The Alchemists of Eve

You have to know where to look. Leafing through the Experimenti de la Excellentissima Signora Caterina da Forlì, one seems to be confronted with beauty advice (how to lighten your hair or achieve a snow-white complexion); these are the most famous pages of Caterina Sforza’s work. And yet, amid those recipes, others appear that are far less frivolous: such as a remarkably early intuition of how to use chloroform to put patients to sleep. Women, custodians of knowledge tangential to that which men kept to themselves, frequently pioneered discoveries that would not officially spread until later: they were alchemists, sometimes labeled as witches. Milan now pays tribute to Sforza and to some forty of her illustrious female peers with a site-specific exhibition by Anselm Kiefer. His large works dedicated to these heroines seem to be the result of alchemical processes themselves: the forgotten faces of these prophetesses emerge from corroded surfaces, their bodies rising through a golden cosmos, their names returning forcefully to our remembrance.