Oppenheim, Germany, 1617–1618

The Emblem Books

Fifty engravings, fifty mottoes, one restless search for the Philosophers’ Stone.

Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens paired each of its fifty emblems with a Latin epigram and a three-voice musical fugue — an unusual fusion of image, text, and sound unmatched elsewhere in the alchemical literature. Matthäus Merian the Elder’s engravings range from domestic scenes of washing and cooking to the ouroboros and the squared circle, translating abstract chemical theory into pictures anyone could read. It remains the single most excerpted source of alchemical imagery in general circulation today.