The First Key

A crowned king and queen meet in a landscape while a leaping wolf and a bent old man work fire beside them.

Work: The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine, in Musaeum Hermeticum (1678 edition, Frankfurt)
Artist / creator: Matthaeus Merian the Elder, engraver (text attributed to Basilius Valentinus)
Origin & date: Late 17th century (1678 edition); text tradition traced to ca. 1599
Held by: Science History Institute, Philadelphia

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 crowned king with a scepter and a crowned queen holding a flowering branch stand facing each other in an open landscape with a walled town behind them. At the king’s feet a wolf leaps across a burning crucible; near the queen a gaunt, stooped old man labors over his own small fire with a scythe close by. Readers of the period took the king and queen as the two chief principles that had to be brought together to begin the Great Work, commonly glossed as gold and a purifying agent. The leaping wolf was a standing cipher for antimony ore, used to strip impurities from gold before any union could occur. Opening the sequence, this plate sets the king-and-queen pairing that recurs, transformed, through all eleven keys that follow.

About this reproduction

Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Science History Institute, Philadelphia’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.

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