Whilst researching a post for my other blog (http://medievalfoundry.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/the-origin-and-use-of-bellows-especially-in-medieval-europe/), I remembered that I had seen bellows in alchemical illustrations.
However in refreshing my memory I find that they feature only infrequently.
Breughel’s famous drawing of an alchemist and his family shows the use of them to encourage a small fire:
Yet I have been unable to find many examples of the use of bellows to blow a furnace in alchemical texts or illustrations definitely associated with alchemists. The ones I checked seem to assume the use of a draft furnace.
I wonder why?
Here is at least one example, but it is surely meant to show alchemists in bad light, it comes from a 1520 book:
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/weiditz.html
The same with this one:
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amclglr14.html
From 1494. A Narrenschiff is a ship of fools, a form of satire, and the man doing the alchemy has some rather foolish clothes on. But at least it shows some retorts of the more modern one piece type, indicating that they existed even in the late medieval period.
About the only actual picture I know of is this one, no. A283, from 1503,
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amclglr15.html
And the mid-16th century Splendor Solis has one illumination showing a man using bellows to increase the fire of what looks like a dye bath, with a bearded man within it. Normally dye baths work by a sort of natural draft, or rather whatever air can get in through the hole in the side to the firewood within.
Obviously draft furnaces require less labour to use, and if you are Thomas Norton or many others, you can regulate how much air gets in by the holes in the bottom of the furnace. This is simpler than using bellows, and also more repeatable. Proper learned discussion of the importance of airflow in a furnace and how to adjust it can be found in the Summa Perfectionis of pseudo-Geber of the late 13th century. But there is no mention of bellows.
A more esoteric reason might be that draft furnaces are seen as more natural and closer to nature.
At the top right of this selection of images you can see what is probably a cherub of angel using a set of bellows on a distillation fire. But it is from 1660, so hardly representative of the period of interest, and is surely meant more as a ?????
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amclglr7.html
A similar problem with this one:
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amclglr11.html
From 1752 it shows a type of furnace that is more wishful thinking than really useful piece of equipment. Chymistry had it’s armchair experts as much as any other endeavour.
Related to this is Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae aeternae from 1595, which has draft furnaces but also a pair of bellows:
My own experience is that bellows aren’t needed when your draft furnace is well made and using dry wood. But if you use damp wood or the furnace isn’t setup properly, then you will need them to get it going properly.
This can be seen in the woodcut at the bottom right of this page, from 1478:
http://www.alchemywebsite.com/amclglr13.html
Given the setting though it is more like a medicinal distillation of plants.
I have made liberal use of Adam Maclean’s re-coloured redrawings of period illustrations. There are undoubtedly more that are simply not freely available. Yet the simple fact is that between the texts and the illustrations, it is clear that bellows do not count for anything much in alchemy. They are tools to be used when necessary, but have no deeper meaning.
Just to make sure, I checked the indexes of Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis, and found no mention of bellows or anything related under air.
What then to make of Reid’s classification of “puffers”, so called because they puffed a lot of air using bellows?
Well, re-reading the relevant pages, it strikes me that he takes a leaf from Jung’s works, by looking at the similarity of it over centuries rather than in proper context. So although he mentions Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman who blew on the fire until his heart felt faint, in the copy I habe Chaucer does not mention precisely what he blew on the fire with. Given the circumstances it may well have been his own breath! Or else bellows were so ubiquitous at the time that it was not important to mention them. Either way, bellows themselves are not important, to Reid it is the obsession with blowing the fire strong which matters; I suspect by contrast the true alchemist uses draft furnaces and avoids such labour. Or else all that matters is the correct heat, not how you get it.
This suggests a rather more practical orientation, even within esoteric alchemy, than you might think, but many of the less practical texts are focused solely upon the substances you work with, not the tools to be used. It is the practical ones which go into details of furnace height and wall thickness or type of glassware to be used. But even those I have available do not mention bellows.
All this is completely different from the works and evidence regarding metallurgy. In the works of Biringuccio, Agricola and Ercker, the bellows are an intrinsic part of the process. Agricola tells how to make them, Ercker gives instructions on how to arrange things so the bellows blow onto the test in the furnace. There is no mystery about them, but they are mentioned as appropriate. Looking at it this way, the lack of mention of bellows in alchemical works surveyed suggests that fewer of them are as practical minded as they might like to make out.
Something that might have relatively affected alchemical texts and practise is the presence of a certain amount of conservatism. All too often, the best is held to have been in the past, and authors rely upon historical works, perhaps affecting their approach to technology and tools.
Come to think of it, the treatment of new technology and ideas in alchemy would be an interesting topic to look at, although it might have been done before.
JDP said:
I think the most obvious reason is, as you considered it yourself, because bellows were simply a very common-place tool in the lab in an age of furnaces that worked exclusively with solid fuels (wood, charcoal/coal, dried dung.) There’s plenty of alchemical treatises that do not mention or describe many or even any tools but it is very safe to conclude that the authors were well-acquainted with them and used them. The semi-veiled descriptions of reactions between substances in such texts obviously imply that their authors must have been using apparatuses and tools which they do not actually bother to mention or describe.
Another reason contributing to the alchemists wanting to distance themselves from the image of the bellows could very well be that this tool eventually became widely associated with the “sophists”, “fools”, “Geber’s cooks”, “vulgar chymists”, etc. (i.e. erratic seekers), under the umbrella term “puffers”.
By the way, you forgot one very important medieval source: Al-Razi. In his very popular “Book of Secrets” he does mention and gives a brief note on bellows as being among the repertoire of tools used in alchemy. In his books Al-Razi seems to suggest that this tool (alongside tongs, crucibles, molds, etc.) is an item that the alchemist has borrowed from the craft of “artificers” like goldsmiths and blacksmiths.
guthrie said:
Ah yes, I forgot about al-Rhazi, I was looking more at European sources, especially those which might have illustrations. Come to think of it, the small number of MS I have seen in the British library don’t have marginal illustrations of bellows either.
JDP said:
A couple of other remarks regarding bellows in alchemical imagery: The bellows appears twice in the “Splendor Solis” series of drawings attributed to Trismosin. One you have already noticed, the other one appears in the next drawing:
http://www.hermetics.org/solis/solis12.html
The naked child inside the flask is giving the griffin-like creature a liquid to drink from a flask and at the same time has a bellows directed at the creature (the general sense conveyed here seems to be “imbibe and heat” the Philosophers’ Stone being confected inside the flask.)
The older series of drawings in “Aurora Consurgens” also shows bellows in one of the drawings:
http://www.fuocosacro.com/pagine/1/aurora_consurgens31.htm
A man blows a fire under a cauldron containing a yellowish liquid, to which blue birds come to drink and then apparently fly away.
The text of neither one of these treatises mentions bellows, as far as I can remember, yet the pictures that accompany them do show them. As pointed out before, I think it’s simply because they were a very common-place tool, most alchemical texts simply do not go out of their way to point them out because the authors very likely just assumed most of their readers would be well-acquainted with this tool and how to use it. This also commonly happens with many other tools and apparatuses which the authors of such texts must obviously have known very well and do not bother to mention or describe.
Fleur-de-Gigi said:
Reblogged this on La Bella Donna and commented:
Interesting post about alchemical bellows…
JDP said:
I tried posting this earlier but apparently it did not make it through because of the links I originally had placed for the respective images of “Splendor Solis” and “Aurora Consurgens”, so I will post it again but without the links:
A couple of other remarks regarding bellows in alchemical imagery: The bellows appears twice in the “Splendor Solis” series of drawings attributed to Trismosin. One you have already noticed, the other one appears in the next drawing (plate 12) The naked child inside the flask is giving the griffin-like creature a liquid to drink from a flask and at the same time has a bellows directed at the creature (the general sense conveyed here seems to be “imbibe and heat” the Philosophers’ Stone being confected inside the flask.)
The older series of drawings in “Aurora Consurgens” also shows bellows in one of the drawings (plate 31) It shows a man blowing a fire under a cauldron containing a yellowish liquid, to which blue birds come to drink and then apparently fly away.
The text of neither one of these treatises mentions bellows, as far as I can remember, yet the pictures that accompany them do show them. As pointed out before, I think it’s simply because they were a very common-place tool, most alchemical texts simply do not go out of their way to point them out because the authors very likely just assumed most of their readers would be well-acquainted with this tool and how to use it. This also commonly happens with many other tools and apparatuses which the authors of such texts must obviously have known very well and do not bother to mention or describe.
guthriestewart said:
Sorry, it was stuck in moderation as it were. Note yet sure why, sometimes blog controls really are a bit complicated.
JDP said:
Found another 15th century depiction of bellows in an alchemical manuscript:
http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0031726.html
It is not clear, however, what is it being used for in this case. It seems as if it is being employed for “sucking” a liquid from a pan rather than for its usual purpose of injecting air into burning fuel.
guthriestewart said:
Thanks, that is a bit odd. The vessel they are sucking from is a flat plate with blueish stuff in, that is the same as the illustration below, so that is a reasonable suggestion. Except that I’ve never heard of bellows being so used, maybe if I get a better copy of the text it might make more sense. Very odd.