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

WHAT PAINTING IS 175
others have three colors or an indeterminate number. A book
could be filled with directions that do not correspond to the fourstep
sequence.
The work may be one step, or three or four; but it can also be
five, seven, twelve, eighty-four, or an indeterminate number. The
“Philosophical Hand,” invented by Johann Isaac Hollandus,
posits alchemy as a matter of five substances and two principles.
Over each finger there are fish, clods of earth, lanterns, and
crystals of salt—symbols for saltpeter, copper, sal ammoniac,
alum, and common salt, and on the palm of the hand there are
symbols for quicksilver (standing for the male principle or
“seed”) and sulfur (standing for the female principle of “earth”). 8
Often there are seven steps, pictured by ladders with seven rungs
(one occurs in Dürer’s print Melencolia I) or symbols of the seven
planets. Antoine-Joseph Pernety promoted the division into
twelve steps, so that the work could correspond to the zodiac. 9
Dorothea Wallich compared the steps to Hercules’s twelve
labors. 10 Barchusen’s 84 plates cannot be reasonably interpreted
as 84 steps, because they are repetitive and confusing, though he
probably intended at least 70 steps. Eventually the competing
theories tend to undermine each other, casting the whole notion
of stages into doubt. There are also books where the number of
steps might as well be infinite. The authors name stages, but do
not place them in order, or say where they begin or end. The
usual state of affairs is a combina tion between an insistence on
steps and the evasion of anything explicit: an author will allude
to steps, but make sure that no comprehensible sequence can be
found in the text.
The sequence of the work is never fully legible in alchemical
texts, nor is it simply disguised: it is approached, alluded to,
distorted, and undercut. Readers like Jung who hope to find the
single sequence underlying the hermetic clues tend to think the
alchemists were just not reporting everything they knew, as if
they had a four- or twelvestep sequence but were holding back.
Like art historians and conservators who want to understand
Renaissance painting, hopeful students of alchemy want to think
there was some certain knowledge, or at least a body of consistent
themes and ideas that could be learned and passed on.
Sometimes there were (though many of them were unhelpful or
mistaken), but most often the confusions and elaborate directions
in the old books are really just strategies for staving off the