Art & AlchemyJacob Wamberg Partly because of alchemy's dismissal from the Parnassus of rational sciences, the interplay between this esoteric knowledge and the visual arts is still a surprisingly neglected research area. This collection of articles covering the time span from the Late Middle Ages to the 20th century intends, however, to challenge the current neglect. Areas on which its twelve authors cast new light include alchemical gender symbolism in Renaissance, Mannerist, and modernist art; alchemical ideas of transformation in Italian fifteenth-century landscape imagery; Netherlandish seventeenth-century portrayals of alchemists; and alchemy's tortured status as a forerunner of photography. Art and Alchemy indicates that alchemy indeed has several connections with art by examining some of the pictorial and literary books that disseminated alchemical symbols and ideas, delving into images, which in one way or another can be shown to appropriate and interpret alchemical ideas or environments, and expanding t |
Contents
Preface 79 | 7 |
The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy | 23 |
A Stone and Yet Not a Stone | 64 |
The Material Ethereal | 83 |
GENDER ΙΟΙ | 103 |
Artists Alchemists and Mannerists in Courtly Prague | 129 |
Guilt or Gold Alchemy and Prostitution | 149 |
Alchemy in the Amphitheatre | 195 |
Alchemy and Its Images in the Eddleman and Fisher Collections | 221 |
Convention and Change in SeventeenthCentury | 249 |
Notes on Contributors | 273 |
Common terms and phrases
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