The Alchemists Personae

As the various Latin, French, and Flemish inscriptions printed with The Alchemist made clear, Brueghel (1525-69) offered early modern viewers a morality tale of the futility of alchemy, warning those who were tempted that it could only destroy families and households. See how this foolish man distills in his vials / The blood of his children, his treasures and his senses, read one French inscription. See how, after searching uselessly for mercury, / He goes with his children to seek his bread. 1 The moral of the story seems clear. Yet as a representation of the alchemist, Brueghel s 

While alchemical authors continued to write about alchemical theory and practice in the early modern period, they also began to comment on the alchemist as a social type, constructing a persona that could, ideally, 

As these literary authors sketched out the figure of the alchemist for their readers, this fictionalized character seemed to come to life in more 

Reason responds to each declaration with a much longer counterexample or argument. By modeling their own decisions on this kind of debate, presumably, Petrarch s readers would have learned how to make a well-considered decision about anything, in this instance about undertaking alchemy. 

In countering Joy s optimistic predictions, Reason lays out a devastating case against alchemy. Neither Joy nor anyone else has witnessed alchemy (which Petrarch defined here narrowly as transmutation), Reason declares, and all reports that it happened to some are fabricated by people who have found it expedient to believe so. 30 Believing alchemical success to be unattainable, Reason naturally predicts that the outcome of Joy s alchemical endeavors will be disastrous, leading to a catastrophic mix of madness, obsession, poverty, and even degeneracy and blindness  

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