Artist · 11 prints
Thesaurus Thesaurorum Prints
About the Thesaurus Thesaurorum
The Thesaurus Thesaurorum ("Treasure of Treasures") is an illustrated alchemical manuscript held by the Wellcome Collection in London (MS.4775). It is written in Latin, with a few additions in German verse, and is catalogued as dating from about 1725. Its full title, Thesaurus thesaurorum et secretum secretissimum, presents it as a true process for making the Philosophers' Stone. No author is named.
The 123-page folio volume is filled with symbolic watercolour drawings and pictures of alchemical apparatus such as furnaces, flasks and distilling vessels. Typical pages set an emblem above a piece of equipment: Saturn facing a three-headed dragon over a furnace, a lion shot by a man whose blood feeds a rose plant, or Mercury as a winged woman entering a bath. A later owner, Michelangelo Guatani of Bologna, recorded buying the manuscript in March 1874.
Thesaurus Thesaurorum prints: reproductions of the watercolour illustrations from the Thesaurus Thesaurorum, an alchemical manuscript of about 1725. The collection includes An Enthroned King Receiving Tribute beneath a Radiant Sun, A Woman Seated on a Lion beneath Sun and Moon, A Rainbow over Dragon and Serpent, above Two Alembics and A Stag-Drawn Chariot in the Clouds above a Heated Alembic (all 1725).
This selection follows the manuscript's pattern of a symbolic scene above laboratory equipment: suns and moons, kings and lions, birds, dragons and serpents set over flasks, alembics and furnaces.
The clear, colourful plates suit studies and libraries, and several hung together make a strong series on a long wall. All prints are museum-quality reproductions, available unframed or framed with acrylic glazing, with free shipping and import duties covered.
