When alchemy is invoked in a conversation about art, it is usually meant to imply that something mysterious is happening. This was surely the feeling behind the nineteenth-century painter and critic Eugène Fromentin’s declaration that the contemporaries of the great seventeenth-century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn regarded him with admiration, but also “not without some anxiety,” for both the painter and his extraordinary, “enigmatic” works carried “the air of an alchemist.” In discussions of modern art dealing with the subconscious and unconscious, Carl Jung, the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, features prominently for his promotion of a spiritual alchemy rooted in the collective unconscious, through which many “secrets” and symbols pass through the human psyche on its journey towards wholeness. Such uses of alchemy share an aura of inscrutability, a mystical feeling generated by a belief that art itself, and especially art about transformation—chemical or spiritual—gestures at an unknowable divine. This treatment of alchemy can be provocative, and it can be useful, but this book is concerned with another kind of alchemy altogether: by this I mean the alchemy of workshops, kitchens, and studios that filled the early modern European world, a network of arts, labors, and experimentations that were practical, complex, and ubiquitous.

The period between about 1450 and 1700 marked a watershed or “Golden Age” for Western alchemy. Sometimes called chymistry, early modern alchemy might be described as a set of speculative tools by which individuals manipulated their environments. Many people, looking backwards at alchemy from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated it with occultism, superstition, and magic.