LIT REVIEW: The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages

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LIT REVIEW: The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages

POSTED: Thursday, October 29, 2009, 6:32 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

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Marion Boyars, 336 pp., $17.95, Sept. 1

Imagination, according to the 11th-century Latin text The Great Ladder of Heaven, consists of 12 levels. On the lowest level are images we recognize from our everyday lives. On the second level are images that we haven't yet seen, but can be sure are real, such as faraway lands or people. On the third level are images that nobody has ever seen, but that everybody knows exist, such as ' if you happened to inhabit Europe in the Middle Ages ' gold-guarding griffins.

These griffins, and many other creatures who occupied the third level of medieval Europeans' imaginations, appear in Spike Bucklow's The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages, a history of color, chemistry and cosmography in medieval Europe. Though a chemist by training, Bucklow largely omits modern science from the book, intending it rather as a 'primer or visitor's guide to the traditional world view.' By this book's account, the traditional world was a place imbued with far more cosmic meaning and spiritual direction than ours.

To addicts of Dan Brown and other authors of crypto-religious thrillers, Bucklow's book might be an especially intense fix. Almost every page illuminates a secret, symbolic meaning behind some literary or exegetical text. The 'All the world's a stage' monologue in As You Like It, for instance, is revealed to be an extended metaphor about the human soul's journey through stages characterized by planetary qualities: a Martian (warlike) phase, an amorous Venutian period and so on.

The biggest riddles in the book, however, are recipes for paint pigments. These recipes could be, variously, 'scientific poems' that frankly admitted the pigment they promised was impossible to make (metallic blue), coded secrets about the illusory nature of reality (dragonsblood), or illustrations of universal principles (Spanish gold) ' in short, almost anything except straightforward lists of ingredients. Understanding the philosophical and religious significances of each pigment, Bucklow argues, can nowadays provide 'access to the most profound levels of meaning in some of the greatest products of European culture.'

But Bucklow never shows that this profundity was apparent to medieval Europeans beyond a small community of reclusive alchemists. He devotes scant space to individual paintings, artists or historical events, focusing instead on long explanations of esoteric legends or belief systems. Although he drops many interesting anecdotes along the way ' did you know that women in ancient Greece prospected for gold by drawing tar-tipped feathers through lake mud, then burning the feathers and sifting gold dust from the ashes? ' Bucklow's narrative often meanders into theoretical discourses whose relevance to the main subject is not clearly established.

Like a lapis lazuli stone, glittering with tiny specks of pyrite, The Alchemy of Paint is resplendent with eye-catching factoids. The rich portrayal of a traditional culture promised in the preface, however, is as elusive in this book as that famous blue mineral was in medieval Europe.

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