Full Description
This collection of articles covering the time span from the Late Middle Ages to the twentieth century intends to challenge the current neglect of the interplay between esoteric knowledge and the visual arts. '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 the scope of alchemical imagery by indicating structural affinities between alchemical processes and artistic creation.
Contents
Introduction; The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy: The Formative Period c. 1150-1350; A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Themes in North Italian Quattrocento Landscape Imagery; The Material Ethereal: Photography and the Alchemical Ancestor; Fluctuating Identities: Gender Reversals in Alchemical Imagery; Artists, Alchemists and Mannerists in Courtly Prague; Guilt or Gold Alchemy and Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Paris; The Paracleasian Magus in German Art: Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn; 'Alchemy in the Amphitheatre': Some Considerations of the Alchemical Content of the Engravings in Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1609); Alchemy and its Images in the Eddleman and Fisher Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation; Convention and Change in Seventeenth-Century Depictions of Alchemists; Index.
