The Emblem Shelf
The Emerald Tablet
The words given a body, and the tradition its founding image.
- Work
- from the Musaeum Hermeticum
- Maker
- Engraved by Matthäus Merian
- Date
- c. 1625
- Source
- Musaeum Hermeticum, Frankfurt · scan: Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
A bearded figure holds out a tablet inscribed with the terse lines of the Tabula Smaragdina, the 'Emerald Tablet' — 'as above, so below' — the most quoted text in all of alchemy, and here given a face and a frame. This engraving, in the manner of the plates Matthäus Merian made for the Musaeum Hermeticum of the 1620s, turns the legendary tablet of Hermes Trismegistus into a scene: the sage presenting the doctrine as if handing over a stone. The Emerald Tablet is a few dozen cryptic sentences, endlessly copied and glossed. To picture it at all was audacious. The plate gives the words a body, and the tradition its founding image.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Emerald Tablet 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 the Musaeum Hermeticum (1625), held by Musaeum Hermeticum, Frankfurt · scan: Wikimedia Commons. 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.
