Marina Nebro: Arts and Culture

Alchemy of Medieval Art

Having lived close to New York City my entire life, I’ve never ventured past 112th Street (the Church of St. John the Divine). To be honest, there are still more places in the city that I haven’t visited than those that I have. Recently, I made my way all the way up to the 190’s to Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters – a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to reliquary and medieval art. The museum is located in the New York City neighborhood of Inwood. The walk from the 181st Street subway (I got off at the wrong stop) up to the park was gorgeous, with tons of trees, greenery, and beautiful Tudor style apartment buildings. The park, overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades in New Jersey, contained a myriad of pathways, outlooks, art installations, and open expanses of grass. There could have been better signage, though, because it took a while to find the Cloisters, and everyone else in the park seemed to be searching for the museum as well.

The reason for my first visit to the Cloisters was to support a fellow Macaulay Honors student, Maryam Esperanza F. Razaz, who, as an intern at the museum, was giving her final, unique gallery tour: The Alchemy of Medieval Art. Having heard about the topic through my Macaulay newsletter, I was very excited for the lecture because I find the science/art/magic of alchemy to be extremely fascinating, and I was interested how Maryam would connect it to artwork. A Medieval Studies and Analytical Chemistry major at Brooklyn College, Maryam has always been interested in the scientific process behind artwork and other aspects of Medieval life. Today (and I’m speaking from personal experience), artists often simply buy materials at local crafts stores to begin their painting process – acrylic, oil, watercolor, etc. But in the Middle Ages, artists and artisans had to create these paints on their own, following intricate recipes and techniques passed down from generation to generation. Maryam’s main question was this: did these artists understand the chemical processes behind the artwork they were creating, or were these concoctions discovered through trial and error and experience? She concludes that these painters, sculptors, glass blowers, and metal workers were all, in a sense, proto-scientists and alchemists. They took raw, base materials and transformed them to create beautiful and remarkable pieces of work.

Throughout the entire tour, Maryam exposed her audience to five unique pieces of artwork, all made through different alchemical processes. The first was a fresco painting, The Healing of the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus (above) by an anonymous Spanish artist in the 12th century. I won’t begin to act as if I understand the exact chemical changes that fresco painting entails. One would assume the process is simple – smear some paint on a wall and call it a day! This is not the case. Due to the property of the limestone and the process of the drying plaster (molecules actually transform during this time), the pigment actually embeds itself into the wall and becomes one with the final painted surface.

Another example of alchemy in art is the Enthroned Virgin and Child from 12th century France. The sculpture is carved out of wood, but had been painted with pigments taken from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli. Instead of having a finished product looking like wood, the artist was able to create the illusion of a marble or stone sculpture with this pigment mixture. Maryam explained the complex and multi-step process of extracting the blue tint from the stone. It was artists like this, who kept written records of their processes and followed those of others, that had the first “scientific laboratories.” Without them, the coming scientific revolution and interest in the natural world might not have existed in the same way. Artists had to be knowledgeable about the land, plants, and minerals around them in order to be successful in their work.

Vision of Saint Germain of Paris
Stained Glass

Aquamanile in the form of a Lion
Copper Alloy

Merode Altarpiece – Robert Campin
Oil Paint

In addition to various discussions about glass blowing, metal working, and the emergence of oil paint (the pieces of artwork above correlate respectively), Maryam took us outside to the Medieval Garden in the center of one of the Cloisters many courtyards. A classic Medieval Garden is not necessarily one with beautiful flowers and romantic fountains, but one filled with useful herbs and vegetation. Plants were used for art, medicine, food, and various other daily needs in Medieval Europe. As a side note, after the tour, I visited the museum’s gift shop and bought a CD with Medieval and Renaissance music dedicated to gardens just like the one at the Cloisters (and future “pleasure gardens”).

Maryam picked a really interesting and unique subject as the focus of her tour. I had never learned about the work behind the artwork, and I thought it was quite awe-inspiring! Not only were the artists of the Middle Ages able to paint and sculpt with amazing technique and talent, they also had to know how to harvest and collect the raw materials necessary – an entirely different skill!

I’d like to take the time, here, to congratulate Maryam on a job well done. Her delivery of all the knowledge she acquired through her research was superb! In asking about her motivations behind the Cloisters internship, I learned that she ultimately plans on becoming a pediatrician. This fact caught me by surprise because I would have never thought there could be a correlation between museum work and medicine. As an intern, she gave group-tours to many day camp children, showing her passion for children and their creative, intellectual minds. Also, as a future doctor, she will now have so much knowledge about the history of her field – many of the plants that she may have studied from the Cloister’s garden could have been useful in both the art world and the world of medicine in the Middle Ages. Not every physician has this background knowledge. And ultimately, I realize, despite field or career track, anyone can be enchanted by Medieval life and culture – and I found someone who is as interested in it as I am!

The Alchemy of Art
Maryam Esperanza F. Razaz – Macaulay Honors Student
The Cloisters Museum and Gardens
August 2, 2013

Marina B. Nebro