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

80 THE MOULDY MATERIA PRIMA
materia prima would be the original chaos, forever hidden from
out eyes, and the secunda materia would be the one that this author
proposes as the hinge between spiritual existence and the visible
world.
The anonymous author of this book might have agreed with
Dee that the materia prima would have to contain all substances, or
at least all metals, in an inchoate mass. From an artist’s point of
view, this is the feeling that paint has every form already within
it, but in a confused state. The paint is like a bird’s nest, with the
threads all tangled and interwoven, and the painter’s job is to
tease them apart and lay them out for everyone to see. It is a very
different frame of mind from the queasy awareness of rot and
excrement, the heavy despondency of lead, or the delicate
incipience of water. Here painting is more of an operation, or a
technique, and the paint is already poised halfway between
chaos and completed painting.
And the list is not finished yet, since there are dozens more
identifications of the materia prima. The medieval Spanish
polymath Ramon Llull is credited with a manuscript claming the
first principle is not mercury but love, which is a binding agent
(amoris foedere) for all substances. 16 Love was the favorite choice of
alchemists who thought that alchemy should begin and end in a
monadic principle. In the frontispieces of books by the French
clergyman François Béroalde de Verville, love takes the form of a
trellis of ivy that entwines all the operations of alchemy. 17 There
is another tradition in alchemy that holds that mercury is the
single matter required in the alchemical work: another
manuscript attributed to Llull speaks of the world as a polarity of
forms of mercury—the hot, dry calcinated mercury and the cold,
moist sublimated mercury. 18 Titus Burckhardt, a twentiethcentury
Arabist and mystic, blends modern psychology with
older traditions by suggesting that “in the last analysis,”
quicksilver is “the most direct psychic manifestation” of materia
primal. 19 Later in the history of alchemy, salt became the primary
principle and materia prima of the universe. 20 Johann Rudolph
Glauber (his name means “believer”) waxed eloquent about salt:
“everything lives and grows and is sustained and increased in
salt,” he wrote, “salt is the beginning and ending of every
thing.” 21 Georg von Welling’s massive pansophic Magic-
Kabbalistic and Theosophic Work on the Origin, Nature, Property and
Use of Salt, Sulfur and Mercury is a religious and philosophic