Art & Alchemy

Front Cover
Jacob Wamberg
Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006 - Art - 297 pages
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
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Jacob Wamberg is professor of art history at Aarhus University, Denmark.

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