The Tree in the Text

A bare tree drawn in brown ink grows up through the bottom of a page of French prose.

Work: Collection of short alchemical tracts, stated to have been written by Lascaris (Wellcome MS 3175)
Artist / creator: Unknown hand ("stated to have been written by Lascaris")
Origin & date: 1702; French and Latin
Held by: Wellcome Collection, London (MS 3175)

Format

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$24.00

The story

A bare tree drawn in thin brown ink grows up from the bottom of the page into a block of French prose, its branches reaching into the lines of writing. The roots spread out at the foot like a hand. The Wellcome catalogues this as folio 37 of MS 3175, a collection of short alchemical tracts in French and Latin dated 1702 and stated to have been written by Lascaris. A note in a nineteenth-century hand on the first flyleaf calls it "Manuscript par Lascaris philosophe-hermétique." The tree was the alchemists' picture of metals growing in the earth. Here it grows out of the words, a single drawing in a long stretch of text.

About this reproduction

Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wellcome Collection, London (MS 3175)’s open-access release.
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
Color-managed to the source scan.
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Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London, licensed CC BY 4.0.

In situ