From the Rosarium to the Mutus Liber: Alchemical Iconography in Print

When alchemy passed from manuscript to print, its images had to change technique. Hand-painted miniatures gave way first to woodcuts, carved in wood, and then to copper engravings, finer and more detailed. Between 1550 and the end of the seventeenth century a true alchemical iconographic repertoire was thus born, circulating from one book to another and from one city to another, often reusing the same plates. Four works mark its main stages.

The Rosarium philosophorum

In 1550 the Rosarium philosophorum appeared in Frankfurt, in the collection entitled De alchimia opuscula, accompanied by a series of twenty woodcuts. The images follow a precise story: a king and a queen meet, unite in a bath, die in a tomb, are purified by a dew falling from the sky and are finally reborn as a single being with two heads. The figures are simple, almost naive, but of great symbolic power.

These woodcuts derived from older manuscript models and were in turn copied countless times. In the twentieth century they attracted the attention of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who commented on them in an essay devoted to transference, helping to make them famous outside the world of historians of alchemy as well. Today the Rosarium series is known in many variants, printed and handwritten, which make it possible to follow the migration of an image across two centuries.

The Twelve Keys and the Musaeum hermeticum

Between 1599 and the early years of the seventeenth century the German publisher Johann Thölde issued a series of writings attributed to Basil Valentine, a Benedictine monk for whom there is no historical evidence whatsoever. Among them were the Twelve Keys, twelve allegorical images, carefully engraved in later editions, showing kings, wolves, dragons, birds and planetary figures. Many scholars think that Thölde himself was the author, or at least the compiler, of these texts.

In Frankfurt the publisher Lucas Jennis specialised precisely in illustrated alchemical books. In 1625 he published the Musaeum hermeticum, an anthology of treatises that was enlarged in the famous edition of 1678. Jennis was skilled at reusing his own plates: in Daniel Stolcius's Viridarium chymicum, published in 1624, he gathered more than a hundred engravings that had already appeared in other volumes, accompanying them with short epigrams.

The Mutus liber, the silent book

The most enigmatic work came in 1677 from La Rochelle. The Mutus liber, that is, the silent book, consists of fifteen engraved plates almost without words, apart from the title and a few biblical quotations. The author signs himself with the pseudonym Altus, and his identity remains uncertain. The images show a couple working together in a laboratory, gathering dew, distilling and heating, under the gaze of celestial figures.

The implicit message was clear: the alchemical work could not be explained in words, only contemplated. In 1702 the Genevan physician Jean-Jacques Manget included the plates in his great Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, ensuring their European circulation. Even today the Mutus liber is one of the most reproduced books of the Hermetic tradition.

From the Rosarium to the Mutus liber, alchemical iconography in print shows a clear evolution: from the simple figures of the first woodcuts to the refined compositions of Baroque copperplate. But the principle remained the same, namely to entrust to the image what the text could not or would not say openly. This is why, even today, these books are studied as much in libraries of the history of science as in art museums.