As a member of the Board and as an independent member of the Council belonging to the Humanities cluster, my role for the 23rd Annual Conference of the Academia Europaea in Paris was to organize a group of Sessions (Sessions 6–8) to focus on different aspects of chemistry, opening up the topic to contributions from various branches of the humanities and social sciences. To do this, I chose to feature relatively small subjects often under-represented in our Academy meetings, such as early modern and modern philosophy, the history of the scientific revolution, musicology, poetry, history of art, and archaeology, all with regard to their involvement with the wide and varied range of applications of chemistry since its origins. This is why the final part of the Conference aimed to tell a wider story of the intellectual and material ‘culture’ of chemistry, which from natural philosophy and experimental science expanded into a literary, aesthetic and social history as it considered the roles chemistry played in a figurative and technical way, both theoretically and practically.

Theoretically, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, chemistry has provided new models, symbolic systems and conceptual tools widely used in the Humanities as spiritual metaphors, analogies, transformative codes and cultural icons. This was the main focus of the two historically oriented papers of Session 6, which considered the intersection of the origin of chemistry with natural/experimental philosophy, musicology, history of ideas and literary theory. In ‘Transforming Matter, Refining the Spirit: Alchemy, Music and Experimental Philosophy around 1600’, Penelope Gouk focused on the complex methodology of a group of Paracelsians who developed their spiritual and experimental alchemical practice by also referring to the transformative role of music. As ‘embodied sound’, the intermediate nature of music was taken to fill the gap between spirit and matter, as a soul medicine with individual as well as social curative effects. In ‘Genii, Homunculi and Golden Pots. Chemistry and Poetical Experiments around 1800’, Wolfgang Proß examined the pathway of chemistry from a systematic art based on empirical grounds to its professionalization and rationalization as ‘science’, exploring the way in which it was perceived and received by the general public. Proß highlighted the persistence of alchemical patterns and popular vitalistic notions that widely influenced how classical and romantic literature and musical culture approached the new science of chemistry.

The practical perspective on chemistry was represented by archaeologists who applied chemistry to retrace the technical development of human civilization, disclosing the origins of materials and people, and by chemists who explored new frontiers of flavour, creating a new awareness of alimentation, showing how our culture of taste and cooking depends upon the microstructure of food. This was the main topic of the two complementary papers of Session 8, linked by the common thread of the impact of chemistry on social products and habits. In ‘Chemistry and Archaeology – 200 Years of Interaction’, Ernst Pernicka provided a lively historical survey of the idea that the chemical composition of metals could be used for dating and for determining provenance, from the first quantitative analysis at the end of the 18th century, which was performed on a Roman coin, to the new chemical techniques such as isotopes, which he himself used when excavating Troy to decipher the puzzling and fascinating Sky Disc of Nebra. The scientific discipline called ‘Molecular Gastronomy’, introduced in 1988 by N. Kurti and H. This, provided the background for the second paper, by Hervé This, ‘When Physical Chemistry Meets People: Molecular Gastronomy, its Applications in Education, Technology and Technique’. Presenting with great verve, and including a practical demonstration, he characterized the ‘ilchemiteracy’ of typical customers, ignorant of molecules, compounds, processes, and combated widespread and ill-grounded fears of additives used in the food industry, by providing a deeper insight into culinary transformations, and showing that the scientific explorations of cooking can lead to a new appreciation of food.

Finally, I included figurative and material aspects of chemistry, which, as the two sides of the same coin, were joined together in the aesthetic impact of new techniques for imaging chemical processes and bio-chemical structures, or in understanding technical aspects of artistic production, as in the delicate and complex tasks of determining the composition and thickness of paint layers of historical works of art through analytical chemistry. This was the main topic of the two reciprocal papers of Session 7, dealing, respectively, with art in chemistry and then with chemistry in art. Giorgio Paolucci, of the Elettra National Synchrotron Radiation facility in Trieste, presented ‘The Beauty of Chemical Imaging’. By referring to the use of modern synchrotron radiation sources, his brief was to illustrate the developments both in spatial resolution, of the order of a few nanometres, and in the ability to distinguish different chemical species, in mapping chemical composition of matter, revealing patterns of striking beauty. In ‘Chemical Analysis and Painted Colours: The Mystery of Leonardo's Sfumato’, Philippe Walter offered a sophisticated and nuanced example of how X-ray fluorescence measurements were realized on seven paintings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre to understand how he obtained a ‘smoky’ aspect for the creation of flesh tones, with very subtly shaded contours.

Ultimately, Sessions 6–8 on the multifarious, broadly cultural significance of chemistry aimed to show that breaking down traditional barriers and retracing common grounds and exchanges between chemistry and traditional humanities can provide a better understanding of both fields and can indicate new avenues of research. Moreover, from the point of view of education, it suggests that chemistry can well stand as a central subject in a liberal arts curriculum, because it bridges humanities on the one hand and rigorous experimental natural modern science on the other, with benefits for both, in the spirit of our Academy.

The papers presented here reflect the sequence of the Sessions.