The Great Still

A tall double-walled vessel with a funnel feeding it and a tap at its foot, drawn across a full page.

Work: Ymage de Vie, traictant des secrez des philosophes sur la fleur d'alkemie (Wellcome MS 446)
Artist / creator: Unknown French scribes; text attributed to Raymond Lull
Origin & date: France, 15th century; French and Latin
Held by: Wellcome Collection, London (MS 446)

Format

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Size

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$24.00

The story

A tall vessel with a double wall fills the page: a narrower inner pot set into a wider outer one, a funnel on a pipe feeding the space between them, and at the foot a pipe running out to a small tap with a spout shaped like an animal head. It is drawn in brown ink and grey shading with no text at all. This is one of the full-page drawings of furnaces and apparatus that the Wellcome records in its fifteenth-century Ymage de Vie, a manuscript of processes in French and Latin credited to Raymond Lull. The double wall is a water jacket, and the tap lets the cooling water out. The animal-head spout is the scribe's one indulgence.

About this reproduction

Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wellcome Collection, London (MS 446)’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