Archaeology of a Wound, Liturgy of the Erased
To cross the threshold of the Sala delle Cariatidi is not to enter an exhibition space: it means, rather, to step into a liminal zone where architecture ceases to be a container and becomes a witness, stops being a frame and turns into laceration. Giuseppe Piermarini had delivered it, between 1774 and 1778, as the apotheosis of the neoclassical sublime — forty-six metres of ceremonial vertigo that were meant to glitter with stucco, gilding, galas and sovereignty. On the night of 15 August 1943, one hundred and forty Lancasters of the Royal Air Force, dumping over five hundred tons of incendiary ordnance on the heart of Milan, surrendered it to the other face of the modern: carbonised, flayed, eviscerated in its wooden frame. The trusses collapsed upon the vault, the gallery gave way at several points, the floor tore open like a shroud.
The decision — never truly planned, yet sedimented over the decades as a civic posture and a conscience shaped like a choice — never to restore it has bequeathed to the city one of the most memory-dense interiors of the entire continent: a cavity in which the burned, skinned stone continues to hold up the ceiling like a body breathing through its own scars. The caryatids themselves, maimed, blackened, polished only by flame, no longer sustain a triumph but an attestation. Within this unexpected configuration — monument by subtraction, architecture that speaks itself through its own amputation — Anselm Kiefer has found his chosen hall, the scorched womb where he could lay down forty-two canvases conceived to enter into consonance, and not opposition, with the wound of the place.
"It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the great figures. Historical construction is devoted to giving memory to the nameless." — Walter Benjamin
Where Stone Meets Flame: A Site Already Kieferian
Anyone who walked through the Sala dello Scrutinio at the Palazzo Ducale in 2022, before the cycle inspired by Andrea Emo and his vertiginous sentence — these writings, when they are burned, will at last give a little light — will immediately recognise the grammar of this encounter. There Kiefer had responded to the Venetian lexicon of the Veroneses and the Tintorettos by elevating his own European mourning to an equal liturgical dignity; here in Milan the gesture inverts and radicalises itself. No longer a dialogue between golden plenitude and pictorial rubble, but between two ruins, two forms of the survival of meaning. The surviving caryatids and Kiefer's canvases speak the same post-catastrophic language: one in which beauty no longer gives itself as smoothness but as the resistance of matter to its own annihilation.
Nor can one forget, just a few kilometres away, the other Milanese pole of the Kieferian hieroglyph: I Sette Palazzi Celesti at the HangarBicocca, those towers weighing ninety tons each, rising up to nineteen metres, in which the lead extracted from the ancient alembics crystallises into crushed books, tilting columns, ziggurats on the verge of collapse. If there the reference was the Sefer Hekhalot — the 5th–6th century Hebrew treatise on the palaces of Merkavah mysticism and the visionary's ascending initiatory journey towards the Name — in the Sala delle Cariatidi the trajectory inverts and horizontalises: no longer the vertical ascent of the initiate, but an anonymous descent into a genealogical underworld, into the crypt of female adepts consigned to oblivion. Between Bicocca and Palazzo Reale, Kiefer thus traces a constellation in which the city itself becomes a hermetic organism, a body through which a single alchemical current circulates — coagulation and solutio, nigredo and albedo, remembrance and erasure.
The Alchemists: Naming What History Silenced
The title, apparently descriptive, in fact carries a methodological detonation. Le Alchimiste: the simple feminine plural of a term that Western historiography has, for centuries, declined only in the masculine becomes, in Kiefer, a politico-ontological operation. It returns existence to a multitude of figures whom official knowledge — the same knowledge that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gave birth to the treatises of Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Jean Baptiste van Helmont — had relegated to the margins, often forcing their authors to sign with male pseudonyms, to hide their domestic laboratories, to risk the stake as witches rather than recognition as scholars.
Kiefer, curated by Gabriella Belli with philological rigour, constructs a pantheon of thirty-eight names that extends from myth to the nineteenth century. There is Cleopatra the Alchemist, attested in the 2nd or 4th century, presumed author of a writing on Chrysopoeia, the art of generating gold; there is Maria the Jewess, inventor of the bain-marie and of distilling instruments that survived intact until Liebig; there are Caterina Sforza, who spent her youth in Milan and left a manuscript of over four hundred medicinal and alchemical recipes, Isabella Cortese with her Secreti published in Venice in 1561, and Marie Meurdrac — author, in 1666, of the Chymie charitable et facile en faveur des dames, a proto-feminist manifesto disguised as a recipe book.
There is Rebecca Vaughan, wife and collaborator of Thomas Vaughan in mid-seventeenth-century England, likely killed by mercury inhalation during her husband's experiments, who becomes pure silence in his journals. There are Anna Maria Zieglerin at the court of Braunschweig, tried and burned in 1575, and Mary Anne Atwood, who in 1850, with A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, reignited the hermetic tradition in the Victorian age. Names that Kiefer inscribes, now calligraphed in graphite, now burned with an electrocautery, directly onto the canvases, as epitaphs of a clandestine register finally resurfaced.
There is Rebecca Vaughan, wife and collaborator of Thomas Vaughan in mid-seventeenth-century England, likely killed by mercury inhalation during her husband's experiments, who becomes pure silence in his journals. There are Anna Maria Zieglerin at the court of Braunschweig, tried and burned in 1575, and Mary Anne Atwood, who in 1850, with A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, reignited the hermetic tradition in the Victorian age. Names that Kiefer inscribes, now calligraphed in graphite, now burned with an electrocautery, directly onto the canvases, as epitaphs of a clandestine register finally resurfaced.
The choice is not celebratory but archaeological in the Foucauldian sense: it is not a matter of erecting a reparative monument, but of exposing the discursive logic that rendered these women invisible, of showing how their removal belongs to the same symbolic economy that produces the great names of the canon. In the flayed space of the Sala, where the surviving caryatids — the other female statues of the city's wounded memory — bear the traces of wartime trauma in their bodies, these alchemists recover, for one season, their sisters in stone. Two calcined female collectivities, two silences. The device is as simple as it is relentless: the violence of the 1943 fire and the secular violence of epistemic erasure are equated as operations of the same oblivion. The fire that disfigured the Sala and the symbolic fire of the stakes that burned the witch-scientists converge into a single pyre, over whose awakening Kiefer now presides.
Matter as Theology: Lead, Sulphur, Gold and Ash
On the level of facture, the forty-two canvases constitute a tactile encyclopaedia of alchemical thought. Kiefer has always worked with lead as with an ideological organ: saturnine, heavy, melancholy metal, lead was, for the hermetic tradition, the prima materia to be transmuted into gold, ground zero of the Great Work. Here lead is poured, oxidised, folded into sheets that drape over the canvases like fossilised skins; sulphur settles in yellow concretions; mercury is evoked rather than used, because of its toxicity; gold leaf, cold-pressed, seals the figures like a Byzantine icon recovered from under strata of soot. Sand, clay, burnt straw, real ash — the same ash that for Celan was asche vom Rhein, the ash of History — form the nourishing earth of each work.
The canvas is no longer, properly speaking, a painting: it is a reactor in which paint allows itself to be traversed by oxyacetylene combustion, by acid corrosion, by electrolysis, by suture. Kiefer incises, tears, stitches back together, erases, begins again — gestures that do not imitate alchemy but practise it, taking on the geological time of matter as the very time of the work. The faces of the alchemists rise from these sediments like liminal apparitions, now angelic, now monstrous, they sink and re-emerge; often they are imprisoned beneath gold grounds that have none of the reassuring brilliance of the Sienese Trecento but rather the opaque glow of a rusted monstrance. Bodies at times turn into alembics, at times into empty vestments, at times into withered trees — a symbolic vocabulary that draws simultaneously on the Turba philosophorum, on Jakob Böhme and on the kabbalistic substrate that runs through the whole of Kiefer's œuvre.
Within the installation, these pictorial machines are not hung against the walls like pictures but suspended at a distance, tilted, arranged so as to leave the caryatids fully visible. The hall is not concealed: it is activated. To walk among the canvases is to move through a metallic forest in which every trunk is also a tombstone, and every tombstone is also a window onto a vanished body. The light, always grazing, always sparing, returns the space to an auroral or crepuscular temporality, never meridian. One has the impression of walking inside a transmutation that has been completed — leaving us visitors in the suspended moment of the opus incompletum, between putrefaction and rebirth.
Existence, Memory, Transmutation: The Philosophical Lexicon of the Work
It would be reductive to read the cycle solely in a historiographical key, or as a matter of gender recovery. The stakes, philosophically, are more vertiginous. Kiefer poses the question of being as a question of the residue: what remains when a form has been annihilated, what persists of the subject once History has expunged it from its own narrative. It is the theme that runs through the entire German twentieth century — from Benjamin, who read into history a growing pile of ruins, to Heidegger, who thought the work of art as Verborgenheit and Unverborgenheit, simultaneous veiling and unveiling, through to Blanchot and his écriture du désastre, a writing of catastrophe that can never represent catastrophe itself except by grazing its perimeter.
Kiefer belongs to that lineage because he has always worked on the tension between what annihilation consumes and what, precisely through annihilation, is saved in the form of a trace. Le Alchimiste, in this sense, are emblematic figures of an existence that gives itself only as survival: having been denied a full place in official discourse, they exist today only as intermittences, as flickers recoverable in the margins of the archives, in their husbands' colophons, in witchcraft trials, in recipes transcribed and then smuggled under male names. Kiefer does not restore them to full presence — that would betray their very status — but keeps them in the liminal condition of operative ghosts, voices rising from the depths of the lead without ever becoming fully visible. This choice is ethical before it is stylistic: it spares the alchemists the further outrage of being reduced to posthumous icons, maintaining their consistency in the most authentic form possible, that of an echo.
There is, finally, a profound existential coincidence between the artist and the Sala. Both bear the mark of 1943 — Kiefer was born in March 1945, among the rubble of a Germany on its knees; the Sala had been incinerated eighteen months earlier — and both have made of ruin the primary material, the place of their own beginning. Kiefer's art, it has often been written, is a posthumous art, born after the end, which takes upon itself the task of thinking what comes after. Here, in Milan, that after at last finds a setting commensurate with its own conceptual density: a room that does not pretend to be intact, a room that bears its own ruin as a theology.
An Exercise in Seeing
To leave the Sala delle Cariatidi, after walking through the cycle, means to carry away the weight of a form of knowledge that cannot be reduced to conceptual knowing. One has learned something, but that something does not lie in the names acquired nor in the chronology of the hermetic treatises — it lies, rather, in an altered perception of the relation between body, matter and time. One has glimpsed, if only for the short time of a visit, the possibility that History is not a continuous line but a field of forces in which every erased figure continues to exert its own gravitation, invisible and operative. One has understood that a wound, when it is honoured rather than sutured, can become the space in which new words are born.
With Le Alchimiste, Kiefer does not merely exhibit works in a place: he confers upon a wounded place the dignity of completing the work. The Sala delle Cariatidi is not a background to the canvases; it is the forty-third canvas, the largest, the oldest, the one that contains the others. And perhaps, in one of those rare epiphanies that Milan can still offer its inhabitants, one recognises in this conjunction something akin to a belated justice: to the mute caryatids, who have borne for eighty years the insult of the fire, sisters are finally returned with whom they may speak. And to those sisters — forgotten alchemists, tried healers, erased thinkers — a room is offered where their voices, metallised in lead and sealed beneath gold leaf, can, for the first time in centuries, resonate.
"The civilisation of the past will become a heap of ruins and in the end a heap of ashes, but over the ashes spirits will hover." — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Anselm Kiefer. Le Alchimiste Curated by Gabriella Belli Palazzo Reale, Sala delle Cariatidi — Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan (entrance from the Scalone dell'Arengario)
Dates: 7 February – 27 September 2026
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–19.30, Thursday until 22.30, Monday closed (last admission one hour before closing)
