ONE 
ONE The illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings explored in this book were high-end cultural goods. Their position in the economy of medieval Europe was similar to that of today’s electronic goods – people can survive without them, but they have their uses, including displaying images and status. And, like TVs, computers and mobile phones, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings were also technological products.
Modern hi-tech consumer items are made by complex chains of specialized activities. They are obviously hi-tech because we can use them without knowing anything about their manufacture, and what goes on behind the screen is a mystery that we do not need to understand. However, modern attitudes towards the technology that underlies paintings are quite different. Most of us painted at school, so, superficially, the process seems quite familiar – the only surprise is how the Old Masters did it so well.
No single person on earth could ever possibly make a TV, computer or mobile phone from its raw materials. But a single person could easily make a painting from scratch if they wanted. They could collect ores, build a furnace, smelt metals, make axes and knives, and then cut down a tree for a panel, or kill and skin an animal to prepare velum. Or they could make a plough, till soil, grow flax, spin linen, build a loom and then weave a canvas. If they wanted to use paper, they could make a sieve, find a pond or divert a stream and use wood pulp or waste cloth. They could prepare the panel, canvas, velum or paper with glue made from animal skin, wheat starch or old cheese. They could make brushes from sticks and squirrel or hog hair, or make quills from feathers. Then they could make a paint medium by bleeding resins from a tree, squeezing oil from flax seeds, or simply by collecting eggs from a hen. Finally, for pigments, they could pick up different coloured earths, grind, wash and maybe burn them, char bones or twigs, and extract colours from plants and insects.
One person could do all of these things and then combine the products to make a painting. Of course, they might be better at some tasks than others, but none is beyond a single individual and countless historic manuals describe each of the activities in great detail. It follows that people who looked at Old Master paintings during the artists’ lifetimes would have known much of what went into creating the images. Today, however, paintings are in museums and galleries, and are completely divorced from everyday experience. So, sadly, the origins of Old Master paintings have become almost as mystifying as the origins of digital images. A whole dimension associated with the artist’s materials and methods has been lost because even our childhood encounters with painting in school involved just being given paint, paper and brushes by a teacher. Modern materials are not prepared – they come from shops.
Materials are necessary for making images and, whether or not we paint, we all create images – be they careful, careless or carefree – by choosing particular clothes, haircuts or make-up. Everyone makes judgements based on the images that they see. Image has vast cosmological significance, which is why make-up and some surgical procedures are called ‘cosmetic’. Today, the cosmological significance of materials is largely forgotten but, once recalled, it can provide a powerful way of understanding art. Yet before painters could make art, they had to make their materials. So this chapter focuses on a modest material – lead white – which was an essential ingredient of every great European painting, right up to the mid-twentieth century. It happens to be the main ingredient for paint used in depictions of flesh, and it is no coincidence that it was also used as make-up to lighten living flesh for thousands of years (illus. 1). Painters may have made this particular pigment themselves, but they might also have bought it ready-made.1 In this case, they would usually have gone to the apothecary, where it was also sold as an ingredient for cosmetics and medicines.2 These crossovers helped make artists’ materials familiar to non-painters.
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1 Westminster Retable, detail (see illus. 33). Lead white provides the colour for St Peter’s hair, eyes and flesh, as well as the highlights of his robe and its black-and-white ermine. |
Artists and doctors were also connected in the person of St Luke, patron saint of both, and the vocations were associated for millennia. For example, in the early sixteenth century the successful painter Lucas Cranach bought his local apothecary as an investment. He employed professionals to run it, but he also had a personal interest in alchemy, an integral part of the apothecary’s art. A little later, in the mid-sixteenth century, when the Academy of Drawing was set up in Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici on the instigation of Giorgio Vasari, a petition was made so that the painters could be released from the city’s Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries.3 The composition of paintings was informed by the pharmacological properties of pigment right up to the seventeenth century.4
In the seventeenth century, the relationship between painters and physicians was in decline, although the two vocations were still in the same division of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke.5 A manual that discusses Rubens’s and van Dyck’s painting techniques was written by London’s leading physician, Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne, doctor to kings.6 (About a century later, the connection between painters and physicians endured in William Hogarth’s involvement in establishing London’s Foundling Hospital.7) About 400 years earlier, a doctor had been among a fictitious group of pilgrims who went to Canterbury. Chaucer said of him
No one alive could talk as well as he did
… The cause of every malady you’d got
He knew, and whether dry, cold, moist or hot.8
‘Dry, cold, moist or hot’ are the four qualities that relate to the four elements – cold and dry earth, cold and wet water, wet and hot air, and hot and dry fire. A balance of these qualities results in good health, whereas imbalances led to a variety of illnesses. Exactly the same ideas governed artists’ techniques. So the ideas behind artists’ techniques were quite familiar to the people who commissioned and enjoyed paintings, if they had any interest in their own health.
However, the world has changed and the images that were created centuries ago are the product of beliefs that are now quite unfamiliar. Today, some of those images – and much of what went into them – might appear, to use Shakespeare’s words from Hamlet, ‘wondrous strange’. If we are to appreciate them fully, then we must follow Hamlet’s response to strangeness, which was ‘therefore as a stranger give it welcome’.9
Hamlet recommended an open mind in the face of the unfamiliar. But Shakespeare’s phrase owes much to an ancient theme: the traditional obligation to offer hospitality to strangers. Shakespeare knew this tradition from at least two sources – the Bible,10 and classical myth, where it occurs as the concept of xenia. Xenia, or hospitality, features in the Odyssey, for example, when a swineherd, Eumaeus, calls his ferocious dogs off a passing beggar. Eumaeus kills a pig to feed the hungry traveller, they share some wine and tell stories, and the ‘good host’ then gives his ‘strange guest’ the ‘portion of honour’ after first offering meat to Zeus, the god who protects strangers. (The ragged old man turned out to be the swineherd’s long-lost master, Odysseus, but he maintained his deception and enjoyed more hospitality as a stranger.11) The obligation to offer strangers hospitality is a convention that expresses the bond of solidarity between insiders, such as those defined by the ties of blood or creed, and outsiders who do not belong to a particular family or faith. Now, insiders and outsiders are the inevitable result of any grouping, such as the insiders who know how to paint and the outsiders who do not. In later chapters it will become clear that the concept of xenia can help to unravel the riddles presented by images.
Hamlet’s ‘welcome of a stranger’ was a response to his father’s ghost, suggesting a bond between those in the natural world and those of the supernatural. Indeed, Hamlet famously follows his advice about open-mindedness by saying, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’12 Another of Shakespeare’s characters, Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, reinforces the message, advising against having ‘a stubborn soul / That apprehends no further than this world’.13
In order to appreciate the power of images in illuminated manuscripts and on panel paintings, the modern viewer has to be hospitable towards those aspects of the painter’s world that appear strange. A medieval image possesses something like the strange power of a relic. A painting may not contain venerated remains – channelling the spiritual powers associated with a saint – but the whole world back then was God’s creation, and every part of it was charged with spiritual power. Every colour in a painting had the potential to offer its social and spiritual significance to the finished image. In the Middle Ages, European paintings contained ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan, vermilion synthesized by alchemists searching for the philosopher’s stone, and gold purified from African mines or recycled from ancient treasures.14 But even the most modest, home-grown colours had stories to tell and meanings to give to the best paintings.
This chapter looks at a pigment that is found in every one of the images explored in following chapters. Some aspects of that pigment might seem strange to the modern eye.
Lead white – known from classical times as ‘ceruse’ and called ‘basic lead carbonate’ by modern science – is rarely found in large amounts in nature. In the first century, Pliny said that most of it was manufactured.15 It was among artists’ materials found in the ruins of ancient Ur dating to around 3000 BC.16 Indeed, its manufacture is mentioned in cruciform tablets of about 1700 BC retrieved from Assurbanipal’s ruined library at Nineveh.17 Theophrastus described its manufacture 300 years before Christ.18 Later, Vitruvius described how it was made in Rhodes, where the natural version had once been mined, and it was the painter’s most important artificial white pigment until the mid-twentieth century.19
Of course, there were variations on the theme, but the way of making it changed relatively little for 4,000 years and was described regularly in European manuscripts. The early ninth-century artists’ manual Mappae Clavicula contains several recipes, and, 300 years later, ‘Theophilus’ (an anonymous German or Flemish monk) gave a full and detailed account of how to make the pigment.20 He said that you should take sheets of lead, place them in an oak chest, sprinkle them with vinegar and urine and bury them under horse dung for a month, then dig up the lead and scrape off the white-coloured rust.21 I have followed his recipe: it works, and it is as easy as it sounds (illus. 2).
Urine and horse dung might sound rather unlikely chemicals for the manufacture of a synthetic pigment, but they were standard alchemical ingredients. They are among the things mentioned in The Canterbury Tales when, bemoaning his fate in the service of a canon who was interested in alchemy, the Yeoman listed
Our urinals, our pots for oil-extraction,
Crucibles, pots for sublimative action,
Phial, alembic, beaker, gourde-retort,
And other useless nonsense of the sort.
…
Chalk, quicklime, ashes and the white of eggs,
Various powders, clay, piss, dung and dregs,
Waxed bags, saltpetre, vitriol and a whole
Variety of fires of wood and coal.22
Modern readers might see this as a technical digression, but Chaucer mentioned these details (and many, many more) because he thought his audience would find them significant. After all, specialist details only hold the attention of specialists and he intended his poem to be evocative and literary, not dry and documentary. The Canterbury Tales was a storytelling competition, started in a pub in Southwark, London, and intended to entertain a very mixed group. As well as a Doctor and a Canon’s Yeoman, there were knights, a Miller, a Reeve (farm manager), a Cook, lawyer, Shipman, a Franklin (landowner), a Wife, a Summoner (court official), a Clerk, Merchant, Squire, a Manciple (catering manager), a student, haberdasher, dyer, carpenter, weaver, carpet-maker, ploughman, and various religious people. Chaucer’s pilgrims were from a cross-section of society and, as such, their knowledge and interests represent the knowledge and interests common to those who commissioned and appreciated paintings in the Middle Ages.
2 A coil of lead metal, about 2.5 cm (1 in.) across, after being sprinkled with urine and vinegar and exposed to the acid fumes produced by a pile of horse manure under which the metal was buried for 1 month. The white crystals seen growing on the black metal were used in cosmetics and medicine and formed the basis of white paint for millennia.
The beliefs and attitudes of common people are rarely recorded. So, throughout this book, I will use statements made by fictitious characters in popular literature as a guide to the unrecorded beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people. The instant popularity of Chaucer’s poetry and Shakespeare’s plays suggest that the ideas they voiced resonated with a wide audience, one that probably included people who also enjoyed paintings. Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s enduring popularity also suggests that many of the ideas they express were not restricted to their contemporaries, but are common to us all. The underlying view of the physical world – including the four qualities and elements, for example – was remarkably stable in Europe from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries.23 So, while not always exactly contemporary, Chaucer’s poetry and Shakespeare’s plays provide insights into the nature of medieval paintings and contemporary viewers’ responses to them.
Similarly, even though the works of art considered here are all products of the Christian tradition, I will occasionally use statements made by those who adhered to other systems of belief. This is because the European view of the physical world rested upon a metaphysics that Christianity shared, to a very large extent, with Islam and the Eastern traditions. This shared metaphysics helped shape Dante’s poetry, for example.24
Chaucer’s pilgrims would have been familiar with the alchemical ingredients of his Canon’s Yeoman because most of those materials were also part of everyday life. Without doubt, they would also have had personal experience of the simpler ingredients in Theophilus’ recipe for making lead white. Everyone was familiar with urine and vinegar, and everyone – rich and poor, urban and rural – knew about horse dung. Chaucer’s group would also have been familiar with various products made from lead metal, like pipes, windows and roofs. But none of them was a plumber so they probably did not have much personal experience of how the recipe’s key ingredient, lead, actually behaved.25
In the Middle Ages, the crafts – like plumbing and painting – were all called ‘mysteries’ because the technical aspects were not known in detail beyond those initiated into the mystery. Artists knew how to combine ingredients, how to control processes and how to use products to make art. These were their ‘secrets’. Nonetheless, it is obvious that artists did not jealously guard those secrets, since they wrote numerous technical manuals and they built their workshops clustered close together, typically on the same streets. All the evidence suggests that artists wanted to share their knowledge.
The craft mysteries were ‘secret’ for two simple reasons. First, they could not be seen and second, they were not known to those who did not seek them. You cannot tell if a craftsperson is skilled by looking at them – the person has to be ‘tried’ before an assessment of their skill is possible. Traditionally, that ‘trial’ was the commissioning of a ‘masterpiece’ (after a seven-year apprenticeship) which showed the extent to which skills lay hidden in the individual. Secret skills arguably lie latent and invisible within all people, just as white lead lies hidden within black lead, awaiting the trial that will make it visible.
Artists’ secrets were ‘open’, like the modern secret of riding a bike – known to all bike riders, hard to acquire for novices and prone to getting a bit rusty among those who do not practice regularly. Today, those who have not learned how to ride a bike do not generally believe that bike riders harness occult powers to make them stay upright. Most recognize that the secret could be open to them. In Hamlet’s terms, they are ‘strangers’ to the secret of bike riding – they may be ‘outsiders’ as far as the ‘in-club’ of riders is concerned, but they know what they would have to do if they wanted to join the club. They might not possess the skills but they can ‘welcome’ those who do, not threatened by their own shortcomings but celebrating the others’ achievements. Such welcoming of strangeness is exactly what makes ordinary people admire extraordinary performances on sports fields, in theatres, concert halls and art galleries.
Apprentices were bound to keep their master’s secrets. Most historians interpret this as a contractual obligation to maintain the commercial advantage of their master’s workshop over other workshops.26 But it is not nearly that simple. It was in the interest of all workshops to maintain common technical standards and the craftsmen knew that the whole craft would falter and fail if masters could not, or would not, share skills. Sharing the secret was imperative and manuals were one way of doing this.
But artists knew that what could be written in manuals was only a tiny proportion of the knowledge necessary to make great art. What they held in their heads was greater than what was written, but still, even that was a very small part of the necessary knowledge. Much of the knowledge needed to make great art was mysteriously ‘secreted’ within their bodies as the precious fruit of disciplined practice. It was held as muscle memories. Their fingers, hands, arms or ‘members’ literally ‘remembered’ how to make pigments, paints and paintings. They knew what to do and how to do it through repeated physical performances, not through following explicit instructions.27
Artists’ embodied knowledge was initially acquired, and then further refined, by working within an open community of practitioners. Only by repeatedly observing, imitating and participating in the mystery, as practised in their own and in neighbouring workshops, could their secrets survive and develop. So, when swearing to keep the secret, apprentices were not engaging in selfish protectionist behaviour – they were promising to physically absorb a set of skills so that the technical knowledge or craft mystery would live on, embodied or secreted in another generation of practitioners.28
Chaucer’s pilgrims almost certainly did not know all the secrets of making lead white. However, they knew white powders could have strange properties that would seem miraculous if they were not so familiar. For example, St Augustine noted that lime – which was ‘quick’, ‘slaked’ and used in the making of mortar – was strange enough to make it a marvellous yet everyday illustration of Nature’s hidden secrets.29 All of lead white’s ingredients were similarly close to home and Chaucer’s pilgrims would have known enough about them to appreciate the pigment’s mysterious transformation; however, two things would have struck them as rather strange.
First, the pigment is bright white but it comes from a metal that is dull and black.30 Second, it is the purest possible colour, but it comes from under a dung heap. The pigment Rembrandt used to depict the weightless gleam of light reflected from the moist rim of an eyelid came from a heavy metal, pissed on and buried in shit. Before even starting to paint, artists were confronted with riddles. Why does black make white? Why does the pure come from the putrid?
Like the artist’s professional behaviour in the workshop, the lead’s behaviour in the dung heap was a mystery. Yet for millennia, a black metal did make a white pigment and purity did emerge from filth. Lead white was made regularly and reliably it was not an unpredictable quirk of nature, it was a mystery that was harnessed. The fact that the mystery was routinely practised was proof that, although ‘secret’, it was an integral part of life in the Middle Ages – just as bike riding is today. But, with all due respect to cyclists, lead white’s secrets are incomparably more subtle and profound.
Lead white held secrets because some details of its manufacture were difficult to describe and were more suited to learning by doing. Yet restrictions were also placed on what should be written about artists’ mysteries, just as they were placed on spiritual truths. For example, a fourteenth-century mystic’s manual explicitly stated that it was not for ‘the loud-mouthed, or flatterers, or the mock-modest, or fault-finders, gossips, tittle-tattlers, talebearers or any sort of grumblers’ nor for ‘the merely curious’.31 Julian of Norwich finished her spiritual handbook with a warning: ‘beware that thou take not one thing and leave another, according to thy affection and liking’.32 Similar attitudes are evident in the alchemical and magical traditions with which the crafts were associated. The legendary Merlin’s magic, for example, included ‘mechanical contrivances’, and it was said that out of respect for his sources he would not reveal the ‘mysteries’ for people’s ‘entertainment’.33
The authors of spiritual guides and craft manuals wanted to give all or nothing – they thought that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. To focus on selected technical details would risk an unbalanced understanding. The mystery of lead white could only be solved by looking as widely as possible and embedding it deeply in everyday life.
Lead white’s least familiar ingredient, lead metal, is rarely found in the natural world. The dull metal is made by roasting a shiny stone called galena (illus. 3). This was mined for thousands of years before Theophilus wrote his recipe because, in addition to lead, it also contained silver.34 There are lead mines all over Europe that date from before 3500 BC and one in the Alps is estimated to have coordinated the activities of around 180 people, processing 12 tons of ore and producing about 300 kg of metal each day.35
The origins of metal prospecting and mining are lost in prehistory and they constituted their own mystery throughout the Middle Ages. Silver and lead were said to have been found in Goslar, Germany, after a nobleman’s horse exposed a vein with its iron-shod hooves. (The horse was called Ramelus; the nobleman’s name is not recorded.) Georgius Agricola, a sixteenth-century physician who practised medicine in a mining district, compared Ramelus’s discovery to that of Pegasus, who opened a spring by tapping a rock with his hoof.36 Buried ores were followed by prospectors who traced the veins’ subterranean flow using divining rods. Agricola compared this method of finding hidden riches to Hermes’ use of his caduceus and to Athena’s divining rod, which gave youth to the aged Odysseus.37
The fact that miners had to venture into the underworld to follow the veins meant that they imaginatively encountered strange, otherworldly creatures. These subterranean phantoms, fairies, elves, genies, goblins or gnomes guarded metals as they slowly grew underground, and they could be malicious or benevolent.38 Growing metals were said to be influenced by the planets, so lead, for example, was influenced by the planet Saturn throughout its long gestation.39 Pliny compared the productivity of mines to women’s fertility.40 As such, miners tore metals from Mother Earth’s womb and, since such violation could have dire consequences, miners prepared for work through strict cleansing and religious rituals.41
Britain’s mineral wealth was one factor that prompted the Roman invasion.42 Indeed, the Romans reorganized ancient methods, processing lead ores in industrial quantities.43 Details of making lead would have been well known to Chaucer’s pilgrims because England supplied lead to much of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But people who lived in parts of Christendom far from lead mines would still know about the metal because of its numerous biblical references.44 Most of these contrast lead with gold.
Lead and gold were also contrasted in literature. For example, Dante described his journey through Hell, where he ‘came upon a painted people’, ‘weary and exhausted’ and wearing dazzling, hooded cloaks. These ‘heavily burdened spirits’ were clothed in gilded lead and were the tortured souls of liars and hypocrites, who in life had been outwardly golden but inwardly leaden.45 Such unfavourable comparisons of lead with gold were enduring and widespread, so Shakespeare contrasted gold with ‘dull’ and ‘base’ lead.46 Hermia also swore her love to Lysander on Cupid’s ‘best arrow with the golden head’ which ‘prospers loves’.47 This alludes to the fact that Cupid also had lead-tipped arrows that made love flee, causing unrequited love.48
Lead always seemed to represent the unattractive and undesirable option, so it might appear an unlikely starting point for making white, the purest of all colours. That would, however, be a rather hasty, one-sided judgement, because lead is a metal and metals were said to have a double nature, still acknowledged today by sayings like ‘coins have two sides’ and ‘swords are two-edged’.
3 A rough piece of galena, which was processed for its silver content and was the main source of lead metal. Mining such ores and the extraction of these metals was a prime focus of economic activity in northeast and southwest England for centuries.
Swords, of course, are made of another metal, iron, and Pliny outlined its double nature quite explicitly.
Iron serves as the best and worst part of the apparatus of life, inasmuch as with it we plough the ground … build houses … and employ it for all other useful purposes, but we likewise use it for wars and slaughter and brigandage … now actually equipped with feathery wings … to enable death to reach human beings more quickly we have taught iron how to fly …49
He continues,
[Yet] the benevolence of nature has limited the power of iron … by inflicting on it the penalty of rust … making nothing in the world more mortal than that which is most hostile to mortality.50
Moreover, ‘the effect of rust is to unite wounds … though it is with iron that wounds are chiefly made!’51 Pliny called rust antipathia, literally ‘opposite nature’52. (Iron and its rust have opposite natures because the cause of bloodshed is destined to also become the cure.) Iron’s martial nature is due to its connection with the planet Mars and lead shows its nature through its connection with Saturn, heaven’s coldest and apparently slowest planet. This made the metal cold and slow as well as dull and base.53 However, in his Metamorphoses, Ovid described ‘a fire of love’ in Hermes’ heart which was ‘as hot as when the leaden bullet from a Balearic sling catches fire as it travels through the air’.54 Centuries later, in Love’s Labours Lost, Shakespeare repeats exactly the same idea. Just as the cold metal can become hot, so the slow metal can become fast.
Is not lead a metal heavy, dull and slow?
…
You are too swift, sir, to say so:
Is that lead slow which is fired from a gun?55
When thrown from a sling or fired from a gun, cold became hot and slow became fast. Lead bullets suggest that one of the painter’s riddles – the base black metal becoming a pure white powder – might not be restricted to their workshops. Lead simply has the potential to become its opposite. Ovid’s and Shakespeare’s observations suggest that such transformations were fundamental to the nature of the metal. Yet changing cold to hot or slow to fast is easy compared to turning black to white. So how did the artist make black lead turn into lead white?
Cennino Cennini wrote an artist’s manual nearly 300 years after Theophilus. He did not go into details about lead, vinegar, urine or horse dung – he simply said that lead white was ‘made alchemically’.56 The thirteenth-century Dominican Albertus Magnus compared alchemy to medicine and said ‘skilful alchemists proceed as skilful physicians do … Nature itself performs the work.’57 Petrus Bonus, the fourteenth-century physician, said that alchemy assisted transformations ‘when all necessary conditions already pre-exist’.58
The mystery into which painters were initiated allowed them to see that the ‘necessary conditions’ for a white powder ‘pre-existed’ in a black metal. Of course, this is not obvious to the uninitiated eye, yet in general the mysterious ‘pre-existence’ of everyday products in unlikely ingredients was common knowledge. For example, another craft mystery recognized that window glass ‘pre-existed’ in ferns and in beech trees.59 This is strange because ferns and trees are green and rustle in the breeze. When burned, they turn into ash which is white and blows away in the wind. Nevertheless, heating those ashes with sand makes glass, which is colourless, brittle and can stop draughts. Exactly how these transformations took place was part of the glazier’s secret and even if the details were not widely known, it was common knowledge that there was a secret to be possessed. The Roman de la rose asked,
Have we not seen how those that are expert in glass-making can, through a simple process of purification, use ferns to produce both ash and glass? Yet glass is not fern, nor fern glass.60
Chaucer’s Squire also commented on the mysterious commonplace:
… others said how strange it was to learn
That glass is made out of the ash of fern,
Though bearing no resemblances to glass;
But being used to this, they let it pass.61
Changing fern into glass was ‘strange’ but people ‘let it pass’, accepting the strangeness, as Hamlet would recommend. The Roman de la rose was a guide to relationships and love, and it used fern and glass to compare the works of Art and works of Nature. It illuminated the mysterious transformation of identities wrought by love as two individuals become one couple. (The mysterious nature of the ingredients of glass also had spiritual relevance, since churches were consecrated by making the sign of the cross on the floor with ash and sand. The two materials have the potential to become one chemically, just as the two lines become one graphically.62) The Roman went on to suggest that similar transformations were possible with metals, while warning that ‘those who indulge in trickery’ would never achieve any alchemical transmutations.63 Of course, an artist’s transformation of black into white was much easier than an alchemist’s transmutation of lead into gold, even if at first sight it seemed similarly strange. Yet the pre-existence of a white powder in a black metal was more than just an expression of the dual nature of metals. It was an expression of a fundamental, if now overlooked, aspect of Nature herself.
Whenever Nature reveals something of herself to us, she also conceals something. This law is constantly reinforced, from everyday observations – such as the stars being hidden when the sun comes out – all the way to quantum phenomena, where a subatomic particle’s position or velocity can be known, but not both. This law of Nature applies to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, through all humanity, to the nature of the cosmos. It accounts for the pre-existence of brittle, clear glass in swaying green ferns and it was also known to Friar Laurence when he brewed his sleeping potion in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Alone, with a basket of ‘baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers’, he pondered on Nature’s opposed or double nature.64 As Mother Earth, she produces everything yet she also consumes everything. Indeed, ‘The earth that’s Nature’s mother is her tomb: / What is her burying grave, that is her womb’.65 And the Friar mused on the ‘excellent virtues’ of earth’s bounteous produce,
… the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.
For naught so vile that on earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied
And vice sometimes by action dignified.66
Friar Laurence knew that opposites coexisted in everything. The tomb-and-womb produced vile-and-good, which could be used-and-abused, towards virtues-and-vices. All things have two sides. Indeed, at the very beginning of Romeo and Juliet, the story is introduced as being about ‘Two households, both alike in dignity / In fair Verona’.67 So there were two sides to the city, and each household also had two sides, since Romeo and Juliet both defied their families by loving a member of the opposed household. Of course, as the plot unfolded, the Friar’s herbs hid Juliet’s life so convincingly that fate conspired to make Romeo seek death. So, as the threads unravelled, the Friar’s attempts at virtuous intervention seemed to turn to meddling vice. Yet the lovers’ deaths usher in a reconciliation of the two households so the Friar’s act eventually had a virtuous side. At the end of the play, the Prince asks:
Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys by love.68
Love is hate’s scourge and the whole story manoeuvres through a territory in which herbs and stones, cities, families and actions all display a double nature. For people who saw virtues latent in vices, or glass latent in ferns, the ‘pre-existence’ of a white powder in a black metal was not too great a surprise.
While this does not exactly solve the painter’s riddle of black becoming white, it does recognize it as a particularly clear example of the riddle-like, double nature of all things. Lead white embodied a craft mystery that reflected one of life’s fundamental mysteries – it was proof that, whatever appearances may suggest, everything always has another side. The traditional world was not categorically ‘black-and-white’ and, in it, all things could change.69 One-and-the-same Nature sometimes showed one face, and sometimes another. So when Nature showed her black face in lead, painters knew that she was hiding her white face.70 The painter’s mystery involved seeing one of Nature’s faces and persuading her to show the other.
The arts follow Nature, but – as the Friar’s actions in Romeo and Juliet show – the effects of the arts can go in different directions, irrespective of intentions. Of course, there are also many possible different intentions: Pliny, for example, noted that ‘best and worst’ iron could be made into swords or ploughshares. Nature, on the other hand, is much more reliable: whether a man makes a sword or a ploughshare, Nature always turns them both to rust.
Ploughshares wound Mother Earth as swords wound men, and when Nature turns them into red powder – destroying and reabsorbing them, providing a tomb for the ore that was torn from her womb – she changes the cause of bloodshed into a cure. This is natural justice, and the direction that natural justice takes is always the same. As Chaucer’s Wife of Bath said, ‘Men fail in living up to their professions; / But fire never ceases to be fire.’71 Man’s intentions may be good or ill and, either way, they may succeed or fail. But when they follow Nature – as opposed to following fallen human nature – they always succeed, and their effect is invariably good.
Making the pigment was a relatively straightforward part of what Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman called a ‘slippery science’.72 The ease of Theophilus’ recipe suggests that, in making lead white, artists simply followed where Nature was willing to take them. This, in turn, suggests that the black metal ‘wanted’ to turn into the white powder. Now, the modern mind might find it strange that a mere metal might ‘want’ to do anything at all but, just as humans have ‘rational’ souls, the traditional world recognized that animals had ‘sensitive’ souls, plants had ‘vegetative’ or ‘nutritive’ souls and minerals had ‘existential’ souls.73 The disposition of lead’s soul, for example, was an earthly embodiment of Saturn’s intelligence. The planet was closest to God in the cosmic hierarchy and encompassed all the other planets, it corresponded to old age and displayed the dispassionate and unhurried wisdom of maturity. Taking shape under the earth, where everything has two sides, lead metal could be ‘cold and slow’ or it could be ‘dispassionate and unhurried’. While usually seen as the former, it might prefer the latter. Also, while black, under some circumstances, it might want to be white.
Nature’s fundamental transformations all flow in one direction. For example, according to Meister Eckhart, fire has something ‘lofty in its nature’, so it never stops rising ‘until it licks the heavens’.74 According to Aristotle, all things seek the perfection of which they are capable.75 So, if a black metal wanted to become a white powder, and ‘willingly’ did so when helped by the artist, then white must be a ‘perfected’ form of black. Of course, Cennini’s warning about using lead white on walls also suggests that black is a perfected form of white. The perfection of white corresponds to the ‘positive way’ in theology while black’s perfection corresponds to the mystic ‘negative way’, which describes a ‘darkness full of blessing, a rich nothingness, which brings the soul great spiritual freedom and tranquillity’.76 It is entirely appropriate that craft mysteries recognized both ways and both perfections. Indeed, some earlier British craftsmen dedicated their workshops to Janus, the god who looked in both directions.77
Painters wanted to turn black into white and Nature happily complied, showing her white face after lead was buried under horse dung for a month. In view of Aristotle’s observation, the emergence of purity from filth now seems rather less strange. The material world’s urge for perfection means that – if people assist Nature rather than interfere with her – the emergence of purity from filth is inevitable. So the riddle seems to be solved. Yet a question remains. Why is lead’s path to perfection covered in dung? Or to be more precise, what is it about vinegar, urine and horse dung that persuades black lead to show its white face?
Vinegar was very familiar in the kitchen – it preserved and enhanced the taste of food. It was also used as a medicine and, in the first century AD, Pliny recorded many medicinal formulations containing vinegar.78 Its uses were enduring, and indeed, in the seventeenth century, Edward Topsel recommended the application of vinegar for the removal of warts (combined with juice squeezed from decapitated ants, one for each wart).79 This remedy, minus the decapitated ant juice, continued into the twentieth century.80
However, in addition to everyday household uses, vinegar also had a more obscure significance. Biblical references to vinegar include drinking it, and in most contexts this seemed to be a way of adding insult to injury. For example, ‘I looked for some to take pity, but there was none … in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.’81 Immediately before his crucifixion, Christ was offered vinegar but refused to drink.82 Yet later, on the cross, he was again offered vinegar and this time, knowing that ‘all things were now accomplished’, he drank.83 In the context of crucifixion, vinegar may have been offered as a means of hastening death, as means of passing beyond the sufferings of this world.
In Theophilus’ recipe, the vinegar could have been present for its sharp and corrosive properties or for its healing and preserving ones. Painters would have been aware of both possibilities from everyday experience. Yet, from a spiritual point of view, vinegar may have played an offensive or a merciful role in lead’s path to perfection. These spiritual possibilities were relevant because, as members of the Guild of St Luke, a painter’s work was, to a greater or lesser extent, modelled on the work of a saint. According to historians, the craft guilds – which spread across Europe immediately after the Crusades, and owed much to Arab mystic brotherhoods – were not clearly distinguishable from the spiritual fraternities from which they developed.84
St Luke’s dual role is relevant to the other liquid in Theophilus’ recipe – urine – because painters often depicted St Luke painting the Virgin and Child with his medical equipment in the background.85 Prominent among that equipment were flasks for inspecting urine and woven baskets for carrying the flasks. Urine containers instantly identified the medical profession, and people’s interest in their own health made them aware that urine had significance (illus. 4–5).
Herodotus recorded that when Pheron bathed his eyes in urine his sight was restored after ten years of blindness.86 This hints at a medical use, but the most common medical use of urine is suggested by Herodotus’ stories of King Astyages’ dreams.87 Physicians were identified in paintings by urinal flasks because urine was a key diagnostic, the colour, smell and taste of which determined a patient’s state of health and the appropriate course of treatment. References to urine – or ‘water’ – were commonplace, thus Shakespeare’s audience instantly understood what Falstaff meant when he asked ‘what says the doctor to my water?’88 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine’s lovesickness shone through him ‘like water in a urinal’ so that all could see his sorry condition.89
4 Metz Pontifical, detail (f25r); an ape-doctor takes a patient’s pulse and inspects their urine.
In Theophilus’ recipe, vinegar and urine were just sprinkled on to the lead. Horse dung was a more significant ingredient and it also found its place in popular plays. Horse dung occurs, for example, several times in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The playwright alluded to horse dung’s everyday use as a garden fertilizer.90 He also, however, wove its properties into the plot, because when Bosola, the Duchess’s horseman, is being lured into the play’s bloody conspiracy, he asked: ‘What’s my place? / The provisorship o’ the horse? Say, then, my corruption / Grew out of horse-dung: I am your creature.’91 By calling himself a ‘creature’ whose intentions ‘grew out of horse-dung’, Bosola suggests that thoughts are conceived just as life is conceived, drawing upon the notion that life comes out of death.92 (One example of creatures created from decaying matter is the spontaneous generation of bees from the putrefying corpse of a lion, an image that stretches from the Old Testament riddle ‘out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness’93 – all the way to the visual icon on Tate & Lyle’s tins of golden syrup.) At the play’s end, Webster’s Duchess – when apparently looking upon the dead bodies of her steward and their children – says that the scene of carnage
5 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (98r); a wolf-doctor inspects a cripple’s urine (or is maybe just ‘taking the piss’).
Than were’t my picture, fashioned out of wax,
Stuck with a magical needle, and then buried
In some foul dung-hill.94
The Duchess alluded to a voodoo-like practice of inflicting injury with an impaled, slowly melting doll. Bosola implied that dunghills cause transformations and his Duchess knew that this particular transformation was caused by heat.
Vinegar and urine are predominantly water – which, from an elemental point of view, is cold and wet – so they might initially appear ill-suited to impart heat to lead. However, vinegar’s taste is described as ‘sharp’, indicating that it contains elemental ‘fire’, which was described as hot, dry and sharp, accounting for its ability to penetrate things.95 Urine also has a ‘burning’ property, as demonstrated by the everyday phenomenon of nappy rash.
Vinegar, urine and horse dung all offer some form of heat. Vinegar appears to ‘melt’ warts, urine appears to ‘burn’ skin and, as Webster noted, horse dung provides enough heat to melt a wax effigy. Buried in the dark, under horse dung, fiery vapours attack the metal, drying it out and causing it to rust. Theophilus’ recipe is a slow ‘trial by fire’ and the basest of all metals fails the test, but at the same time providentially provides painters with their purest colour.
The heat in vinegar, urine and horse dung all comes from the same source – life. Vinegar contains the residual heat of the yeasts that fermented sugar into wine and beyond. Urine contains the metabolic heat liberated by digesting food, while horse dung also slowly releases the heat produced by digesting food. The food for life – whether the fruits of the vine for the yeast’s vinegar, everyday beverages for an artist’s urine, or grass for the horse’s dung – all originally absorbed its heat from the sun. If the lead had been subjected to a fierce fire, then it would just melt. The steady, gentle heat channelled through life’s excrement enabled it to subtly transform. Thanks to some of life’s usually overlooked ‘gifts’, a dull black metal slowly absorbed the sun’s fire and turned into a bright white powder.
The transformation may seem strange to us, but artists would have welcomed it because similar transformations appeared to make other pigments. For example, they collected their best red colour, kermes, from the blood of insects that seemed to grow in rotting berries on oak trees.96 The purity of lead white and the richness of kermes both came from putrefaction, just like the origins of sweetness in Samson’s riddle about the honeycomb. Lead white and kermes were examples of Nature as both ‘tomb and womb’. They were craft secrets, but those outside the craft would recognize that they obeyed a universal law. The law was reflected in Plato’s assertion that ‘the living come from the dead, just as the dead come from the living’.97 It is also in folklore, for example in the idea that dead men’s decomposing spines are transformed into serpents, the archetypal cause of the death of men.98
The profound nature of artists’ craft mystery was suggested by the colour change – from black to white – and by its intimate link between life and death, or creation and destruction. Indeed, the mystery of lead white was reinforced by the gentle pace at which the transformation proceeded.
Theophilus’ recipe is not the only one to specify that ingredients should be left for a month. The exact length of a month can vary, and some recipes specified that ingredients should be left for a ‘philosophical month’ or 40 days.99 The time taken to transform the various ingredients had a biblical significance that would not have been lost on artists or on the audiences of Chaucer, Shakespeare or Webster.
The ‘great forty days’ was the period after the Crucifixion, during which Christ appeared to his disciples.100 However, that was preceded by the Flood of 40 days; Moses’s 40 days on the mount; the Israelites’ 40 days in the land of Canaan; and Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness.101 These were all periods of preparation and purification that were intended ‘to humble and prove’.102 However, even those who did not know their Bible tales would have known the significance of 40 days from public health regulations. This is because if they, or any of their family, friends or neighbours caught a serious contagious illness they would be ‘quarantined’. The word quarantine literally means ‘group of forty’ and the 40-day period had medical significance for over two millennia. For example, there was an ancient Greek Hippocratic dictum that the 40th day of a disease was especially critical; Venice established quarantine laws in the early twelfth century; Daniel Defoe mentions quarantines in his account of the plagues that swept through London when he was a child in the mid-seventeenth century; into the nineteenth century, infected ships were quarantined for 40 days in Melbourne, Australia.103 Medical quarantine was merely a continuation of the biblical period of purifying or ‘proving’.104 And people would also have known the period’s significance if they fell foul of the law, because churches offered sanctuary of 40 days to allow both pursued and pursuer to undergo a change of heart.105 (Today, the idea of a legally enforced opportunity for reflection lives on in the month-long – four-week rather than 40-day – ‘cooling-off’ period written into some financial transactions.)
Black lead is therefore changed, cured or dead, purified, ‘proved’ or ‘humbled’ by the artist. So, being sprinkled with vinegar and urine and buried under horse dung can be seen as ‘a vice that is by action dignified’, to use the words of Romeo and Juliet’s Friar, just like in The Tempest, where in another trial, Ferdinand is forced to carry logs on Prospero’s island. He accepts with grace and recognizes that ‘some kinds of baseness / Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters / Point to rich ends’.106 The ‘poor matter’ of collecting logs was humbling, the ‘rich end’ of which is Miranda, daughter of the Duke of Milan (Prospero), whose hand the prince eventually wins. But carrying logs is a strenuous activity – it is hardly comparable to putting a small piece of lead under a dung heap, going away and then coming back a philosophical month later. As far as the medieval artist was concerned, making the pigment was almost completely effortless. The artist did not try to force the transformation. The recipe was a case of ‘less is more’, as Duke Senior observes in the Forest of Arden: ‘gentleness shall force, More than … force move us’.107
In making lead white, the artist did not interfere – he or she simply provided favourable conditions and then left Nature to her own devices.108 This style of work is central to traditional medicine and to alchemy, which Petrus Bonus compared to incubating an egg.109 Rotting dung heaps might literally incubate lead metal in art (as, in Nature, they incubate crocodile eggs), but incubation also has a long-forgotten spiritual side. It was the Greek name for a dream-based meditative technique that the presocratics adopted from eastern shamans.110
This review of ingredients suggests that they all were two-sided. Lead was cold and slow, yet could be hot and fast. Vinegar was sharp and corrosive, yet also healing and preservative. Urine’s prognosis was good or ill and dung embodied both generation and corruption. Hence the fact that artists could make something by doing nothing suggests that their own activities might have another side too. Today, the opposite of activity would be deemed inactivity, but the modern West looks for outward activity and overlooks the possibility that outward inactivity may be a sign of inward activity. The traditional opposite of action is contemplation – the ‘one thing necessary’.111 This was widely practised by local mystics around the time that the images considered in this book were painted, and to which we will return.112
The creation of an artist’s material from a natural material was a two-stage process. First, a shiny stone was turned into a dull metal and then the black metal was turned into a white powder. The first stage harnessed the labour of tens of thousands of people, was the focus of entire communities and even motivated military invasions. The second stage cost almost nothing, looked after itself and was hidden from view. The first stage was very public and demanded outward activity, while the second stage – a philosophical period of apparent inactivity – was private and allowed inward contemplation. So, if the painter contemplated their white pigment, what might they have seen?
In the Middle Ages, the whole world could be seen in a single pigment particle, just as William Blake later famously saw the whole world in a grain of sand.113 In fact, because its genesis was relatively familiar, it may have been easier to see the whole world in a particle of lead white than in a grain of sand. Everyone knew that, when ingested, lead white was ‘a deadly poison’ but those who possessed at least some of the artist’s secret knew that, when contemplated, it could nourish the soul.114 Lead white was a very practical pigment, and Robert Kilwardby, a thirteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, said, ‘the practical sciences are speculative’, so the pigment’s practicality was a guarantee that it would reward speculation.115
Robert Kilwardby would have seen the synthesis of lead white as a proof of the biblical assertion that ‘All things are double’, and those who enjoyed plays would have recognized the pigment’s double nature easily, since Shakespeare constructed his Romeo and Juliet around double natures.116 Indeed, it was inescapable as Touchstone, Shakespeare’s aptly named fool (touchstones were used by artists to check the purity of gold) in As You Like It, reminded his audience that ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’117
Regular reminders about the law of double nature – in the Bible, in literature and in craft secrets – guarded against a hasty judgement of appearances, since things can be cloaked with their opposite. The noble Odysseus’ homecoming as a filthy beggar was one example and, as Touchstone observed more generally, ‘Rich honesty dwells … in a poor house, as your pearl in your foul oyster.’118
The pre-existence of white powder in black metal and the purifying effect of dung were riddles that confronted medieval painters every day. The modern aversion to paradox has marginalized such riddles but they refuse to die and live on, usually dismissed as truisms or platitudes. For example, in the face of adversity, someone might say ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. This is merely a restatement of what lead white proved to artists – that when Nature shows her black face, she hides her white face. Indeed, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ need not be an unrealistically ‘rose-tinted’ view of the world since, as everybody knows, roses have thorns. Neither inherently optimistic nor pessimistic, ‘clouds with silver linings’ and ‘roses with thorns’ might sound trite, but they are concise ways of saying that reality is never one-sided. It is always a mix.119
In great paintings, lead white’s material nature resonates perfectly with the colour it reflects. For example, in the retables – to be considered in the final chapters – lead white makes the flesh of Christ, and is the colour at the centre of rainbows, where it is, in every imaginable respect, a mix of opposites. The double nature behind the pigment’s inscrutable colour held a crucial key to the meaning of much medieval art.
Of course, white is special – according to the apocryphal Gospel of Philip, Christ mixed 72 different dyes to make it.120 Christ’s recipe had more ingredients than Theophilus’, but Christ’s 72 dyes, like Theophilus’ 40 days, were symbolic. They referred to the number of disciples He sent out, which in turn reflected the 72 names of God and the number of the world’s nations and tongues, according to Jewish tradition.121 As such, the ingredients of Christ’s white represent fullness, and the fullness of white was reinforced by Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian statement that ‘whiteness is a complete form, and the privation of whiteness [that is, every other colour] … is an imperfect form.’122
In alchemy, the outward colour of a material was taken as a sign of its inward state and it was said that ‘whiteness signifies the eternal peace and concord of the elements.’123 In lead white, the mix of opposites is complete and harmonious – its origins in filth provided a proper balance for its purity. As medieval painters knew, lead white is neither one thing nor the other – it is both.
While masters and patrons who contemplated the pigment might catch glimpses of plenitude, harmony and cosmic double nature, less philosophically inclined apprentices might simply have found the pigment extremely satisfying to make and use. They could take something dull and black, do very little, and end up with something bright and white. The almost effortless transformation would have helped build confidence in their ability to manipulate matter. Lead white’s synthesis was intensely affirmative – it was a small but significant step towards taking a few piles of coloured powders plus a few drops of gum, egg or oil, and then transforming them into devotional images of great beauty.
Just as cooks aim to balance the ingredients in their meals, artists aimed to balance the colours in their images. On the painter’s palette, lead white was quite ordinary. As a staple ingredient of paintings, it may have been a foil for other colours, just as bread was a foil for more glamorous foods. Indeed, in many paintings a cheap pigment like lead white simply served to provide the appropriate colour in the appropriate place. Though, in great paintings, the colour’s ‘speculative’ meaning was reinforced by the ‘practical science’ that made it.
In the hands of great painters – as the images considered in the following chapters will demonstrate – pigments offered much more than just their colours. This is because, as Lomazzo’s sixteenth-century painter’s manual said, ‘colours have different qualities, therefore they cause diverse effects in the beholders, which arise from an inwarde contrariety of their causes (as Aristotle teacheth)’.124
Colours caused ‘diverse effects’ in people because Lomazzo’s ‘qualities’ were the same as Chaucer’s Doctor’s, that is, ‘dry, cold, moist or hot’, which, when imbalanced, were ‘the cause of every malady you’d got’.125 As a white that arose from black and a purity that emerged from filth, the pigment’s ‘inward contrariety’ influenced the person who gazed upon it in a painting. The light reflected from lead white entered eyes and fed souls, just as bread enters the mouth to feed bodies. Properly used – according to alchemical theories of elements, artistic theories of perception and medical theories of health – the wholeness of lead white could help impart health, ‘eternal peace and concord’ to the soul.
The relic-like power of wonder-working medieval images flowed from colours used as the embodiment of qualities and the recognition that even everyday materials were, at the same time, vestiges of God. Today, such a way of approaching art may seem strange but, if we follow Hamlet’s advice and ‘give it welcome’, then we find that the strangeness cloaks something quite familiar. Indeed, that familiarity arises because traditional art’s ‘practical and speculative sciences’ touch upon questions that are as relevant today as they were the day the images were painted.
