What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

186 WHAT PAINTING IS
needed it to be—a robe in a painting of the Golden Calf. But it
never quite evaporates. When I say that painting is at its best
when it pushes toward transcendence, but does not escape from
itself, this is what I mean. It is the pushing, rather than the old
rabbit-duck choice between illusion and materiality, that makes
paint itself so expressive. This is a captivating passage, an
apparition trapped at the exact instant it disappears.
Christianus Adolphus Balduinus’s small etching of the
philosopher’s garden is one of the sweetest alchemical Utopias
(Figure 10). 19 Here is the end of all transmutations. The
philosopher’s stone is the sun and also a winged genius,
“hovering,” as a contemporary writer says, “over the
philosopher’s rose garden just before descending into its
glittering pool.” 20 The water of the pool is composed of “golden
gold” (AURUM AURÆ), made out of pure sunlight. The
alchemist waits at the garden gate.
There is impeccable calm and balance. The “things above”
(sursum) are the same as the “things below” (deorsum). A receding
movement (seorsum) is the same as an approaching movement
(horsum). The seven metals below are mirrored by the seven
planets above. The Seal of Solomon, sign of the harmony of the
four elements, presides over the water. Its inversion or reflection
(retrorsum) is the same in the pool as out of it. And the entire
vision is symmetrically framed by the four elements.
One goal of the alchemical processes is balanced stillness. But
the philosopher’s garden is never a pure heaven. Even when it is
symbolized by a single rose, the rose has thorns and attracts bees,
moths, and spiders; and when it is pictured in a landscape as
Balduinus does, it is surrounded by difficult, parched country.
The alchemist’s sister hurries down from the Planetary
Mountains, carrying the key to the garden. Inside, all is calm and
serene: but outside, she must hurry. The mountains are stark and
endless. Alchemists never forget what lies outside the garden, or
what infests it from within.