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.mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

Powerful and immaterial

On earth as it is in heaven

Taming fire

Quest for Fire

The raw and the cooked

Roasting, frying, grilling, boiling and braising

Household arts

It's Winter, light the fire!

Heating the artist's workshop

Adding fuel to the fire

From earthenware jug to fridge

Alchemy

Vulcan's forges

Magic of transparency

The Candelabra's luster

The electricity fairy

City lights

The steam horse

Boom!

3, 2, 1...blastoff!

Fear in the city

Caught in the cross fire

Auto-da-fé

Show me a sign

Witches and the stake

Up in smoke

Saint John's bonfires

Like a great sun

One last bouquet

Alchemy

Experimenting with the effects of fire is an age-old practice. In the Middle Ages and modern times, alchemists play an important role in exploring fire's transformative properties. A full-fledged philosophy of nature, this ancient form of chemistry— which it branched off from in the 18^th century—is admittedly a long way from modern chemistry. Based like the medicine of the time on the principle that the world is an organic whole, alchemy nonetheless involves real laboratory work. Using analogical reasoning and supposed correspondences between the various elements, alchemists continually transform matter, especially metals, in the belief that metals derive their properties from the original qualities of base elements' fundamental principles. Heating, burning, dissolving—unlike the magical practice often attributed to them, alchemy experimenters carry out genuine laboratory experiments.

The philosophic fire

...so that Fire & Water seem to have interchanged their mutual qualities, or else the philosophic fire is not to be supposed of the same kind with the common Fire; and the same thing is to be said of the Philosophic water.

As for the Calc Vive or Quicklime & Ignis Graecus, we know that they are kindled by Water and cannot be extinguished by it contrary to the Nature of other things that will take Fire; so it is affirmed that Camphor over-kindled will burn in Water. And Anselm de Bood says that the Stone Gagates being set on fire is more easily quenched by Oil than Water, for Oil will mingle with it and choke the fiery body. Whereas Water not being able to mix with the fatness yields to the fire unless it totally covers & overwhelms it, which it cannot easily do because although it be a Stone, it swims upon the top of the Water like Oil, so Naphtha, Petroleum and the like are not easily quenched by Water. (...).

There is therefore great diversity in Fires, both in their being kindled and extinguished, & there is no less in Liquors, for Milk, Vinegars, Spirits of Wine, aqua fortis, aqua Regia and Common Water differ very much when they are thrown upon Fire.

Excerpt from "Atalanta Fugiens" by Michael Maier

This alchemist monk is "balancing the elements," that is, weighing matter in fire. In addition to food, fire's calorific power can cook matter, or transform its molecular structure to enhance its physical properties.

Brother Bacon, English Alchemist, Balancing the Elements

Michael Maier

The alchemist Michael Maier was born at the end of the 16^th century in the north of what is now Germany. After attaining a doctorate in medicine at Rostock, he became personal physician and private secretary to Rudolf II, grandson of Charles V, living in Prague. Maier benefited from the interest of the prince and later his successor in the occult sciences and alchemy. During his lifetime he published some twenty books on alchemy, some of them highly poetic and illustrated with magnificent engravings. The most well known, translated and republished many times, is his Atalanta Fugiens, an alchemical emblem book, first published in 1618.

.Fire

Alchemy