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

WHAT PAINTING IS 73
oil, canvas, squalor. So it is the artist’s task to discern somehow
what is worth saving, and what can be transformed, and finally
to crawl out of the morass.
Following the model of Jesus’s hypostasis—His incarnation
into flesh—and His resurrection, some alchemists conceived their
purpose as the rehearsal of their own resurrection at the Second
Coming. They studied the revelation of divinity in ordinary
matter, and especially in the most earthy things, those farthest
from heaven and most like themselves. They looked at purulent
infusions and saw their own dying spirits. Turbid waters
mirrored leaden thoughts. A dusky flask suggested a dark mind,
and a foaming crucible implied inner turmoil. They saw the
endless labor, with the recipes calling for a year’s worth of work
to accomplish a single step, as painful allegories for their own
lives, and their chances of redemption. But the Stone was a
hope to be cherished, since it promised that their bodies could
finally be balanced and preserved, and their souls made calm and
clear.
In academic language, these are hypostatic allegories. They are
a general truth about alchemy, but it is easy to overstate them, as
I think Jung did. Most of the time it is implicit that whatever
happens in the flask is of pressing religious importance, but it is
rare to find alchemists drawing parallels between each
experiment and a particular state of their immortal soul. Even so,
most alchemy is theoalchemy: it is about questions of eternal life,
soul and spirit, resurrection, and incarnation. Alchemists knew
they were rehearsing, and often speeding up, processes that the
earth does naturally by brewing metals underground. That work
was God’s, and it was the ongoing perfection of the world. As the
universe drew near to the millennium, human souls as well as
stony spirits were slowly being purified and brought closer to
God. So in a fundamental sense, the alchemists did see their souls
in the retorts and crucibles, but they rarely spoke about their
experiences in the terms that Jung implies: certainly they never
mentioned the psyche, the unconscious, and the archetypes,
which Jung proffers as the actual mechanisms driving alchemy.
Even devoted theoalchemists who wrote about revelation, spirit,
and redemption did not make explicit connections between
laboratory recipes and their own souls. They implied as much by
talking about the relation between alchemy and prayer, but they
did not have the modern penchant for confessional self-analysis.