Alchemy in Art: The Visual Tradition of Transformation

Stand in front of Harley MS 3469 in the British Library, the Splendor Solis of the 1550s, and the first thing that strikes you is the colour. Twenty-two full-page illuminations, painted for an unidentified Habsburg patron — almost certainly someone close to the court of Rudolf II at Prague — burn in saturated vermilions, malachite greens, and gold leaf that has not dimmed in five centuries. The king and queen stand in flasks. The sun and moon float above a tide of black water. Whatever the Splendor Solis “means,” it was not made to be read on a page in a quiet study. It was made to startle. That much the anonymous illuminator understood perfectly.

The early visual tradition: marginalia, not centrepieces

The Leiden Papyrus X and the Stockholm Papyrus, both probably compiled in the third century CE, are the earliest surviving documents of alchemical practice, and they are notably bare. Diagrams of apparatus. A distillation train sketched in outline. A few symbolic figures tucked at the margin, the ouroboros chief among them, but small, almost apologetic compared with the dense symbolic pages of a later age.

The Greek alchemist was not yet thinking in pictures. He was thinking in operations, and the images are there to remind the practitioner where in the sequence the work stands. The Greek visual inheritance is functional — it tells the apprentice what the apparatus looks like. It does not yet allegorise the soul.

The shift came with the Arabic tradition, and Lawrence Principe (The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, pp. 86–92) is right to put weight on it: by the ninth and tenth centuries, the alchemical manuscript had become a page of cosmological argument. Astrological diagrams sit beside the apparatus drawings. Planetary decans oversee the operations. The image is no longer auxiliary to the laboratory practice; it is the laboratory’s claim to be doing what the heavens do. That is a profound change of register, and it is the foundation of every later alchemical image, from the Aurora Consurgens to the Jungian mandala.

The medieval visual tradition: allegory arrives

By the high Middle Ages, the alchemical image had become a religious instrument. The Aurora Consurgens (c. 1420 in the dating of Copenhaver’s 2016 edition, but with earlier strata running back to the late fourteenth century) is the document where the fusion is most explicit. Attributed on the manuscript to Thomas Aquinas — a fiction Copenhaver treats as a Cistercian invention of the early fifteenth century — the Aurora literally identifies the nigredo with the crucifixion, the albedo with the resurrection, and the rubedo with the Last Judgment. The images are not decorations. They are the argument.

The printed Latin Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550, ascribed on the title page to “Bacon” (a fiction), and the German verse Rosarium of the same decade are the other pillar documents of the medieval-Renaissance visual programme. Their sequence of images — the black couple in the tomb, the white queen emerging from the bath, the red king and queen conjoined — became the canon that every later illustrator borrowed from. Twenty folio pages that the entire subsequent visual tradition of Western alchemy is, in a sense, a commentary on. (The dating of the Rosarium illustrations is contested. Rampling, “The Ripley Scrolls and the Rosarium,” Ambix 63, 2016, argues that the visual programme is a Rosarium-tradition source, not a single medieval original.)

The Splendor Solis: a Habsburg marvel

The Splendor Solis is the document I opened with, and I think it is the most important single alchemical manuscript in existence. The attribution to “Solomon Trismosin” recorded in 1598 by Hortulanus and again in the Aureum Vellus of 1682 is, as Principe (2013, p. 169) puts it bluntly, “late fiction” — there was no such person, and the manuscript was painted in the 1550s for a patron in the circle of Rudolf II, the famously alchemically-minded Habsburg emperor who collected occult manuscripts the way other princes collected armour.

What the illuminator got right was the marriage of register. Each image is simultaneously a laboratory procedure (you can almost see the alembic, the athanor, the long-necked flask) and a cosmic allegory (the king crowned in solar fire, the queen washed in lunar water). The viewer is meant to oscillate — to read the picture as glassware and then, after a beat, to read it as the soul’s progress. That double register is the signature of mature alchemical imagery, and the Splendor Solis delivers it more completely than any other source.

A few years later, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533) gave the tradition its diagrammatic skeleton. The cosmic sphere with its planetary intelligences arranged in proper order, the cabalistic tree, the geomantic figures — these are the images that the Western esoteric tradition has been reproducing ever since. Frances Yates (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964, pp. 56–62) is too generous in making Bruno the pivot of the entire tradition, but she is right that Agrippa’s diagrams are the visual grammar in which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did their thinking.

The Rosicrucian moment: the printed image

The early seventeenth century is when alchemical imagery became a publishing phenomenon. Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617) is the most ambitious of the products — fifty emblems, fifty discourses, fifty canons of music, with the alchemical work presented as a synaesthetic programme. Read the emblem. Sing the canon. Meditate on the discourse. The alchemical work is opera, and the alchemist is composer.

The Musaeum Hermeticum (1625), compiled by Lucas Jennis, is the reference library. It gathers the Splendor Solis, the Rosarium, the Turba Philosophorum, the Asclepius, and a long shelf of others in a single volume. Obrist’s contribution to Conjuring Demons (ed. Forshaw, 2016) is the right caution here: the Musaeum is a publishing project with an agenda, and we should read it as such. The Theatrum Chemicum (1602–1661) is the more sober compilation, six volumes of unillustrated texts, and the difference in visual register tells you something about the spectrum of the alchemical community in 1600.

The Ripley Scroll: an English peculiarity

The Ripley Scroll is one of the oddest documents in the alchemical inheritance. More than twenty copies survive, mostly on long narrow parchment scrolls running to twenty feet or more, and they are all variations on a single visual programme: the alchemist at the furnace, the nigredo, the albedo, the citrinitas, the rubedo, the philosopher’s stone, the rebis. The scroll is named for George Ripley, the English Augustinian canon whose Compound of Alchemy (1471) is the most quoted English alchemical poem of the fifteenth century, but the visual programme is later and almost certainly continental in inspiration.

Rampling (2016) has done the work of separating the two. The poem is Ripley’s. The scroll is the Rosarium-tradition made portable, and the two were welded together in the seventeenth century, when English alchemists wanted an English patron-saint for a visual programme that almost certainly originated in a German or Flemish workshop — a small piece of national appropriation, and a useful reminder that alchemical images moved through the trade in manuscripts the way fashionable woodcuts moved through the print trade.

Teniers and the painters of the laboratory

By the mid-seventeenth century, alchemical imagery had become a genre of painting. David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) is the painter everyone cites, and rightly: his laboratory scenes established the visual cliché that we are still living with, the bearded old man peering at a flask in a cluttered room, a skull on the shelf, a manuscript open on the desk, money changing hands at the door. Szulakowska (The Alchemy of Light, 2000) is the standard survey; she reads the genre as satirical, and I think that is half right. Teniers is making fun of the alchemist. He is also, in many of the panels, making the alchemist sympathetic — a serious practitioner of a difficult art, mocked by the world, undeterred. The genre was imitated across the Low Countries and into Germany, and the modern popular image of the alchemist descends in a straight line from these Flemish panels. These are conventions. They are also, mostly, Teniers.

The recurring images and what they do

The alchemical visual tradition uses a small set of recurring images, each loaded with meaning, and the alchemical apprentice learned the tradition by learning to read them.

The marriage of Sol and Luna. The king and the queen, the sun and the moon. The union of opposites that is the work itself. The image is also, almost always, a laboratory operation — typically the conjunction of gold and silver, of sulphur and mercury, of the fixed and the volatile — and the alchemist trained himself to read the picture in both registers at once.
The dragon. Red dragon, green dragon, black dragon. The prima materia in its unfixed, dangerous, transformative aspect. The colours are not decorative; they correspond to stages of the work. The green lion devouring the sun is the strong acid that dissolves gold, and the image is also a moral emblem of the fixed being overcome by the volatile.
The ouroboros. The snake devouring its own tail. The image is older than alchemy (it appears in fourth-century Gnostic texts), and the alchemists inherited it as the emblem of cyclical return, of self-sufficiency, of the matter that provides its own transformation.
The rebis. A single body, male and female, crowned and winged, holding a sceptre and an orb, surrounded by sun and moon. The hermaphroditic offspring of the conjunction, the perfected matter of the work. One of the strangest images in the entire Western esoteric tradition.
The homunculus and the phoenix. The little man in the flask and the bird that burns and rises. The homunculus appears in Paracelsus and then in Goethe’s Faust, and has become the modern shorthand for everything hubristic about the alchemical project — Goethe, not Paracelsus, did the most to fix the image in our heads. The phoenix is the image of the rubedo, and one of the few alchemical images that the popular imagination has retained.

The images are not illustrations of a text. They are the text. The alchemist who meditates on the marriage of Sol and Luna is, in the alchemical understanding, participating in the marriage; the alchemist who meditates on the ouroboros is recovering the unity of all things. To read the images as mere decoration is to miss the point. This is the deepest disagreement between the older school of art history (which treated the images as cryptographic puzzles to be decoded) and the more recent school (which treats them as instruments of thought in their own right). Principe (2013, ch. 5) is firmly in the second camp, and I think he is right.

The Symbolists, the Surrealists, and the modern heirs

The alchemical visual tradition feeds directly into nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Odilon Redon’s noirs, Gustave Moreau’s Salomes, Fernand Khnopff’s sphinxes — these are not alchemical images in any strict sense, but they are drawing on the same well of symbolic thinking that the alchemists drew on, and the visual debt is unmistakable.

Salvador Dalí is the twentieth-century artist most committed to the alchemical inheritance, and his commitment is much more serious than the popular image of Dalí suggests. The 1960 watercolour cycle for Dante’s Divine Comedy, published by Les Heures Clares in 1960, is densely alchemical in its visual programme — the Inferno scenes organised around the colour stages, the Paradiso scenes around the planetary spheres. The 1977 lithograph series Alchemy of the Philosopher is, in effect, a Dalí restatement of the Rosarium. The 1934 Maldoror illustrations are surrealist, full stop; they are not alchemical, and the older sources that call them alchemical are simply wrong.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), the Theosophical and Anthroposophical Societies, and the modern Rosicrucian orders all draw on the alchemical visual tradition as a working resource. The Golden Dawn’s “cipher” manuscript is a new alchemical emblem book, and the cards of the Rider–Waite tarot (1909), designed under Waite’s instruction by Pamela Colman Smith, are the most reproduced alchemical images of the twentieth century. Almost no one who has ever looked at a tarot deck realises that the images descend, through the Golden Dawn, from the alchemical emblem books of the seventeenth century.

Jung and the alchemical image

The most influential modern reader of the alchemical visual tradition is Carl Gustav Jung, and the influence is impossible to overestimate. Psychologie und Alchemie (1944), followed by Psychology of the Transference (1946) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955), are richly illustrated with alchemical images, and Jung’s commentary has done more than anyone else’s to put those images in front of modern readers.

Jung’s reading is that the alchemical images are projections of the unconscious, particularly of the process of psychic integration he called individuation. The king and queen are the animus and anima. The dragon is the shadow. The ouroboros is the self. The philosopher’s stone is the integrated personality. The reading is brilliant, sometimes, and on its own terms it is internally coherent. The problem is that it is not really a reading of alchemy at all. It is a reading of Jung’s own theory, using alchemical images as illustrations. The alchemists were not, in the main, doing depth psychology. They were doing laboratory work and natural philosophy within a serious religious and philosophical framework. Newman (Promethean Ambitions, 2004, ch. 5) and Principe (2013, ch. 5) have made this critique carefully and I think decisively.

That does not mean the images are not useful to depth psychology. It means that the alchemists did not make them for Jung’s purposes, and to read them only through Jung is to lose most of what they are doing.

Why the images matter

The alchemical visual tradition is one of the great bodies of Western art, and the standard histories of art barely mention it. The images are esoteric. They resist the iconographic decoding that the discipline of art history prefers, and they reward a kind of attention that the discipline does not encourage, but they repay the attention.

The most useful single introduction is still Lyndy Abraham’s A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (1998). The most useful single collection of reproductions is the series of British Library manuscripts, of which the Splendor Solis and the Ripley Scrolls are the highlights. The most useful scholarly caution is Principe and Newman: take the alchemists at their word, and resist the temptation to read them as proto-psychologists or proto-scientists.

The reader who wants to recover the alchemical inheritance should start with the images, not the texts. The texts are more argumentative and more easily misread. The images, by contrast, are immediately available.

FAQ

Q: What is the Aurora Consurgens? A: A richly illustrated Latin alchemical manuscript of c. 1420, falsely attributed to Thomas Aquinas. It fuses alchemical imagery with Christian allegory (the nigredo as the crucifixion, the rubedo as the Last Judgment). Copenhaver’s edition (2016) places it in a Cistercian milieu.

Q: Why is the Splendor Solis dated to the 1550s? A: The manuscript (British Library, Harley MS 3469) was painted for a Habsburg patron in the mid-sixteenth century, almost certainly in Rudolf II’s circle. The “Solomon Trismosin” attribution is a 1598 fiction, repeated in the Aureum Vellus of 1682 (Principe, 2013, p. 169).

Q: What did Dalí’s alchemical work actually illustrate? A: Dalí’s principal alchemical series is the 1960 watercolour cycle for Dante’s Divine Comedy (Les Heures Clares) and the 1977 Alchemy of the Philosopher lithograph series. The 1934 Maldoror illustrations are surrealist, not alchemical.

Q: Who first read alchemical imagery as a map of the psyche? A: Carl Gustav Jung, beginning with Psychologie und Alchemie (1944). Principe (2013) and Newman (2004) argue that the reading projects modern psychological categories onto a working laboratory tradition.