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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WHAT PAINTING IS 85 FIG. 2 Noah’s ark. From Goossen van Vreeswuk, De goude Leeuv of den Asijn der Wysen (Amsterdam: the author, 1671), p. 100.

86 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA hell, a seething lifeless place where only God (or his surrogate, the alchemist) can make something beautiful. Some of the earliest Western alchemical texts, attributed to Zosimos of Panopolis, are visions of that sulfury hell. In one manuscript Zosimos recounts his fascination with a pool of burning yellow, where souls pop to the surface and scream before they sink again into the burning depths. It all happens in a dream, where Zosimos finds himself looking into a cauldron set on an altar: I fell asleep…and I saw…a bowl and at the top the water bubbling, and many people in it endlessly. And there was no one near the altar whom I could ask. I then went up towards the altar to view the spectacle. And I saw a little man, a barber, whitened by years, who said to me, “What are you looking at?” I answered him that I marveled at the boiling of the water and the men, burnt yet living. 27 In chemical terms, his vision was probably a bubbling cauldron of sulfur powder and quicklime. 28 It is easy to recreate the yellow hell in a laboratory, by mixing two cups of quicklime (calcium oxide, CaO) with one cup of sulfur powder and five cups of water. 29 When the vessel begins to heat, the yellow sulfur and quicklime sink to the bottom, and a clear “sky” of water forms above them. As it comes to the boil, sulfur bubbles ooze upward like the greasy streamers in a lava lamp, rising and bursting on the surface, and slow-motion showers of sulfur rain back down. Eventually a reddish layer forms on top (the supernatant, calcium polysulfide), casting a bloody light over the landscape. If the heat is moderate, the sulfur and quicklime never entirely dissolve: instead they undulate like the quaking ground of hell that Milton describes at the beginning of Paradise Lost. The hellish smell and churning belches of Zosimos’s liquid are an apt metaphor for the wasteland of the beginning of the work, and it turns out that the mixture has unexpected links to visual art: it has been used to tint and color fabrics and metals. If a strip of polished copper is held above the surface, the hydrogen sulfide fumes will stain it into a darkened metallic rainbow of silver, purple, and black. After a while the clear “sky” in Zosimos’s liquid will take on a greenish gold color, lit from above by the deepening Vermilion of the floating calcium polysulfide. Different metals can be submerged in the greenish

WHAT PAINTING IS 85<br />

FIG. 2 Noah’s ark. From Goossen van Vreeswuk, De goude Leeuv of den Asijn<br />

der Wysen (Amsterdam: the author, 1671), p. 100.

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