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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.


297 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2006

Art: Art--General Studies


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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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