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

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

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23.03.2013 Views

THE BEAUTIFUL REDDISH LIGHT OF THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE 181 reflected in a heavenly mirror and concentrated, as phosphorus, in an orb. The plate has all the sources of light that existed before phosphorus: a starry sky, a fire-breathing dragon, an owl and a cat with glowing eyes, fireflies (over the water), and a rising moon; Haephestus, with a flaming crucible; a woman with a tympanum of alchemical fire, ringed by an ouroboros; another woman who has plucked her flaming heart (symbol of Christian faith) from her chest; and Death, carrying a smoking torch. The alchemical ingredients are all there as well: Poseidon, Saturn, and Mars (representing water, lead, and iron); and the symbols for mercury and sulfur on the ground. Some of the lights are natural, and others divine, and all of them have the aura of the unnatural. It is the alchemist’s goal to control and fix the new light, bringing it into the domain of artifice, and letting it burn, as the epigraph says, without flames. With phosphorus, it became possible to preserve lights and shadows, and its discovery prompted some of the first thoughts about photography. 12 There are more synonyms for the Stone than for any other substance; one source lists over six hundred names. 13 Like the materia prima, the stone is the perfection (summa perfectionis) of all creation, and therefore embodies all substances and qualities in their highest forms. It is the “triune microcosm,” the perfect balance of sulfur, mercury, and salt, signifying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and it also shares the individual properties of every substance. 14 In Khunrath’s language, the Stone is the semi-corporeal near-incarnation of the divine microcosmic soul, and the perfection of the macrocosmic world of substances. Like the monad, it slips like a ghost between insubstantial ideas and forceful reality. Basil Valentine’s book On Natural and Supernatural Things is largely about tincture, another relative of the Stone; he says it has a “supernatural, fleeting, fiery spirit,” so that it does not pertain to the world of visible and tangible nature. But at the same time it can be found in all metals, and so it is partly natural. 15 Everything mundane except the Stone simply exists. Only the Stone can occupy the impossibly thin membrane between the mundane and the transcendental. That is what perfect painting is: neither entirely dull water and stone, nor weightless representation. Not merely a wooden panel coated with cracked and abraded paint, nor entirely a madonna and child. Or as in Rembrandt, not just a slather of oil, nor simply

182 WHAT PAINTING IS FIG. 9 Title page from Johann Heinrich Cohausen, Lumen novum phosphoris accensum (Amsterdam: Joannem Oosterwyk, 1717).

182 WHAT PAINTING IS<br />

FIG. 9 Title page from Johann Heinrich Cohausen, Lumen novum<br />

phosphoris accensum (Amsterdam: Joannem Oosterwyk, 1717).

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