Anselm Kiefer "The Women Alchemists" exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milano

    The Palazzo Reale Milano was built in the 13th century and served as the palace of the rulers who governed Milan, including the House of Visconti, Sforza, Habsburg, and Napoleon. While its architectural style changed over time, it remained the political center of the city, serving as the residence of the rulers of each era.

　The Sala delle Cariatidi (Hall of the Caryatids) in this palace suggests that it was once a magnificent space. “Caryatids” refers to female figure columns. Forty caryatids line this hall, which measures 46 meters long and 17 meters wide. They were created in the 1770s by the sculptor Gaetano Callani (1736–1809). However, they bear little resemblance to their original forms. Their faces and bodies remain broken and missing. Today, the Hall of the Caryatids has the appearance of a ruin. In 1943, during World War II, the ceiling collapsed and was destroyed in an Allied air raid on Milan. Although this damaged and dilapidated space was restored, it was never fully returned to its original state. In 1953, an exhibition of Picasso’s war-themed works—Guernica, Massacre in Korea, and War and Peace—was held in this space. The Hall of the Caryatids, with its ruinous state left exposed, is now used as a venue for art exhibitions.

　Cariatidi (Caryatids) refer to the young girls who danced alongside the Greek goddess Artemis. “She was worshipped also under surnames that reveal the pleasure she took in the dancing of strange dancers both male and female. As Karyatis, she rejoiced in the dances of the girls of the nut tree village of Karyai, those Karyatides who in their ecstatic round dance carried on their heads baskets of live reeds, as if they were dancing plants.”（Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of Greeks, London : Thames and Hudson, 1951, p.149）The figures of these girls dancing with Artemis came to be used as decorations on the columns supporting the temple’s ceiling. Even in modern architecture, they have been incorporated as facade decorations and within building interiors. One such example is the Sala delle Cariatidi in the Palazzo Reale in Milan, which serves as the space for this Kiefer's exhibition.

　The female figures in the Sala delle Cariatidi at the Palazzo Reale stand there today, bearing the scars of war and appearing shattered. The women, trapped on the walls, appear to still be unable to escape the weight of the ceiling, even as they remain in their pitiful state, propping it up. Between the statues are mirrors, in which the collapsed female figures are reflected infinitely as if a distorted world is endlessly reflected.

　Gabriella Belli, who accompanied Kiefer in January 2024 when he visited the space to scout it for the creation of the artwork to be exhibited there, says the following; “they have remained a mementoes of the failure of the humanist spirit in the West, tragically current still today as defenseless witnesses of that never again - now become always - repeated everyday in the service of new flags and new ideology.” (Gabriella Belli, THE KIEFER LOG 2024-2026, KIEFER THE WOMEN ALCHEMISTS, ed.Gabriella Belli, Marsilio Arte, 2026, p.26)

　The collapsing female figures are traces of the failure of the spirit of humanism, and it also serves as a site that reveals how the lessons of that failure have not been applied today. The female figures endlessly repeating within the mirror are witnesses to that madness. This time, placed alongside them and incorporated into a kaleidoscope-like space were Kiefer’s Women Alchemists.

　Each of the 38 massive canvases painted by Anselm Kiefer depicts a female alchemist, and their names are inscribed in gold letters.

　For a long time, Kiefer has shown a strong interest in alchemy and the transmutation it brings about. He has created numerous works centered on the theme of alchemy. In many of these, he depicts men—particularly himself. A prime example is Athanor, which is on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The title, Athanor, refers to the furnace used in alchemy. This furnace is self-sustaining, using its own fuel to maintain a constant temperature. Three words are inscribed in the painting. “nigredo” appears at the same level as the reclining man; a silver line is drawn roughly at the center of the composition, with “albedo” written at that height; and a gold line is drawn toward the top, where “rubedo” is inscribed. In other words, the three stages of alchemy—lead, silver, and gold—are represented within Athanor. And within these three stages, lead—“nigredo”—is positioned on the same line as the naked man. This man was modeled after Kiefer himself. In Athanor, Kiefer placed his own body in the position of lead, the starting point of alchemy. This seems to express his identity as an artist who creates something. Yet it is also a representation of death. 

　The first time a reclining man appeared in Kiefer’s work was in the 1971 piece Man Lying with Branch. In this painting, a man lying on the ground holds a branch against his abdomen. This image appears in alchemical manuscripts; specifically, Kiefer based it on an illustration from the 14th-century Ashburn Manuscript. In the illustration from the Ashburn Manuscript, a tree grows from the genitals of a naked man lying on the ground. Drawing on this image, Kiefer has repeatedly depicted scenes in which tree trunks and sunflowers sprout from a naked man. Moreover, the man looks almost like a corpse. It is the Shavasana pose (Corpse pose) from yoga. Kiefer, who based his painting on a photograph of himself meditating, states that meditation is a small death（Marie-Laure Bernadac, etc., Kiefer au Louvre, Paris : Éditions du Regard, 2008, p.30）.It is said that the man in the Ashburn Manuscript is associated with rebirth following death. If that is the case, then the reclining man depicted by Kiefer implies some form of rebirth alongside death. Plants are sprouting from the corpse of the man Kiefer portrays. Just as a flower withers while simultaneously producing seeds, this suggests that as one human being dies, it brings about the beginning of something else. The death depicted here is not merely an end, but rather a process of renewal, an alternation between death and life, and a transition from one state to another. It is precisely this transition—this metamorphosis—that alchemy has sought to achieve. For Kiefer, alchemy is not merely about creating gold; it is the art of transmumation. Through his alchemy-themed works, Kiefer has demonstrated the power of transmumation.

　In Madame d’Orbelin, exhibited in The Women Alchemists exhibition, a plant stem grows out of a woman’s body, while in Leona Constantia, a woman supports a sunflower without petals that extends from her abdomen. Leona Constantia is said to have authored a work titled The Sunflower of the Wise. (It is interesting to note that a figure named Leona Constantia wrote The Sunflower of the Wise, linking the sunflower—a major motif in Kiefer’s work—with alchemy.) Kiefer thus replaced the theme of men and plants, which he had previously depicted, with that of women and plants.

　With the exception of a very few, such as Virginia Woolf, Kiefer never depicted women with both names and faces. In works like Sulamith and Margarete—inspired by Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge—the women are identified only by name; their likenesses are never depicted. Furthermore, Lilith and her daughters were depicted in white garments and were never shown with faces (in contrast to how Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Collier had portrayed woman as femme fatale). In Women of the Revolution, the names of women who lived through and died during the French Revolution were used, but their figures were absent. In the Die Frauen der Antike (Women of Antiquity) series, women who should have left their mark on history are depicted as faceless figures. In Les Reines de France, the queens’ faces are blatantly being erased. In these examples, the women have lost their faces, which seems to represent how they themselves have been ignored or erased from history. On the other hand, in works such as Winter Landscape and Mutterkorn series, which depict only the faces of women, the viewers are not told who these women are. They are deliberately portrayed as anonymous women without names.

　However, in depicting female alchemists, Kiefer began—for the first time—to portray women with faces and names. And he did so within the context of the themes of alchemy and transformation, which were of the utmost importance to him.

　Caterina Sforza depicts Caterina Sforza, who was born as an illegitimate child of the Sforza family, which ruled Milan. She continued her exploration of alchemy and compiled her findings in a book titled Experimenti. The book details not only alchemy but also methods for making medicines and cosmetics, demonstrating that alchemy was by no means merely a practice aimed at creating gold. Sforza is depicted holding a branch with golden leaves pointing upward.

　The woman depicted in Sophie Brahe is shown holding a crucible for melting gold, with a golden moon depicted behind her. She appears to have reached great heights. Sophie Brahe had been interested in botany, chemistry, and medicine from a young age. She also conducted research in astronomy and alchemy alongside her brother, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, and her husband, the alchemist Erik Lange. It was an insatiable quest for knowledge. Nevertheless, her independent work was in genealogy, a field considered “suitable for women.” The results of her research in alchemy and astronomy are known to the world as the achievements of her brother, Tycho.

　Mary Anne Atwood is about to take flight from the heavy earth with her asymmetrical wings. Mary Anne Atwood wrote Early Magnetism in its higher relations to humanity(1846) and A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850), but published them under a pen name—an anagram of her father’s name, Thomas South—or anonymously.

　In most of the works Kiefer created, the women are depicted either rising higher and higher or taking flight. Mary Anne Atwood, Marie de Bachimont, Anne, Kurfürstin von Sachsen, Sabine Stuart de Chevalier, E.H., and Blanche von Navarra fly with cloth as their wings; Kleopatra appears to be rising without wings, as if propelled by the power of fire; Madam d’Orbelin, whose body floats through the power of plants; Anne Conway and Althea Talbot Howard, looking upward; Sophie Brahe, holding a crucible high toward the sky; and Camilla Eiculiani, jumping with her arms and legs spread wide. They are depicted as if they themselves were transforming from one substance into another. Thus, the painting itself is the alchemical furnace, the athanor.

　Some of the female alchemists depicted here are figures whose actual existence cannot be confirmed. Women such as Caterina Sforza, Sophie Brahe, and Mary Anne Atwood were involved in alchemy in one way or another. However, the identity of Isabella Cortese—who is said to have authored The Secrets of Lady Isabella Cortese, published in Venice in 1561—remains unknown, and it has been suggested that Leona Constantia was a pen name used by another person. If that is the case, this breathtaking installation—comprising 38 female alchemists arranged here and woven together on a massive canvas of 38—is a space where fact and fiction intertwine. It reveals to us a “world that might have been,” a world of potentialities.

　Female alchemists pursued knowledge and the possibilities of science just as their male counterparts did. Although alchemy is often regarded today as an occult practice, it actually began in Egypt around the 1st century as a fusion of ancient metalworking techniques and Greek natural philosophy. During the dawn and formative years of modern science, alchemy paved the way for fields such as botany, chemistry, physics, medicine, and pharmacology. The practice of alchemy was an exploration of humanity’s power to transform things, and research continued in an effort to demonstrate that the world could be transformed by human agency. Among those who carried this work forward were women.

　However, throughout history, knowledge has been monopolized by men, and if a woman stands in a laboratory just as a man does, it would be regarded as an attempt at witchcraft. Women who behave like men are labeled “witches.” No woman could help but be influenced by the witch legends that began in 1454. To avoid being condemned as witches, women had to downplay or conceal their abilities. “Witches,” after all, are simply capable women—women who possess knowledge, influence the world, and sometimes even have the power to transform it.

　Kiefer does not portray female alchemists as beautiful. Rather, they are depicted as monsters or witches. (Although there are exceptions, when looking at the women depicted by male painters, one cannot help but wonder if they were portrayed as beautiful precisely to belittle women’s power.) By depicting female alchemists in terrifying forms, Kiefer reveals the power of these women, which has been hidden or ignored until now. Women with scholarly talent were once dismissed with derision as “occult” and deemed insignificant, or were nearly brutally eradicated as “magical” beings; yet today, within Kiefer’s works, they are brought to life with names, faces, and bodies. They were able to assert themselves, create something, and possessed the power to transform the world.

　“Art will survive its ruins.” These are words Kiefer has repeated many times since 1975. In the ruined Sala delle Cariatidi, those words resonate with even more vividly. Within these ruins, Kiefer’s works and the women alchemists continue to survive, right here and now.