The Alchemy of Paint

The Alchemy of Paint examines pre-modern artists’ recipes for a handful of pigments, including lapis lazuli, gold and vermilion. It has become a widely-used text in the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of the history of ideas, medieval art history and the history of science.

Historic pigment recipes – many of which were reconstructed by the author – provide evidence that practicing craftspeople had a detailed grasp of the sophisticated physical and cosmological theories that defined reality in pre-modern Europe. As such, the book is an in-depth, and heavily-referenced, primer for the pre-modern European world-view. For example, the chapter on the purification of lapis lazuli – to make ultramarine – is a practical example of how so-called Aristotelian four-element theory helped people engage productively with the material world.

The first half of the book shows how theories – like the four elements, hylomorphism, emanation, etc – were reflected in practice in recipes that ‘worked’, as well as in recipes that ‘did not work’ – like dragonsblood and mercury blue – but were nonetheless faithfully repeated. The second half of the book revisits materials – including vermilion and gold – to show that widely-recognised multi-levelled meanings were inherent in materials. Physical materials could therefore contribute metaphysical meanings to the mainly religious objects that incorporated them.