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

NOTES TO CHAPTER I 207
1. Emmens, Argentaurana or Some Contributions to the History of
Science (Bristol and London: Geo. Du Boistel and Co., 1899), 32,
reprinted with commentary in Truman A.Schwartz and George
B.Kauffman, “Experiments in Alchemy,” Journal of Chemical
Education 53 (1976):136–38, 235–39, especially 238. Text modified.
2. For example in Aurifontina chymica: Or, a Collection of fourteen Small
Treatises Concerning the First Matter of Philosophers, edited by John
Frederick Houpreght (London: William Cooper, 1680).
3. A longer list, and an analysis of body metaphors, is in my Pictures
of the Body, Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, forthcoming).
4. For shit and bodily fluids in the context of twentieth-century art,
see also YveAlain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s
Guide (New York: Zone, 1997), 22, 29–31, 238, and 286 n. 10, citing
Sartre’s visqueux, in Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel
E.Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 774, 776.
5. Translation from Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the 16th and
17th Centuries, translated by George Engelke (Chicago: Aries
Press, 1935). For the original see chapter 1, n. 30.
6. The letter is dated II April 1995.
7. For example Eirenaeus Philalethes [George Starkey], De metallorum
metamorphosi, in Musæum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum…
continens tractatus chimicos XXI prœstantissimus (Frankfurt:
Hermann van de Sande, 1678 [1625]), translated in Three Tracts of
the Great Medicine of the Philosophers (London: Cosmopolita, 1694),
and as “The Metamorphosis of Metals,” in The Hermetic Museum,
Restored and Enlarged, edited by Arthur Edward Waite, 2 vols.
(London: Elliott and Co., 1893), vol. 2, pp. 227–45. Waite’s
translation has been reprinted several times, for example The
Hermetic Museum, 2 vols. in 1 (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser,
1991. See further William Newman, “The Corpuscular
Transmutational theory of Eirenaeus Philalethes,” in Alchemy and
Chemistry in the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries, Proceedings of the
Warburg Colloquium, 1989, edited by Piyo Rattansi and Antonio
Clericuzio (Dor-drecht: Kluwer, 1994), 161–82, especially 163.
8. Die Alchimie des Geber, edited by E.Darmstaedter (Berlin: Springer,
1922), 39.
9. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character
and Conduct of Artists (New York: W.W.Norton, 1963).
10. Allen G.Debus, “Renaissance Chemistry and the Work of Robert
Fludd,” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century (Los
Angeles: William Andres Clark Memorial Library, 1966), 1–29,
especially 17, citing Robert Fludd, Anatomies ampitheatrum effigie