The salamander and fire: from Aristotle to Cellini and Paracelsus
Aristotle and Pliny, the emblem of Francis I, Benvenuto Cellini's tale and the fire spirits of Paracelsus: the salamander between nature and legend.
The fire salamander, with its black livery spotted with yellow, is a real amphibian and fairly common in the damp woods of Europe. Yet for almost two thousand years European culture credited it with an extraordinary property: that of living in fire without burning, or even of putting it out. This legend, born of ancient observations and fanciful interpretations, passed through natural history, heraldry, alchemy and literature, turning a small woodland animal into a powerful symbol.
Aristotle, Pliny and the chill of the salamander
Aristotle, in his Historia animalium, reports that the salamander, as people say, puts out fire by walking through it. Pliny the Elder expands the notice: in the tenth book of his Natural History he describes the animal as so cold that it extinguishes fire at a touch, «non alio modo quam glacies», no differently from ice. Elsewhere he stresses its venom, considered among the most dangerous.
A core of real observation may explain the legend. Salamanders like to shelter in damp, rotting logs; when the wood was thrown on the fire, the hidden animals might rush out of it, giving the impression that they were born from the flames. Their skin also secretes moist and toxic substances, which fed the idea of a body able to withstand heat.
The emblem of Francis I and Cellini's memory
In the Renaissance the salamander became a heraldic device of great prestige. Francis I, King of France, chose it as his emblem, accompanied by a motto often given as «Nutrisco et extinguo», I nourish and I extinguish, which played on the double nature of fire, both good and destructive. Crowned salamanders still decorate the châteaux of Chambord, Blois and Fontainebleau today.
Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, tells a childhood episode. When he was about five, his father saw in the hearth a little lizard-like creature that seemed to live among the flames, called his son and gave him a slap so that he would remember for ever having seen a salamander, then consoled him with a caress and a few coins. The story shows how alive the legend was in the sixteenth century.
Salamander wool and spirits of fire
In the Middle Ages the fabric made from asbestos, which does not burn, was called salamander wool. Marco Polo, in his Travels, made clear that this material came not from an animal but from a mineral mined in the mountains of Asia. Despite this clarification, the idea of fireproof garments woven from the salamander's hair continued to circulate in tales of marvels.
Paracelsus, in his treatise on nymphs, sylphs, pygmies and salamanders, published posthumously in 1566, used the salamander's name for the elemental spirits of fire, alongside those of water, air and earth. From then on, in alchemy and occultism, the salamander became the symbol of purification through fire and of the transformation of matter.
The history of the salamander is an example of how a natural fact, read with the tools of another age, can become myth. The woodland amphibian neither puts out fire nor lives among flames, yet its name still evokes the unburnable and the eternal. From the Historia animalium to the châteaux of the Loire, the salamander tells of the long dialogue between observation and imagination in European culture.