The Reading Hand
The Planetary Mounts of the Hand
How people once organised the hand into meaning.
- Work
- from a chiromantic treatise
- Maker
- Engraver unknown
- Date
- c. 1650
- Source
- Wellcome Collection, London
Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
A palm with the seven planetary 'mounts' raised and labelled — Venus at the thumb, the Moon opposite, Jupiter, Saturn, Sol, and Mercury along the fingers — the fleshy pads by which chiromancers sorted a hand's supposed character. This diagram distils the planetary side of palmistry into a single clean map. Like the whole tradition it belongs to the long history of reading the body as a sign-system, an idea that ran from antiquity into the nineteenth century. Shown as history and design: a picture of how people once organised the hand into meaning, precise and orderly, and none the less a belief for all its precision.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Planetary Mounts of the Hand printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate — from a chiromantic treatise (1650), held by Wellcome Collection, London. The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
