The Alchemical Cabinet
The Arms of the Art
The Great Work opens with a coat of arms.
- Work
- from Splendor Solis
- Plate
- The Arms of the Art
- Maker
- Attributed to Salomon Trismosin
- Date
- c. 1582
- Source
- British Library, Harley MS 3469 · 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
The first plate of Splendor Solis presents a coat of arms: a shield bearing a golden vessel, held up as if the Great Work were a noble house with its own heraldry. The manuscript, attributed to the legendary Salomon Trismosin, survives in jewel-bright miniatures set within elaborate Renaissance borders — flowers, grotesques, and gold laid on like a book of hours. Made around 1582, it is among the most beautiful alchemical manuscripts ever produced, its images prized as much for their painting as their doctrine. Here the sequence opens not with a furnace but with a claim of nobility: this art, the plate says, has a lineage.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Arms of the Art 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 Splendor Solis (1582), held by British Library, Harley MS 3469 · 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.
From the same hand
