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Inside the alchemist's workshop: Paintings of David Teniers the Younger - C C - May 20, 2016
http://daily.jstor.org/alchemists-workshop/
EXCERPT: David Teniers the Younger, a seventeenth-century Flemish painter, had a serious thing for alchemy. Over the course of his career, Teniers painted some 350 different scenes, illustrating just about every aspect of alchemy imaginable. All of Teniers’ alchemical scenes, however, show the alchemist’s workshop as a place of experimentation and inquiry–a space full of instruments integral to the experiments, tools that were built and maintained through a plethora of different technologies.
Lydia Pyne
In The Toolbox, historian and anthropologist Lydia Pyne explores humankind’s use of tools throughout the millennia. In Teniers’ best-known painting, Alchemist Heating a Pot, an elderly alchemist anxiously leans forward, carefully handling a small bellows, fanning oxygen into a small fire under a ceramic vessel....