Oppenheim, Germany, 1617–1618
The Dragon Devouring Its Own Tail
The most famous image in the book: a serpent eating its own tail, alchemy’s emblem of a cycle with no beginning.
- Work
- Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XIV
- Artist / creator
- Michael Maier (author); engraved by Matthäus Merian the Elder
- Origin & date
- 1617/1618, Oppenheim, Germany — early modern alchemical emblematics
- Held by
- Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution color-managed file — yours to print, study, and keep.
Size
Available as a digital download only — this scan’s resolution doesn’t hold up cleanly as a physical print at any size.
$24.00
The story
A dragon curls into a closed ring, jaws fastened on its own tail — the ouroboros, one of alchemy’s oldest inherited symbols, here given its most widely reproduced early-modern rendering. The caption is blunt: "Hic est Draco caudam suam devorans," this is the dragon devouring its own tail. Alchemical writers used the figure for a process without a fixed start or finish: matter destroying and consuming itself in order to be renewed, shedding an old skin to acquire a new one along with youth. Atalanta Fugiens was itself a layered object — each of its 50 emblems paired an engraving with a Latin epigram and a three-voice musical fugue, an unusual fusion of image, text, and sound for 1618 — and this plate, endlessly excerpted since in books on symbolism, shows how far one image from it has traveled beyond the volume that made it famous.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wikimedia Commons’s open-access release.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan.
- Ships in 5–8 business days; satisfaction guaranteed.
