Frankfurt, 1550 (this selection also draws on a 1610 Basel reprint)
Immersion in the Bath
King and queen, now unclothed, sit together in a hexagonal stone bath, still separate but sharing one water.
- Work
- Rosarium Philosophorum
- Artist / creator
- Unknown (anonymous woodcut artist)
- Origin & date
- 1550, Frankfurt (De Alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum)
- Held by
- Wellcome Collection, London
Format
The full-resolution color-managed file — yours to print, study, and keep.
Size
Sized to protect print quality — this scan’s resolution supports sizes up to 12x16 cleanly.
$24.00
The story
The same royal pair, now nude, sit in a fountain-shaped stone bath, a dove hovering above with a sprig held between their hands; the margin labels the page Speculum, "mirror." Alchemists treated undressing and shared bathing as the necessary step before conjunction: the two principles first had to be stripped of their outward, worked forms and returned to a common, unformed state — dissolved, in the technical sense — before they could be recombined. The bath’s water echoes the fountain’s mercurial water from the opening plate, signaling that this dissolving happens in the same solvent the whole work began with. Their still-separate postures, hands just meeting at center, mark this as preparation rather than union — the picture immediately before conjunction, and a rare surviving page from this exact 1550 print run.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wellcome Collection, London’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.
Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London, licensed CC BY 4.0.
In situ
See it framed
Immersion in the Bath composited into real, photographed rooms — choose the room and the frame, see exactly what arrives.
Shown at 12x16" — the largest size this piece’s scan holds full clarity at.
