Alchemy, image and text: The waning of alchemy and the decline of visual discourse in the late Renaissance

Abstract

Abstract From its obscure origins in antiquity the alchemical tradition enjoyed a late flowering in seventeenth-century Europe with the appointment of alchemists at European Courts and a profusion of alchemical publications within the rapidly expanding output of printed books. Works, such as Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) and Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi (1617, 1621) incorporated fine engravings, with imagery that reflected the Renaissance spirit of synthesis, resemblance, analogy and allegory, and the deployment of a widely accepted range of symbols and emblems. Microcosm and Macrocosm, matter and spirit, the human and the scientific were presented by Fludd and others as a unified cosmos, linked by complex systems of analogy and resemblance, within a framework of NeoPlatonism and Christianity. Alchemical literature employed a balance of text and image, in which visual argument, using analogy, resemblance, emblem and allegory, complemented text. The question of why this system gave way, in the late seventeenth century and ensuing Enlightenment to modern scientific and other serious discourse, progressively stripped of images, is discussed with reference to the writings of Francis Bacon, Edmund Burke, Ernst Gombrich, WJT Mitchell and Marshall McLuhan. The enduring influence of alchemy upon visual artists, from William Blake to Yves Klein and Anselm Kiefer, reflects a continuing concern with the integration of the material and the spiritual, and challenges a linguistics-based semiotics as well as an excessively reductionist science.