Spike Bucklow worked at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, paintings restoration studio of the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was originally trained as a chemist but has always had an interest in the arts. In the 1980s, he made special effects for block-buster movies, but has since spent twenty years working on the oldest paintings in Britain. His in-depth examination of great paintings has resulted in ground-breaking research into the science and craft of artists from the late 13th century to the early 20th century.
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Bucklow, S. (2009). The Alchemy of Paint. Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages. Equinox Publishing. https://doi.org/
Bucklow, Spike. The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages. Equinox Publishing, 2009. Book. https://doi.org/
Bucklow, S (2009): The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages, Equinox Publishing, [online] https://doi.org/
Bucklow, S. The Alchemy of Paint. Equinox Publishing, 2009.
Bucklow, Spike. The Alchemy of Paint. Equinox Publishing, 2009. doi.org:
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The Alchemy of Paint
Toggle the cite modalArt, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages
The Alchemy of Paint examines pre-modern artists’ recipes for a handful of pigments, including lapis lazuli, gold and vermilion. It has become a widely-used text in the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of the history of ideas, medieval art history and the history of science. Historic pigment... Read more
Published: 2009
Pages: 336
Paperback: 9780714531724
ePub: 9780714522500
The Alchemy of Paint examines pre-modern artists’ recipes for a handful of pigments, including lapis lazuli, gold and vermilion. It has become a widely-used text in the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of the history of ideas, medieval art history and the history of science.
Historic pigment recipes – many of which were reconstructed by the author – provide evidence that practicing craftspeople had a detailed grasp of the sophisticated physical and cosmological theories that defined reality in pre-modern Europe. As such, the book is an in-depth, and heavily-referenced, primer for the pre-modern European world-view. For example, the chapter on the purification of lapis lazuli – to make ultramarine – is a practical example of how so-called Aristotelian four-element theory helped people engage productively with the material world.
The first half of the book shows how theories – like the four elements, hylomorphism, emanation, etc – were reflected in practice in recipes that ‘worked’, as well as in recipes that ‘did not work’ – like dragonsblood and mercury blue – but were nonetheless faithfully repeated. The second half of the book revisits materials – including vermilion and gold – to show that widely-recognised multi-levelled meanings were inherent in materials. Physical materials could therefore contribute metaphysical meanings to the mainly religious objects that incorporated them.