On 6 July, Christie’s presented an Art d’Asie Sale in Paris, featuring a wide array of Asian art – from imperial porcelains to Tibetan thangka. Surprisingly, it was a Taoist alchemy album from early Qing dynasty (1644-1911) which achieved the highest price and stole the show.
The 48-page Taoist alchemy album – illustrated with colourful pictures, diagrams and detailed essays – is an ancient Chinese guide to produce a Golden Elixir for immortality.
Rarely seen at auctions, it was hammered down at €600,000 – far exceeding the pre-sale low estimate of €10,000 by 60 times. After fees, it was sold for €756,000 (around US$771,000) to take the crown of the sale.
The secrets of nature's alchemy captivated both the scientific and literary imagination of the Middle Ages. This book explores Chaucer's fascination with earth's mutability. Gabrovsky reveals that his poetry represents a major contribution to a medieval worldview centered on the philosophy of physics, astronomy, alchemy, and logic.
I came upon this in an art store today, an oil paint colour labeled 'Caput Mortuum', and was thinking, Adam, that it could be a decent side hustle for you to act as a consultant for an (established? emerging?) pigment/art supply company in creating an 'alchemical' line of colours, the Thrice-Great, or Peacock's Tail series, say. I say that in jest, but I almost bought the colour today on name alone.
One could come up with a few dozen evocative names, I’m sure, just from Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Just around the treatises of Ripley are mentions of the 'Blackest Black' as being like a "Cimmerian utter Darkness of compleat Rottenness", which, admittedly, sounds less like an oil paint colour than a black metal concept album; but Lyon Green, Terra Foliata, Toad fully Ruddy, Crow's bill Blue as lead ('Crowys byll bloe as lede'), etc., that could hold unto a small tube label.
And it would be very poetic to walk into a studio (or watch a YouTube video) and hear the artist explain: "How did I made the colour on that section? Easy, you just mix two parts of White Eagles with one part of Splendor Solis."
An alchemical furnace from the Nordic Museum’s collections is one of few remaining artifacts from the 18th century alchemist and mineralogist August Nordenskiöld. Employed to produce gold for Swedish king Gustav III, Nordenskiöld had a subversive counter-agenda of making the secret of alchemy open to all, and thereby ending the ”tyranny of money”.
Goldin+Senneby have produced an instruction manual, offering collectors a license to reproduce the 18th century alchemical furnace that belonged to August Nordenskiöld. The replica instruction manual exists in a numbered but unlimited edition, where the price increases for each edition sold; making it increasingly expensive to decrease the rarity of the artwork.
The alchemical furnace was first copied during a solo exhibition at Crystal, Stockholm (2012), including a magic performance at Drottningholm Castle Theatre. The replica instruction manual was first presented at Frieze NY the same year. Manual ed 3 is in the collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris, since 2016.
Adam, I'm sure the images from Darmstadt which you posted the other day are linked to Gustav III of Sweden, who employed Nordenskiöld. Gustav is mentioned in the notes after the images.
An illustration from the Arcana divina, MS 88 in the Beinecke Library, Yale, shows the use of sunlight to heat or transform material in alchemical flasks.
If you have $239,239.96 to spare then you might like to invest in a copy of Domenico Beccafumi's La ricerca e lo sfruttamento dei metalli.
'The series begins with the gods observing the alchemist in his laboratory, proceeds via an initial meeting, to the gods alarm at possible capture and, perhaps, the intended use to be made of them and their properties, their capture and enchainment by the alchemist and, finally, the gods being lead to the anvil. The alchemist s assistant, most likely symbolic of Vulcan, does the work, while the alchemist in pensive mode, looks on as director, scholar and philosopher. The second group of five plates, while appearing to be simpler, at least in thematic terms, is made more complicated by having no clear pictorial conclusion.'
I love the authoritative figure of the alchemist in these engravings, pushing the gods around, thus reversing the usual man-god paradigm, and getting the assistant to do all the hard work.
