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

180 WHAT PAINTING IS
said about the Stone can be interpreted as a reference to Christ:
like him, the Stone is the perfection of everything earthly, and it
can perfect the earth in turn (by changing ordinary rocks into
gold). The resurrected Christ makes many appearances in
alchemical texts, where he mingles with odd alchemical
companions. In Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheater of Eternal
Wisdom, one of the most elaborate alchemical texts ever printed,
Jesus stands in splendor at the center of concentric rings of
symbols and Hebrew texts (COLOR PLATE 13). This is one of the
rarest of all alchemical books, and in this copy—it is one of two in
the world—the illustrations have been painted with gold and
silver. The silver has darkened to black, but the gold is still
brilliant, and the plates glow and shimmer with unearthly light.
Here Jesus is nude, like the unfinished hermaphrodites and
homunculi, and he stands in a fiery aureole, on a flaming
phoenix, the alchemical symbol of resurrection. Around him are
the signs of his divinity: sentences in Latin, proclaiming him the
Son of God, and his holy names in Hebrew. Khunrath’s books are
daring mixtures of Christian and alchemical thinking,
dangerously close to the ground of heresy.
This is where the idea of hypostasis really matters, since the
Stone is a hypostatical substance: a literal substantiation and
incarnation in the manner of Jesus Christ. It is half-real and halfheavenly,
and it perches just on the edge of the world of possible
substances. The Harvard-trained alchemist George Starkey, who
took the hermetical name Eirenaeus Philalethes, captured this
semidivine status by saying that the stone is of the species of
gold, but more pure: “If we say that its nature is spiritual, it
would be no more than the truth; if we describe it as corporeal,
the expression would be equally correct.” 9 Some substances are
natural, others unnatural, and others hover inbetween. Before the
discovery of phosphorus, the only fluorescent or phosphorescent
substances known were decaying plants, and wood from two
trees found in Mexico and the Philippines. The Mexican tree,
Eysenhardtia polystachya, will glow with a peacock blue when it is
put in water. 10 The two woods are drunk as medicines, and went
under the name lignum nephriticum, kidney wood. When
phosphorus was discovered in the history of alchemy, it sparked
a new interest in the mingling of natural and supernatural. The
title page of Johann Heinrich Cohausen’s New Light of Phosphorus
evokes the mysterious new light (Figure 9). 11 The setting sun is