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

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