Alchemical Emblem Books
Image-driven alchemy of the seventeenth century.
Emblem books pair engraved images with mottoes and verse. The alchemical examples are part of a shared visual genre: they borrow motifs from one another, but none is a copy of another.
Every relationship here is therefore marked as similar tradition, apart from the root works.
The Lineage
Listed in approximate chronological order. The label above each title states how it relates to the rest of the family.
Atalanta Fugiens
Michael Maier’s fifty emblems with musical fugues.
Mutus Liber
The “Wordless Book”: fifteen plates with almost no text.
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
Narrative rather than emblematic, but part of the same symbolic world.
The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
Johann Valentin Andreae
The Hermetical Triumph: or, The Victorious Philosophical Stone
Treatise and allegory in the same symbolic vocabulary.
Relationship Labels
Root text: The earliest surviving text the family is organised around.
Similar tradition: Belongs to the same current or genre; no textual dependence is claimed.