The Alchemical Cabinet
The Planetary Flasks
The stages of the Work, sealed inside enchanted spheres.
- Work
- from Splendor Solis
- Plate
- The Planetary Flasks
- Maker
- Attributed to Salomon Trismosin
- Date
- c. 1582
- Source
- British Library, Harley MS 3469 · scan: Wikimedia Commons
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 round glass flask holds a small scene beneath its ruling planet — one of a sequence Splendor Solis devotes to these vessels, turning the stages of the Great Work into a set of illuminated globes, worlds within glass. Painted around 1582, they are miniature paintings in the fullest sense: a bathing scene, a garden, a night sky, each sealed inside its flask like a reliquary. The conceit is the manuscript's genius — the laboratory apparatus reimagined as a series of enchanted spheres, doctrine dissolved into pure image, the science of the furnace turned into a jeweller's window.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
The Planetary Flasks 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.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
