The legacy of alchemy persisted through the Industrial Age, yielding the modern media that claim to be the ultimate chemical mirrors of nature: photography and the liquid crystal displays of the digital world.Īlchemists were notorious for attempting to make synthetic gold, but their goals were far more ambitious: to transform and bend nature to the will of an industrious human imagination. Materials invented in alchemical laboratories throughout the world include oil paints, dyes, and inks cements and ceramic glazing and dazzling effects in metalwork and glass. Eventually filtering into Europe, the "Great Art of Alchemy" made an indelible impact on the art, science, and creative culture that flourished in the Renaissance and well into the Enlightenment. From the seeds of its practice in Greco-Egyptian and Chinese antiquity, alchemical knowledge and techniques developed along the medieval "silk routes" of Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. In medieval Europe, alchemy was known as the Great Art in Islam, it was simply "the Art." David Brafman, associate curator of rare books at the Getty Research Institute and curator of the exhibition The Art of Alchemy, explores this mysterious and misunderstood subject and its influence on artistic practice and expression from antiquity to the present day. Among all the arts, it is the art of alchemy which most closely imitates nature
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