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

210 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
26. “Era dal Nulla uscito / Il tenebroso Chaos, Maßa difforme / Al
primo suon d’Onnipotente Labro: / Parea, che partorito / Il
Disordin l’havesse, anzì, che Fabro / Stato ne fosse un Dio; tāto era
informe.” Tachenius, Lux obnubilata, op. cit., I.i.
27. Panopolis is modern Akhmim, in Upper Egypt. The quotation is
from F.S. Taylor, “The Visions of Zosimos,” Ambix 1–2 (1937–46):
88–92, especially 89 (translation modified); and see Marcelin
Berthelot and Charles Ruelle, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs,
3 vols. (Paris: Steinheil, 1887–88), vol. 3, pp. 107–112, 115–18;
Michele Mertens, “Project for a New Edition of Zosimus of
Panopolis,” in Alchemy Revisited, Proceedings of the International
Conference on the History of Alchemy at the University of Groningen,
edited by Z.R.W.M. von Martels. Collection de Travaux de
l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, edited by John
D. North, vol. 33. (Leiden: E.J. Brill: 1990), 121–26! and, most
recently, Les alchimistes grecs, edited by Robert Halleux (Paris:
Belles Lettres, 1981–95), vol. 4, part 1, Zosime de Panopolis: mémoires
authen tiques, edited and translated by Michele Mertens. The
modern interest in Zosimos dates from Jung; see his “Die Visionen
des Zosimos,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 5 (1937):15–54.
28. For the interpretation, see Berthelot and Ruelle, Collection des
anciens alchimistes grecs, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 118, n. 3.
29. The following description is William Newman’s version of a
recipe in Robert Halleux, Les alchimistes grecs, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 181,
n. 4 (personal communication, 1991).
30. These are recommended by Schwartz and Kauffman,
“Experiments in Alchemy,” op. cit., 236, who use 10 g each of sulfur
and CaO or Ca(OH) 2 and 150 ml of water, heated for about 15
minutes.
31. Quoted in François Le Targat, Kandinsky (New York: Rizzoli, 1987),
9.
32. For general thoughts on the physicality of the horizontal format,
see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1993), chapter 6.
33. This aspect of the paintings is analyzed in more detail in my
Pictures of the Body, op. cit., chapter 1.
34. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1986). The claims Stella makes are also discussed in my
“Abstraction’s Sense of History: Frank Stella’s Working Space
Revisited,” American Art 7 no. 1 (winter 1993):28–39, revised in
Streams into Sand: Links between Renaissance and Modern Painting,
with a commentary by Loren Partridge (New York: Gordon and
Breach, forthcoming).