Circle, Square, Triangle, Circle

The story

The plate shows the tools of geometric construction — compass, straightedge, a sequence of drawn figures — converting a circle into a square, the square into a triangle, and the triangle back into a circle. Its motto promises that whoever "makes of the male and female a circle, thence a square, thence a triangle, and a circle again" will possess the Philosophers’ Stone. Maier was drawing on the ancient problem of squaring the circle — constructing a square equal in area to a circle using only compass and straightedge — and mapping it onto the alchemical marriage of opposites, treating an unsolved geometric puzzle as a working metaphor for an unsolved chemical one. The image nonetheless keeps the geometry front and center: a robed adept traces the figures directly against a bare brick wall, the nested circle, triangle, and square rendered as literal, measurable shapes rather than as background ornament — a reminder that Maier’s alchemy leaned as heavily on number and proportion as on furnace and flask.