Distributed for Museum Tusculanum Press
Art and Alchemy
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 area. This collection of articles, covering the time span from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century, challenges the current neglect. The contributors cast new light on a range or related topics, including 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.

Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Jan Bäcklund and Jacob Wamberg
MATTER
1: The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy: The Formative Period c. 1150-1350
Aksel Haaning
2: A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Themes in North Italian Quattrocento Landscape Imagery
Jacob Wamberg
3: The Material Ethereal: Photography and the Alchemical Ancestor
Laurie Dahlberg
GENDER
4: Fluctuating Identities: Gender Reversals in Alchemical Imagery
M.E. Warlick
5: Artists, Alchemists and Mannerists in Courtly Prague
Sally Metzler
6: Guilt or Gold: Alchemy and Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Elizabeth K. Menon
7: The Paracelsian Magus in German Art: Joseph Beuys and Rebecca Horn
Urszula Szulakowska
COLLECTIONS
8: ’Alchemy in the Amphitheatre’: Some Considerations of the Alchemical Content of the Engravings in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1609)
Peter Forshaw
9: Alchemy and Its Images in the Eddleman and Fisher Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation
Lloyd DeWitt and Lawrence M. Principe
10: Convention and Change in Seventeenth-Century Depictions of Alchemists
Jane Russell Corbett
Notes on Contributors
Index
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