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

NOTES TO CHAPTER I 195
source is Cristophe Glaser, Traité de la chymie, enseignant par une
brieve et facile méthode toutes les necessaires préparations, 2nd ed.
(Paris:). d’Hory, 1673 [1663]).
7. Only the most determined “puffers” or “spagyrists”—alchemists
who took the day-to-day recipes literally, and understood
everything at face value—would think only of the laboratory. Most
understood that the exotic materials and odd names were ciphers,
pointing vaguely at something beyond. But the exoticism of the
subject cannot be burned away, leaving the indelible spiritual
core, without also losing the texture and fascination of everyday
work. That is why I return to the literal sense throughout this
book: without it, the actual textures, weights, and smells of the
laboratory (or the studio) tend to evaporate in the name of a
transcendental goal that cannot make sense without their support.
Some readers—practicing alchemists, and especially “spiritual”
alchemists—have objected that I spend too much time with literalminded
recipes. This is the defense: that to understand the
fascination of substances, it is necessary to take them—for a while,
and with reservations—exactly as they present themselves.
Without that attention to the grain of everyday life, the essential
tension between substance and sign is prematurely broken.
8. Among them the best is Abraham Pincas et al., Le Lustre de la main,
esprit, matière et techniques de la peinture (Paris: École nationale
supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1991).
9. George Chapman, Homer’s Batrachomyomachia, Hymns and
Epigrams, Hesiod’s Works and Days (London: J.R.Smith, 1858). The
Batrachomyomachia is conventionally attributed to Homer, just as
the Iliad and Odyssey are.
10. In this respect Paracelsus has the advantage of being less
programmatic than Jung; Paracelsus used alchemical concepts for
many things beside his doctrine of spagyric medicine. See, for
example, Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim
[Paracelsus], Elf Traktat (Von Farbsuchten, Andere Redaktion), in
Theophrast von Hohenheim genannt Paracelsus Sämtliche Werke, edited
by Karl Sudhoff and W. Matthiessen, 14 vols. (Munich and Berlin:
R.Oldenbourg, 1922–33), vol. I, p. 56, comparing diseased skin
colors to alchemical colors. The passage is also cited in Massimo
Luigi Bianchi, “The Visible and the Invisible: From Alchemy to
Paracelsus,” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the XVIth and XVIIth
Centuries, Proceedings of the Warburg Colloquium, 1989, edited by
Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994),
17–50, 41 n. 49.
11. Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1975).