The Image of Alchemy

Detail of Alchemist in His Workshop by David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690). Eddleman Collection, CHF.

By Lawrence M. Principe and Marjorie Gapp

Alchemy has long mystified, inspired, and intrigued people of all ages. Modern popular culture generally associates alchemy with magic, mysticism, witchcraft, spirituality, or simply fraud and futility, but painstaking historical scholarship over the past 20 years has revolutionized our understanding and knowledge of historical alchemy, revealing it more accurately within its proper cultural and historical context. The alchemist and his craft are now seen as serious and significant parts of medieval and early modern natural philosophy and as foundational, not only for the content and practices of modern chemistry, but also for the formation of cultural attitudes toward science and technology.

Recently historians of science have demonstrated that given the theories and knowledge available at the time, alchemy—and the promise of transmutation—was eminently reasonable. Such well-respected and famous figures as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle took alchemy seriously and pursued it vigorously. Moreover, alchemy was both a coherent laboratory practice and a powerful metaphor for cultural, spiritual, and material transformation, thus providing a compelling and coherent worldview influential in many early modern philosophical and intellectual contexts.

Alchemy was primarily concerned with studying and manipulating the natural world and, like modern chemistry, with the goal of producing new and better substances for a variety of purposes. Alchemists sought practical knowledge to make products—precious metals, alloys, glass, dyes, pigments, or medicines—that would augment human comfort and extend human power over the natural world. They pioneered a new approach to understanding and controlling the physical world, asked questions about the composition of matter, and developed laboratory operations to deploy their practical knowledge. Such endeavors certainly mark alchemy as the basis of modern chemistry. Indeed, the words alchemy and chemistry were largely interchangeable until the late 17th century, and many scholars now use another 17th-century term, chymistry, to keep the inevitable connotations we attach to those words from coloring our vision.

Yet something deeper captured public imagination and made alchemy a subject simultaneously of fascination, unease, and ridicule. Alchemists generally saw their processes as imitative of nature. Their laboratory operations paralleled not only the physical processes of transformation occurring all over the earth and within our bodies but also theological principles: God’s creative act, redemption, life, death, and resurrection. Thus alchemical writings could operate simultaneously on several levels, speaking in one breath (or one symbol) of mundane chemical transformations and of grander, more sublime ideas. The result was a discourse that was ambiguous and metaphorical but could unite concepts that we moderns have been taught to see as rigidly separated. Alchemists’ worldview, which united pursuits now divided into compartmentalized disciplines, provides an appealing counterpoint to our increasingly atomized, literalist, and unmanageable world.

Alchemical images—both those designed by alchemists themselves to illustrate their knowledge and those produced by artists who depicted alchemy—provide a compelling point of entry into the intriguing world of alchemy and its multiple meanings. Manuscripts and books from the 15th to 17th centuries and 17th- and 18th-century paintings featuring alchemists at work are much more than illustrations of alchemy: they are examples of an early modern vision of the world. Alchemy and early modern art make a natural pair, since both rely on associative thinking and emblematic representation to convey their messages; both need to be “read,” and understanding how to read one helps us understand how to read the other. In the 17th and 18th centuries artists in Holland (the modern Netherlands) and Flanders (the Spanish Netherlands, now northern Belgium) drew fruitfully on images— often ambiguous ones—of alchemy and the alchemist in order to comment on cultural and moral issues in their societies. Netherlandish genre paintings—highly detailed pictures showing people in familiar settings—are artifacts of a changing Dutch society. These paintings facilitated contemplation, encouraged discourse, and enabled social change. Rembrandt’s paintings of household interiors, for example, not only reflected a new popular interest in domesticity but also fostered discussions about the place of the home in Dutch society. Images of the alchemist were also widespread and popular, but scholars have not adequately examined the important lessons these images offered. The act of looking at alchemical paintings enabled collectors from the Dutch middle classes, whose lives had been transformed by religious upheaval and the boom in international trade, to reflect on the forces that were radically altering their world. Alchemy, with its preoccupation with transmutation and production of valuable commodities, seemed to epitomize the changes that swirled around these consumers. Alchemical art—depictions of alchemists at work—thus constituted a site for important debates over the place of science, commerce, and wealth in early modern life.

Alchemy invoked other issues as well. Many depictions of alchemy explore its promise of limitless amounts of gold and its consequences for the unwary or unwise practitioner and his family. Given the link of alchemy with commerce and production, the image of alchemy could also evoke questions about the burgeoning commercialism of early modern Europe and particularly of the Dutch states. The 17th and 18th centuries saw chemistry increasingly professionalized and institutionalized; chemistry entered the university curricula, scientific societies were founded, and the chemical “textbook” became widely available. The middle classes, not just the elite, could use newly available information about chemical practices that were foundational to many new manufacturing applications. Distillation, various methods of purification, and other techniques originally developed by alchemists were crucial for a wide variety of industrial preparations (e.g., refining mineral acids for assaying and separating precious metals). Many contemporary depictions of alchemy represent these techniques.

Some alchemists went so far as to claim that they could surpass nature with their art, and a few argued that alchemical processes could produce new life. Such claims provoked unease in some quarters, as did the linking of alchemical processes with greater, and even divine, powers. Today we wrestle with the promises and perils of scientific knowledge and technological innovation, questioning how biological weapons, cloning, and stem-cell research will affect our lives. These anxieties are strikingly similar to the concerns of early modern Europeans who struggled to comprehend alchemy’s power and how it fit into a rapidly changing society. Examining 17th- and 18th-century paintings like the ones on the following pages can teach us about early modern debates over scientific discovery and technical innovation and give new perspective on similar debates in our own time.