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

COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING, REVERBERATING 139
and lay eggs. At that point, the alchemist is to remove the cocks
and put in toads to keep the eggs warm. (The assumption is that
male chickens can’t roost, but toads can.) When the eggs hatch,
they look at first like normal chickens, but in a few days they
grow serpents’ tails. If the house weren’t stone, Theophilus says,
they would tunnel into the earth and escape. They are to be put
in brass vessels with copper doors, and the vessels are to be
buried for six months. The monsters inside are basilisks, and they
spend that time eating the “fine earth” that filters in through the
copper covers. After half a year has passed, the alchemist is to dig
up the vessels and burn them with the basilisks inside. When
they are cool they are pulverized, and the alchemist adds the
dried blood of a red-haired man, hominis rufi, and mixes the
powders with sharp vinegar. If the resulting paste is painted onto
copper plates, it will soak in and the plates will become gold.
Theophilus’s recipe is only outlandish if it is judged against the
standards of science. To painters, unexpected and inexplicable
metamorphoses are the stock in trade of everyday work. No one
knows what paint does, and when an artist is fooled into
thinking paint can be entirely understood, then the studio
becomes an annoying tedium where paint has to be pushed into
place to make images. There have been painters who thought in
those terms, but painting can be far more interesting and
dangerous.