Splendor Solis, the twenty-two miniatures of the alchemical sun

Among alchemical manuscripts, none is more famous for its beauty than the Splendor Solis, the 'splendour of the sun'. It is a sixteenth-century German treatise accompanied by twenty-two large miniatures, which tell in images the transformation of matter and its rebirth. The best-known copy, dated 1582, is at the British Library in London and is regarded as one of the high points of European alchemical art.

Copies and dating

The oldest known copy is kept in Berlin, at the Kupferstichkabinett, and is dated to the early 1530s. The London copy, shelfmark Harley 3469, is later but of exceptional quality, with borders decorated in Renaissance style, full of flowers, birds and scenes of daily life. Other copies, manuscript and printed, are scattered among various European libraries.

The text was first printed in 1598 in the alchemical collection Aureum vellus, the 'golden fleece', published at Rorschach in Switzerland. This edition contributed greatly to its spread, although prints could not reproduce the richness of the miniatures, which remained the privilege of the few owners of the manuscripts. In later centuries the treatise was also translated into French and English.

Salomon Trismosin, a legendary figure

The treatise is attributed to Salomon Trismosin, presented by tradition as a travelling alchemist and, according to some late sources, even as the teacher of Paracelsus. There are, however, no documents proving his historical existence, and many scholars consider him a legendary figure or a pseudonym, created to lend authority to a text that circulated without a certain author.

The textual content draws partly on earlier alchemical sources, medieval and Arabic, reworked in German. It is an example of the spread of vernacular alchemy in the Renaissance, when texts left monasteries and universities to reach a wider public of physicians, craftsmen, princes and collectors eager to own rare works.

The twenty-two images

The miniatures follow a precise order. They open with a solar coat of arms, then come a philosopher with a flask, a drowning king and a renewed king, a winged hermaphrodite, a dismembered man, a golden tree. A series of seven images shows flasks containing animals and figures, each surmounted by a planetary chariot. The last depict children at play, women washing linen and finally the sun shining over the landscape.

In the interpretive tradition these images represent the stages of the alchemical work, from dissolution to rebirth. The king who dies and is reborn, the union of opposites and the final sun are symbols common to alchemical iconography, here gathered into a sequence of extraordinary visual coherence, in which each plate seems to prepare the next. The scenes of daily life in the borders are a reminder that the work was also conceived as a luxury object.

The Splendor Solis is at once a scientific, religious and artistic work, as the alchemy of its time was. Its mystery lies not in the writing, which can be read without difficulty, but in the symbols: a visual language that every age, from Renaissance collectors to twentieth-century psychologists, has tried to translate in its own way.