MATTER, FORM, AND THE GENERATION OF METALS IN ALVARO ALONSO BARBA'S ARTE DE LOS METALES1

1. I want to thank Susana Draper, Anna More, and Miruna Achim for their valuable suggestions.

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Notes

1. I want to thank Susana Draper, Anna More, and Miruna Achim for their valuable suggestions.

2. For the life of Alvaro Alonso Barba see, Barnadas.

3. In this paper I analyze Barba's alchemy neither as a precursor of chemistry nor as an expression of spiritual or occultist practice. I think that Barba's invention and concepts do not fit either a logic of linear progress of positivism nor an allegorical, spiritual, moral, or mystical language that would search for a supramundane transcendental transformation. I argue for a materialist deviation from the philosophical presuppositions of an imperial and colonial technical expansion. For the limits of the “spiritual” intepretation of alchemy, see Principe and Newman 385–431.

4. One of the central claims of the book is “that alchemy provided a uniquely powerful focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature—a question that resonates even today—can be understood only if the reader is willing to engage with the presuppositions of premodern philosophers, theologians, alchemists, and artists about the structure and nature of the world around them” (Newman, Promethean 8; my emphasis).

5. In Aquinas's words: “When, for example, a statue is made out of bronze, the bronze which is in potency to the form of the statue is the matter; the unshaped, or the unarranged, is the privation; and the shape from which the statue gets to be called a statue is the form. But this form is not a substantial form because the bronze, before the coming of that form, already has actual existence, and its existence does not depend on that shape. This form is, rather, an accidental form. All artificial forms are accidental forms. For art works only on what has already been put into existence by nature” (10).

6. For the appropriation of Barba's theories by Creole modernity and European science, see Platt, “The Alchemy of Modernity.” For an examination of the presence of alchemical tradition in Barba's metallurgy, see Salazar Soler, “Álvaro Alonso Barba”; “Encuentro de Dos Mundos”; “Magia y Modernidad.”

7. See Heidegger: “Both the formative act and the choice of material—a choice given with the act—and therewith the dominance of the conjunction of matter and form, are all grounded in such usefulness” (“The Origin” 28).

8. One of the most fundamental moments of the relation of technology and metaphysics is the hylomorphic Thomism: “The inclination to treat matter-form structure as the constitution of every entity receives a yet additional impulse from the fact that on the basis of the religious faith, namely the Biblical faith, the totality of beings is represented in advance as something created, which here means made. The philosophy of this faith can of course assure us that all of God's creative work is to be thought of as different from the action of a craftsman. Nevertheless, if at the same time or even beforehand, in accordance with a presumed predetermination of Thomistic philosophy for interpreting the Bible, the ens creatum is conceived as a unity of materia and forma, then faith is expounded by way of a philosophy whose truth lies in an unconcealedness of beings which differs from the world believed by faith” (“The Origin” 29).

9. Goodman also says that Phillip “sought an alchemical remedy for his shortage of money” since “since the imports of American silver, though significant had not yet attained the huge flooded after 1560” (12).

10. For the importance of the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy in the process of colonization, see Pagden, MacCormack, and Seed. The second Thomism of the School of Salamanca was the school of thought of Francisco de Vitoria and José de Acosta, who were central to the colonial enterprise. José de Acosta's “Libro Cuarto” of his Historia may be considered the author of the first metallurgical treatise of the New World.

11. For a more detailed historical analysis of the relation between technology, science, and the Spanish Empire see Cañizares-Esguera, Louise Pratt, Gerbi, and Barrera-Osorio. For historical analysis of colonialism and science in the context of the British Empire see Brockway, Reingold and Rothenberg, MacKenzie, and Adas.

12. It is interesting that in Covarrubias we read that “virtud” also means “force” and “value” (969).

13. For more information on the history of amalgamation in the New World and Potosí see Bakewell, Menes-Llaguno, Bargalló, Muro, Platt, and Tandeter.

14. Salazar-Soler inscribes Alonso Barba in the classic interpretation of alchemy that distributes gender roles to mercury and sulphur in a rigid binary fashion. I think that a close reading of this paragraph does not support this reading. I follow Pinkus's idea that ambivalence is structural to alchemical writing.

15. It is possible to say that there is a discontinuity between European modernity and these zones of indiscernibility between marginal unidentified deviations and the Creole and European versions of the colonial technology as laboratories of modernity. It is important to keep in mind that even “patriotic epistemology” “cannot be used to demonstrate continuities in the colonial roots of European modernity, because none of the ideas created in Spanish America later proved influential in Europe” (Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature 67).

16. For a relation between Kusch's seminal thinking and Aymara technology, see Juan van Kessel: “While Western logic developed a technology for its economy of mechanic production, the Aymara logic developed its own technology for its economy of biological production” (193; my translation).

17. I do not claim that Alonso Barba's text is interchangeable with an indigenous or pre-Hispanic belief about metals. That would assume an immutable essence of the “Andean” that would ignore the effect of five hundred years of colonization itself. I am aware of the critical distance between a presumably pure form of indigenous knowledge and its successive appropriations, translations, and expressions that take Occidentalism for granted. I situate my own work within the ruins of Rodolfo Kusch and Juan van Kessel's attempts to retrieve a tradition such as that of “seminal thinking” in order to find a positive and disruptive point where life is not reduced to a passive standing.

18. For the problem of the forgotten Iberian and Colonial origins of the Scientific Revolution see Lopez Piñero, Sánchez-Blanco Parody, Hill, Robbins and Bauer. Lopez Piñero's Ciencia is the first complete and all-inclusive encyclopedic examination of the science and technology in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his Introducción, López Piñero analyzes the discontinuity between the prolific sixteenth century and the more passive scientific innovation in the seventeenth century.