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

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THE STUDIO AS A KIND OF PSYCHOSIS 149 Michael Maier’s thirty-ninth emblem is a landscape, telling the story of Oedipus (Figure 7). The foreground figures embody the riddle of the Sphinx: What walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and three in the evening? At the right, Oedipus is killing his father, and behind that, he is taking his mother’s hand in marriage. On the left, Oedipus answers the Sphinx’s riddle, and she prepares to throw herself off the cliff. In the background, the Sphinx makes a portentous gesture, reminiscent of Jesus’s gesture in the Last Judgment (damning with a lowered hand, and blessing with a raised one), and behind her is Thebes, Oedipus’s city. The Sphinx in the background isn’t an element of Sophocles’s story: she is more like Oedipus’s psychopomp or anima, the siren of his soul that leads him into ruin. 17 Just by itself, Maier’s plate is not out of the ordinary, though Oedipus is an unusual subject for artists in any period. What sets it apart is what he says in the accompanying text. 18 First he reinterprets the Greek story as an allegory of alchemy. Alchemical allegories of myths were Maier’s intellectual specialty, and when he wrote this book in 1617, he had recently completed a long volume on that topic. 19 The allegories usually turn on a single resemblance between alchemy and mythology, and then the remainder of the alchemical story has to be forced to fit. In this case, Maier acts as if he has never read Sophocles, and that he is not sure what happened to Oedipus. He says Oedipus’s answer to the sphinx “is not known,” and he proposes that the “true meaning” involves a square, a hemisphere, and a triangle. The first signifies the four elements: the second “white Luna”; and the third means body, soul, and spirit (or else sun, moon, and mercury). He shows them stamped on the heads of the three figures, so he must have known Oedipus’s answer. 20 In Greek, the name Oedipus means “swollen feet,” because as an infant he was abandoned on a mountain top with a metal pin through his ankles. 21 Maier intends Oedipus to symbolize an alchemically “fixed” substance, one that has been treated until it is no longer volatile (so that it cannot escape from the vessel): Oedipus has swollen feet, on account of which he cannot run, but can only move like a bear or like a slow toad;
150 WHAT PAINTING IS FIG. 7 The life of Oedipus. From Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hieronymus Galler, 1617), emblem XXXIX. behind this is hidden a great secret. On account of his slowness he reduces other things to a solid condition and is not volatile to fire. 22 In another part of the same book, Maier illustrates a man without feet, walking on the stumps of his ankles. Oedipus’s meeting with the Sphinx, therefore, denotes the encounter between the principle of fixation and the inchoate materia prima, and the solution to the riddle embodies essential elements of the alchemical work. In accord with alchemical ambiguity, the symbols and the Sphinx can be variously interpreted, but always in harmony with common processes and substances. This is standard alchemical strangeness; but things get very odd when it comes time to draw the conclusion to the allegory. If Oedipus’s life is a mirror of the alchemical work, and if alchemy is the highest path to the secrets of nature and God, then something must be right about what Oedipus did. The Oedipus
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More praise for What Painting Is
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Published in 2000 by Routledge 29 W
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Wer lange lebt, hat viel erfahren,
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Color Plates All color plates excep
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Introduction WATER AND STONES. Thos
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INTRODUCTION 3 moment, and in the s
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INTRODUCTION 5 So this is not a boo
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INTRODUCTION 7 way to understand ho
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A SHORT COURSE IN FORGETTING CHEMIS
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Tin is made from pure quicksilver m
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WHAT PAINTING IS 45 mark on it. As
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WHAT PAINTING IS 47 they are entire
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WHAT PAINTING IS 49 will tell you
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WHAT PAINTING IS 51 but a source of
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WHAT PAINTING IS 53 be more monstro
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WHAT PAINTING IS 55 lower one blue.
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WHAT PAINTING IS 57 they are painte
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WHAT PAINTING IS 59 other garden pl
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WHAT PAINTING IS 61 FIG. 1 Oppopana
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English mystic Robert Fludd, air is
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WHAT PAINTING IS 65 the same as wat
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WHAT PAINTING IS 67 alchemists saw
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3 The mouldy materia prima IT IS PO
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WHAT PAINTING IS 71 repression: the
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WHAT PAINTING IS 73 oil, canvas, sq
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WHAT PAINTING IS 75 alchemist could
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WHAT PAINTING IS 77 live in murky u
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WHAT PAINTING IS 79 last, and then
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hapsody on salt. Welling says that
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WHAT PAINTING IS 83 mysterious ladd
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WHAT PAINTING IS 85 FIG. 2 Noah’s
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WHAT PAINTING IS 87 half-light and
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WHAT PAINTING IS 89 he could make,
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WHAT PAINTING IS 91 arm’s length
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WHAT PAINTING IS 93 with the correc
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WHAT PAINTING IS 95 an experienced
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WHAT PAINTING IS 97 tunnel view thr
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Page 116 and 117: WHAT PAINTING IS 107 It’s importa
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Page 120 and 121: WHAT PAINTING IS 111 spoon as it is
Page 122 and 123: 5 Coagulating, cohobating, macerati
Page 124 and 125: COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 199 1655), 90, 1
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 201 6. The conce
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 203 “Gnosticis
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 205 Antimony, tr
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 207 1. Emmens, A
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 209 19. Titus Bu
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35. A theory of pictorial chaos is
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auriferœ, quam chemiam vocant, 3 v
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 215 until all (o
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 217 Make an amal
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 219 the “alreo
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32. Ibid., 144. 33. For the mixture
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 223 “Place 8 g
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J.M. Eder, Quellenschriften zu den
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Abstract Expressionism, 89-94, 153
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lapis lazuli; ultramarine; Woad bod
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Duenech, 126-7 Dürer, Albrecht, 17
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heart, human, 27 heat, see fire; te
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lioness, 53 liquids, 1-2, 110 see a
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pine, 123 poppyseed, 123 precious,
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for gold, using silver and a burnin
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stannic sulfide, 183 star of David,
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sulfur virgin, 82 of the sun, 177 V
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What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

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