Chemistry Reference
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the twelve-year old Jesus among the doctors (from Luke , 2, 41ff.) was
commonly used to demonstrate the inferiority of human scholarship
compared to divine inspiration. In this painting (Figure 5b) the artist
accentuated the expression of the inferiority of human endeavors by
giving the figure in the foreground a particularly stubborn and book-
wormish demeanor, which Teniers meticulously copied in his reading
alchemist (Figure 5a). Teniers' puffer alchemist (Figure 5c) is a variation
of an older motif, the Antichrist/Satan who teaches gold-making to the
people, illustrations of which became popular in fifteenth-century Ger-
many. Both Hans Weiditz (Figure 5f) and Albrecht Dürer (Figure 5e)
employed that motif in their woodcut illustrations of the written satires of
alchemy by Petrarch and Sebastian Brant, respectively, who had made
alchemy the epitome of forgery, fraud, greed, and moral corruption
(Schummer 2006). Pieter Brueghel the Elder further developed this motif
into a pictorial drama with an obsessed alchemist ruining his family
(Figure 5d).
Teniers and his colleagues employed these two classical alchemy mo-
tifs but combined them with the classical uroscopy/imposture motif. Note
that Figures 5a and 5c each show an alchemist in the foreground and a
group of men in the background with one holding a flask in his hand like
a uroscopist. In the next 'alchemist' image (Figure 5g), the composition
of Figure 5c is almost inverted: the 'puffer' has moved to the back-
ground, while the reading alchemist now holds a flask in his hand. The
pose of the alchemist in Figure 5g is virtually identical to the classical
pose of the urine inspecting quack doctor in Figure 5h. Thus, quack doc-
tors and alchemists became exchangeable and merged towards one and
the same motif in the works of Teniers and his colleagues.
2.4 Satire continues
Flemish and Dutch genre paintings of quack doctors/alchemists were
extremely popular throughout Europe well into the nineteenth century.
Many of them were reproduced in etchings and widely disseminated
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition, painters
from other countries employed or copied the motifs, such as Trophîme
Bigot (1579-1650) in France, Pietro Longhi (1702-1785) in Italy, Franz
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