killed. In alchemical pictures,
calcination is a black crow, a raven, a skull, a filthy animal, a
mud-soaked man, or a violent murder. 13 From the Death’s Head,
nothing more can be done, and the alchemist would discard the
remains of the experiment and begin again.
As usual there is more here than meets the eye, because the
alchemists did not keep clear of the Death’s Head, but sought it
out whenever they could. The object was to achieve as thorough
a death as possible and still be able to resurrect the ashes,
because the result would be something even stronger. One of the
few common threads that runs through all alchemical procedures
is the requirement that the substance be rotted until it is a black
putrescent mass, and then revived until it is golden and pure.
This is the alchemical death, Putrefaction or putrefactio. The
substance has to be brought to within a single breath of dying,
and then revived—or in the typical hyperbole, it has to be killed
and resurrected. “Revivification” is the way the alchemists said
“resurrection” when they meant substances instead of human
souls. The symbol for putrefaction is a spiky elaboration of the
letter P, intended perhaps to convey the idea that this is not
ordinary rotting or death, but something occult. It was amazing
for the alchemists to witness the resurgence of life in something
apparently dead. To see a body and a spirit rise from “small
Invisible Putrefied Atoms,” an English author remarks, “doth
cause a Religious Astonishment.” 14
“Life is wherever substance exists,” writes Frater Albertus, a
twentieth-century alchemist who lived in Salt Lake City, “and