The Celestial Figures
The Melothesia
The seven planets mapped onto the organs they ruled.
- Work
- from an astrological-medical treatise
- Maker
- Engraver unknown
- Date
- c. 1660
- 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
The melothesia sets the seven planets, not the twelve signs, over the human frame — Saturn at the spleen, the Moon at the brain, Venus at the loins — mapping the classical planets onto the organs they were thought to rule. This engraved figure belongs to the seventeenth century's astrological medicine, when a doctor read the body as an instrument tuned to the heavens. The word itself means 'limb-division.' We show it as a record of thought, not a working chart: a beautifully reasoned system, entirely of its period, that treated anatomy and astronomy as one continuous science. The wonder is in the confidence of it — everything connected to everything, drawn out in clean lines.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Melothesia 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 an astrological-medical treatise (1660), 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
