Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (review)

As Newman demonstrates in Promethean Ambitions, modern concerns about "Frankenfoods" and cloning have deep roots in medieval debates about the boundary between the natural and artificial. Newman uses alchemy as a window onto centuries of exploring the power and limits of human art (or, in modern terms, technology). This art/nature debate ranged widely, touching on everything from theologians' considerations of the powers of witches to treatises on painting, pottery, and the experimental method. Alchemists especially, Newman contends, issued a powerful challenge to the conventional boundary between art and nature that "would feed the fires of the scientific revolution and provide a host of issues that confront humanity even today with a relentless urgency" (24).

Although Promethean Ambitions follows the art/nature debate from antiquity to the present, the core of the book is an analysis of learned treatises written between 1200 and 1700. Two opposing positions emerged in the Middle Ages, when Arabic and Latin philosophers first confronted alchemists' bold claims that they could not only replicate nature, but even improve it by transmuting base metals into silver and gold. Thereafter, Newman argues, alchemy became a touchstone for discussions of the creative powers of art, whether by humans or demons. Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy saw alchemists as rivals and objected to the assertion that transmutation was superior to the merely imitative powers of visual artists.

Alchemists grew even more provocative in the sixteenth century when followers of Paracelsus claimed that they could create not only metals or lower life forms like insects but also an artificial human, or homunculus. Finally, in the seventeenth century, alchemists' arguments in support of artifice found their way into the writings of the most famous spokesmen for the new science, Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. In placing alchemy at the center of this long debate and crediting its practitioners with pushing the boundaries of technology, Newman makes a strong claim for alchemy's centrality to the development of modern science.

Promethean Ambitions demonstrates Newman's mastery of the alchemical textual tradition; he is at his best when reconstructing the long afterlife of specific medieval arguments and showing how Renaissance artists and seventeenth-century natural philosophers alike engaged them even as they turned them to new ends. Scholars who have dismissed either alchemy or Aristotelianism as somehow inimical to modern science or experimentalism will have to reckon with Newman's persuasive textual evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, readers of this journal may be left wondering precisely where this learned debate fits in the larger context of early modern European natural knowledge. Recent scholarship, which has expanded its purview to emphasize the role of practice, material culture, European colonization projects, and visual culture in creating a new relationship between humans and nature, clearly shows that Bacon and his followers were influenced by more than the learned treatises that they read. The full impact of the art/nature debate beyond philosophy remains to be seen, but this erudite book is an important contribution to the intellectual history of art and nature in medieval and early modern Europe.