Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) is a remarkable figure of the Italian Renaissance, leading a colorful and controversial life. Alchemy is more than just a pleasant distraction. She puts fire and vigor into the quest for the philosopher's stone, and does it cosmetically.
Praised in Rome for her beauty, Caterina Sforza is not just a pretty face. Overall she has three husbands, eight children, a smorgasbord of lovers and a fighting spirit. Imprisoned, she attempts to escape. Regent of a strong nation she rules with decisiveness and ruthless strategy.
Cruel in grief, she murders the children and wives of her husband's assassins. She's accused of trying to kill the Pope with poisoned letters. Maybe she does try, but to this day no one knows for sure.
She documents over 400 alchemical formulas and recipes, from medicines to make-up. Her book Experimenti is full of notes and observations. She records such cosmetic recipes as lotions, lip colors and hair dyes.
In medicine, she creates formulations to treat various ailments. These range from common fevers and coughs to more severe conditions such as sciatica and tumors. She experiments with teas, tinctures, plant and animal poisons, inhalants, purging treatments, snuff and oils.
Throughout her Experimenti she explores the properties of talc. Talc, or talcum, is a naturally occurring white clay mineral, the softest stone on the Mohs hardness scale. She uses talc in cosmetics, medicine and alchemy.
According to her experiments, talc is effective in beauty as a cosmetic powder and ingredient, and as a cure for poison. It's also capable of turning gold to silver, a reverse of the normal goal.
Coloring metals is the subject of many alchemical texts. Alchemy emerges from metallurgy as metal-dyeing, gemology as dyeing of stones to make them look like gems, ancient medicine in use of organic materials to prolong life. Alchemy also produces paint pigments.
Caterina's manuscripts overlap medicine, cosmetology and alchemy. She makes cosmetics such as hair dyes and lotions using alchemical principles and methods for production in her recipes. Many alchemical processes, such as desiccation or hydration, mimic those of nature.
Her cosmetic recipes would use "herbs and plants distilled in alchemical vessels". The distillation process, a foundational part of alchemy, is used throughout her manuscript across all disciplines.
Her work with medicine is equated with alchemy, a branch of natural philosophy, due to similar methodology. Between alchemy and medicine there are no borderlines. Caterina writes of "elixir vitae, an elixir capable of conferring perpetual health and youth."
She claims this elixir has the ability to raise the dead and cure the incurable. The instructions written in her manuscript, "recall the principal stages of the alchemical process as described in many alchemy texts", referring to use of glass vessels common to most alchemists.
Under the same principles Caterina also produces a “marvelous and divine water” to improve memory, treat leprosy, and cure many other aches and illnesses. This panacea is considered an alchemical product due to its extraordinary nature, much like the elixir vitae.
Not all her experiments are divine in inspiration. She uses alchemy to find the secrets of turning base metals into money metals due to a burden of debt. It's said she makes metal appear to be gold by changing its weight and color via principles of alchemy.
Perhaps she uses a recipe similar to the one below. From the c. 250 AD Leyden Papyrus:
"For Giving to Objects of Copper the Appearance of Gold And neither touch nor rubbing against the touchstone will detect them, but they can serve especially for (the manufacturing of) a ring of fine appearance. Here is the preparation for this.
"Gold and lead are ground to a fine powder like flour, 2 parts of lead for 1 of gold, then having mixed, they are incorporated with gum, and one coats the ring with this mixture; then it is heated. One repeats this several times until the object has taken the color. It is difficult to detect (the difference), because rubbing gives the mark of a gold object, and the heat consumes the lead but not the gold."
Caterina Sforza is grandmother to one of the major movers and shakers of the Renaissance, Duke Cosimo de' Medici I. He explores the practice of alchemy influenced by her passion for it.
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