Atalanta Fugiens: the Alchemical Book to Look at and to Sing

Few books in the history of alchemy were conceived with the ambition of the Atalanta fugiens. Published at Oppenheim in 1617 by the German physician Michael Maier, the volume presents fifty emblems, each combining an engraving, a motto, a Latin epigram, a prose discourse and a short musical composition for three voices. The reader was invited to look, read, meditate and even sing, in an experience that engaged sight, hearing and intellect together.

Michael Maier, physician at the court of Prague

Born in 1568 in Holstein, Maier studied medicine and philosophy and was for a time in the service of Emperor Rudolf II, the ruler who had made Prague a centre of alchemists, astrologers and collectors. After the emperor's death in 1612, he travelled in England and Germany, publishing within a few years an impressive series of Latin works. He also wrote in defence of the Rosicrucians, the mysterious movement that was arousing debate all over Europe in those very years.

The Atalanta fugiens was printed by Hieronymus Galler on behalf of the publisher and engraver Johann Theodor de Bry, whose workshop was among the most refined of the time. The copper engravings are generally attributed to Matthäus Merian, then a young collaborator of de Bry and later famous for his views of cities. Some copies bear the date 1618, a sign that the book was reissued with a new title page.

The myth of the race

The title recalls a story told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. The maiden Atalanta, extremely swift, challenged her suitors to a race; Hippomenes defeated her by dropping three golden apples, which she stopped to pick up. Maier read the myth in alchemical terms: Atalanta represented the volatile substance that flees, Hippomenes the fixed one that pursues it, and the apple the element that slows the flight and allows union.

The myth also shapes the music. Each emblem is accompanied by a fugue in which the first voice, called Atalanta fugiens, is pursued by the second, Hippomenes sequens, while the third, Pomum morans, proceeds slowly on a repeated melody. It is one of the rare cases in which musical form translates so directly a philosophical idea and a mythological tale.

The most famous emblems

Many images have become classics. The first emblem shows a figure of the wind with a child in its belly, illustrating a sentence of the Emerald Tablet: «the wind carried it in its belly». The second depicts the Earth as a nurse giving suck. Other emblems present a man drawing circles and squares with a compass, a reclining hermaphrodite, a dragon biting its own tail, a king who devours his son and gives him back.

Each image is inspired by a saying from alchemical literature, and the prose discourse that follows explains its meaning with quotations from ancient and medieval authors. Maier thus wished to show that alchemical wisdom was hidden in Greek and Egyptian myths, a theme he also developed in other works, such as the Arcana arcanissima.

Rediscovered in the twentieth century by art historians and musicologists, the Atalanta fugiens has been reproduced, studied and even performed many times. It remains one of the summits of the Baroque illustrated book and a precious testimony to an age in which science, art and myth were not yet divided by rigid boundaries. Leafing through it still means accepting Maier's invitation to join eye, ear and mind.