Germany, 1582 copy (text tradition c. 1532–1535)

Splendor Solis

Gold, the sun, and the alchemist’s Great Work in eight surviving miniatures.

Splendor Solis is among the most lavishly illustrated alchemical manuscripts to survive the sixteenth century — a cycle of gold-ground miniatures built around the sun as both symbol and substance. Structured as parables and a run of planetary vessels, its images encode the classic stages of the Great Work: blackening, whitening, and the reddening said to yield the Stone. Attributed in its text tradition to Salomon Trismosin, this British Library copy remains one of the most reproduced alchemical picture-cycles in the world.