Horsing around: Framing Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the "Splendor

Solis"
Author(s): Sandy Feinstein
Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal , Fall, 2006, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 673-
699
Published by: Sixteenth Century Journal

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20477987

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal
XXXVII/3 (2006)

Horsing Around: Framing Alchemy in the

Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis
Sandy Feinstein
Pennsylvania State University, Berks

Through illustrations notonously difficult to interpret, even when considered in con

junction with the chapters they presumably depict, the sixteenth-century manuscnrpt
Splendor Solis exemplifies the highly symbolical approach to representing alchemical
processes. The central images of the pictures are typically charactenrzed by the fantas
tic: mythic animals, beheading, and allusions to the classical gods. Yet, among all the
wondrous creatures and allegorical scenes, one very familiar, even ordinary animal
regularly appears in the illustrations of this particular manuscnrpt-the horse. Its very
ubiquity offers insight into the larger picture of alchemy: some of the uses of the
animal are unique to alchemy; others reflect the daily life or ordinanrness of the alche
mist's culture. This article examines those illustrations in which horses appear and
discusses how their depiction contnrbutes to understanding the alchemical processes
represented in the visual and verbal texts of the manuscript.

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPT SPLENDOR SOLIs is an alchemical work

that includes twenty-two painted miniatures (325x218mm), some with detailed
ornamental borders or pictorial frames.1 The manuscript, from Harley 3469, dated
1582 in two of the paintings, appears at a time when alchemical images and
symbols proliferated in numerous forms. Specifically, symbolic pictorial and
language codes constituted "the great work" of alchemy and its mysteries.2 The
Splendor Solis, in both words and images, exemplifies the highly symbolical
approach to representing alchemy and its processes. The stages of the alchemical
processes are indicated by conventional allegorical images and allusions intended to
reinforce the mystery of the secret of secrets while also seeming to provide access
into it. The pictures themselves are notoriously difficult to interpret, even when
considered in conjunction with the chapters they presumably depict. The central
images of the pictures are typically characterized by the fantastic: mythic animals
such as dragons, graphic scenes of beheading, and allusions to the panoply of
classical gods. Yet, among all the wondrous creatures and allegorical scenes, one

Solomon [sic] Trismosin, Splendor Solis, ed.]. K. [Julius Kohn] (London: Kegan Paul, 1920). The
British Library has graciously given permission for the reproduction of the illustrations from MS Harley
3469, figures 3-13. Other editions of the text are also cited. For points of comparison, for example, I
use the text included in the sixteenth-century German compilation Aureum Vellus (Rorschach, 1589),
held by the Library of Congress. In addition, I refer to the most recent translation, Salomon Trismosin,
Splendor Solis, trans. Joscelyn Godwin, introduction and commentary by Adam McLean (Grand Rapids:
Phanes, 1991). Quotations from Splendor Solis generally retain original spelling; however, many nouns
that have initial uppercase letters in the source document are lowercased to conform to modern usage.
2Marco Beretta, "The Role of Symbolism from Alchemy to Chemistry," Non-Verbal Communi
cation in Science Prior to 1900, ed. Renato G. Mazzolini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993), 279-319, dis
cusses alchemical symbols and their popularity at this time.

673

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674 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVIL/3 (2006)

very familiar, even ordinary animal regularly appears in the illustrations of this
particular manuscript-the horse. Although horses are not traditionally identified
with alchemy, they appear in a number of the illustrations and ornamental frames
of this sixteenth-century manuscript. Their very ubiquity offers insight into the
larger picture of alchemy-some of the uses of the animal are unique to alchemy,
others reflect the daily life or ordinariness of the alchemist's culture. This article
examines those illustrations in which horses appear and discusses how their
depiction contributes to understanding the alchemical processes represented in the
visual and verbal texts of the manuscript.
This manuscript has elicited little interest from scholars. To my knowledge,
only Kathleen Perry Long has looked seriously at the work; her interest is with
how alchemical images, verbal and visual, "often combined with images of mon
strosity, offer a window into social, religious, political, and epistemological issues
of the day," very specifically the sexual issues of the time.3 As to the role of horses
in alchemy, there has been little more than a note suggesting a connection. Alan
Smith, responding to the discovery of a number of horse skulls on the Isle of Man
argues that the skulls were used for alchemical purposes, citing the seventeenth
century painter David Teniers the Younger to make his point, while remarking,
"there is a subject here to be pursued."4
Pursuing this subject of the horse in alchemy reveals its curiously marginal
place in alchemical manuscripts and illustrations. Its marginality in alchemy might
be said to exist from the fourteenth century and Chaucer's use of the animal in the
Canterbury Tales, specifically in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, to at least as late as the
seventeenth century and Teniers the Younger, the painter Smith uses as his
authority. The appearance of the horse in alchemical literature, whether literary or
pictorial, is interesting for what it says about horses within medieval and early
modern culture as well as its commentary on alchemy, revealing, as it does, actual
processes together with symbolic representations of those processes.
Teniers's paintings of alchemists, made a century after the illustrations from
the Splendor Solis upon which this paper primarily focuses, incorporate at least part
of a horse, its skull. This easily recognizable image appears at the periphery of the
pictures. In The Alchemist (figure 1), mid- to late-1640s, the horse skull appears in
the lower right-hand corner leaning against an alchemical tripod furnace twice its
size, just to the right of a number of books, two opened, one large tome on the
table almost mirroring the smaller one being held by the human figure, the alche
mist. The horse head is not part of the alchemical production that appears to be

3Kathleen Perry Long, "Salomon Trismosin and Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement: The Sexual Pol
itics of Alchemy in Early Modern France," L'Esprit Cr?ateur 35, no. 2 (1995): 10. Long considers only
the 1612 French translation. See also Catherine Henze, "The Jacobean Stage as Limbeck," Cauda Pavo
nis: Studies in Hermeticism 20, no. 2 (2001): 8?19, for an altogether different use of the manuscript.
4Alan Smith, "Horse Skulls and Alchemists," Folklore 101, no. 1 (1990): 122. See also Yvonne
Hayhurst, "A Recent Find of a Horse Skull in a House at Ballaugh, Isle of Man," Folklore 100, no. 1
(1989): 107.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 675

T? l --2
%6

Figure 1. David Teniers the Younger, Thle Alchtemist, 71.2 x 50.7 cm.
Reprinted by permission of Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig,
Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen.

taking place in the background.5 Similarly, the image of a horse's skull may be
found in a later painting, about 1650, also called The Alchemist (figure 2), where it
appears in the upper right-hand corner hanging from a wall, above and slightly to
the right of the alchemist who faces away from it. The bone of the horse's rostrum
points to the open book held by the alchemist, who has turned from the volume
and the mixture he is stirring;6 facing toward the viewer, his eyes appear distracted
left toward the foreground vessel that appears to be a copper cucurbit. The horse
skulls in both these paintings appear outside the central action, as a small part of
something larger. Horses, as simultaneously part of the story and outside it, also

5Teniers's later painting Incantation Scene features a horse skull in roughly the same part of the
frame as Teniers's Tlte Alchemist from a decade earlier, an inclusion that reinforces the sense of magical,
if not alchemical, associations with the horse skull. For reproductions of these paintings, see Jane P.
Davidson, David Teniers the Younger (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979), 97, 103; plates 25, 31
6The horse is a prognathic mammal, meaning it has a long nose. On a living specimen, this part
of the animal has been called the nose or noseband. On a skull, it is known in mammals as the rostrum.
According to the OED, in the seventeenth century, the rostrum, from the Latin for beak, also referred
to the nose of the bellows as well as the "beak" of an alembic. There may be a connection here that
Teniers is exploring. There were still practicing alchemists during the seventeenth century when
Teniers painted; for example, the physician and alchemist Jean Baptista van Helmont (1577-1644),
who died about the time of the first of Teniers's paintings of alchemists.

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676 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

Figure 2. David Teniers the Younger, The Alchemist, 37.5 x 16.6 cm.
Reprinted by pennission of Mauritshuis, The Hague.

characterize the earlier illustrations from the Splendor Solis manuscript. They are
part of the rhetoric of alchemy.
In Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale Prologue, the horse introduces the rhetoric
of alchemy that must be decoded and that the yeoman says he will decode. Riding
into the midst of Chaucer's pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, the frothy horse
resembles his rider, the alchemist's yeoman-assistant.7 Contrary to the practice of
swom secrecy, this yeoman offers to reveal the alchemist's art, "in wordes fewe, /
Hoost, of his craft somwhat I wol vow shewe."8 And show he does through his

7 [The horse] "was al pomely grys" and "of foom al flekked as a pye." Geoffrey Chaucer, The
Canon's Yeoman's Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mif
flin, 1987), 8:559, 565. All quotations are from this edition and will be referenced by line number. All
translations are my own. As I have written elsewhere, the horse is a dapple gray that has so much sweat
it looks as black and white as a magpie. As the narrator draws attention to the hone's coloring, the host
draws attention to the yeoman's color when he asks, "Why artow so discoloured of thy face?" [Why is
your face so discolored?] (664). The fire responsible for the sweat of alchemists, and signified by the
foaming horse and rider, is responsible for the complexion of the yeoman, also signified by the horse.
See Sandy Feinstein, "Refiguring Alchemy in Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale" in Alchemization of the
Mind, ed. Zbigniew Bialas and Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (Munich: Peter Verlag, 2003), 11-21.
I have also examined the use of the horse in its more literal, material uses in Chaucer and Malory; Sandy
Feinstein, "The Reeve's Tale: About That Horse," Chaucer Review 26, no. 1 (1991): 99-106; and idem,
"Malory's Animals: A Matter of Fact," Fifteenth-Century Studies 12 (1987): 27-35.
8Chaucer, Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, 8:619.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 677

narrative of the practice that includes allusions to the horse as well as to the more
conventional symbolic animals associated with alchemy. In the Middle Ages, as in
the early modern period, the conventional iconography of alchemy consisted
largely of fabular and exotic creatures-phoenixes, peacocks, dragons with one or
more heads, as well as other triple-headed animals, including chickens and eagles,
among others.9 Horses, when they appear at all in alchemical texts, are typically
marginal figures lacking a single codified meaning or an explicitly symbolic func
tion. In medieval texts, such as Chaucer's, horses may complement character or
obliquely comment on alchemical practice itself. As in the Splendor Solis, the
appearance of the horse in the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale is not an isolated
occurrence. Toward the end of the poem, Chaucer returns to this animal, this time
as an analogy of futility, in the reference to the proverbially "bold" and "blynde"
horse
That blondreth forth and peril casteth noon.
He is as boold to renne agayn a stoon
As for to goon bisides in the weye. (1413-16)

[That blunders forth and doesn't consider danger.

He is as bold to run against a stone
as to bypass it on the way.]

In short, the horse in Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale frames the nar
rator's lesson in alchemy.
In the Splendor Solis horses are quite literally marginal. They do not appear in
the written text itself, nor in the central, symbolic illustrations. Of the seven illus
trations of fabulous animals in sealed flasks, the frames of six of them include
horses, but only one has a chariot pulled by horses. In the most recent edition,
Adam McLean writes about this border:

All the manuscript copies are elaborate and extremely well-executed ver
sions with fine ornamental bodies surrounding the basic symbols of the
work, and were obviously made by skilled artists rather than practicing
alchemists. The ornate pictorial representations of the various facets of the
planets which surround each of the seven flasks of illustrations 12-18,
with the chariots of the planets pulled by symbolic animals ... is obviously
based upon a famous series of woodcuts of planetary symbolism executed
by Hans Sebald Beham during the period 1530-40.10

9For recent discussions of these conventional metaphors, see, for example, Lyndy Abraham, A
Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gareth Roberts, The
Mirror of Alchemy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
10Adam McLean, "Introduction and Commentary," in Splendor Solis, trans. Joscelyn Godwin
(Grand Rapids: Phanes, 1991), 9. Despite McLean's claims, no more is known about the artists than
about the alchemists.

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678 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVII/3 (2006)

Among the twenty-two illustrations of the Splendor Solis, there are also horses in
three that are not based on Beham's astrological series (illustrations IV, VI, X) and
a fourth (XX) that includes a hobbyhorse.
In Beham's woodcut number 4, "The Sun," horses appear only in the sym
bolic representation of the chariot.11 In the alchemical illustration that appropriates
Beham's woodcut representing the mythological image of the sun (illustration
XV), the two chariot horses at the center top of the picture are joined by a larger
horse in the right-hand bottom part of the frame (figure 3). This larger horse faces
in the opposite direction of the chariot horses, its head touching the edge of the
picture and looking as if it might step beyond the frame. The horse is ridden by a
well-dressed rider, holding what looks like a bow. He could be an aristocratic
hunter or archer. The horse appears to be spirited, its head held high, its left fore
foot raised, as if in midprance or midtrot. Walter Liedtke has identified three con
ventional poses for commissioned equestrian portraits during the early modern
period, poses that recur in these alchemical illustrations: "standing still; a sedate
trot; or a more dashing 'air above the ground' (usually the levade)."'12 In illustration
XV, the pose of the sun's chariot horses are dramatically "air above the ground"
with only one pair of legs touching the niche of the vessel containing the three
headed signifying dragon; the forelegs of the pair are raised and literally in the
clouds (figure 3). Although the illustrations of the alchemical text would not be
considered equestrian portraiture, the use of horses resembles what Liedtke identi
fies as three dominant themes during the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centu
ries: imperial, Christian, and rulership.13
Pulling the Sun God's chariot, these horses serve as the mobilizing force for
the most important symbol of alchemy: the sun. The title of the work itself, Splen
dor Solis, literally means splendor of the sun; and, as glossed by the first modern
editor of this manuscript, "Splendor Solis stands both for Gold Splendour and Soul
Splendour, and intends to convey the secret of physical alchemy by the text, and
of spiritual alchemy by the allegorical pictures" (8). In this sense, according to con
ventional alchemy, the "sun is the mystic symbol for the soul, as the sun illumines
the world with life-giving light and energies, does the soul sustain the body with
life and thought" (97). The same editor explains "Sol, in alchemy, simply means
sulphur of the philosophers, and in common chemistry, gold" (96). The sun is
golden and, therefore, represents gold, the perfect metal; it is a symbolic association
more in keeping with alchemy than chemistry, common or otherwise. To reach

^This classical association is a commonplace and, therefore, not surprising in Beham's represen
tation of the sun. It is the uses to which alchemists put this association that is noteworthy here.
12Walter Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider (New York: Abaris, 1989), 90.
13Liedtke, Royal Horse and Rider, esp. 37-47, 64. For more users and uses of horses, see, for exam
ple, Harold B. Barclay, The Role of the Horse in Man's Culture (London: J.A. Allen, 1980); Joan Thirsk,
Horses in Early Modern England: For Service, for Pleasure, for Power (Reading: University of Reading Press,
1978); Karen L. Raber, '"Reasonable Creatures': William Cavendish and the Art of Dressage" in The
Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 42-66; and Anthony Dent, Horses in Shakespeare's England (London: J.A.
Allen, 1987).

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 679

the ideal signified by the sun, alchemy requires the soul's perfection, meaning a
striving toward God.
The chariot horses pulling the sun above the scene taking place below it rein
force this necessary hierarchy of alchemical values. Moreover, the mythic horses of
the sun counterpoint the apparently royal scene at the base of the frame with the
king or ruler seated on the far left and the white horse with its royal archer to the
right. The rest of the frame surrounding the flask of dragons also appears to be
royal: a castle at left, a joust overseen by a king midframe left, and various aristo
cratic entertainments to the right. Finally, the symbolic dragons appear to be a
reverse mirror image, in triplicate, of the chariot horse's gait. In this illustration, the
relationship among sun, dragon, society, rule, and alchemy is implicit, the inter
connections reinforced by the horses that frame the symbolic action and, therefore,
contribute an integral element in understanding the picture as a whole.14
The fourth illustration in the manuscript is the first in which horses appear; in
this representation of the animals, they might be seen as a literal as well as
inevitably-a metaphoric foundation of the process (figure 4). While specifically
complementing the Third Treatise, this illustration (IV) also represents the sun, but
in an image more characteristic of traditional alchemical iconography than of
classical myth, which appears at the margins: the sun is at top left, the moon at top
right; below the planets are the central figures, who stand on earth and fire,
signifying what is "needed," namely, "the end of this world," when "heaven and
earth should meet and come home. Meaning by heaven and earth the aforesaid
two operations" (25); these two operations are the creation of Mercury and the
ultimate goal, "a perfect philosopher's stone" (22). The editor J. K. identifies the
figures as a king and queen, not specifically as heaven and earth, despite the text's
direction. He neglects to mention the foundation upon which the image sits, the
horses and the classical scene that literally underpin the central image.15
In this part of the picture, horses again appear in the margins, this time at the
base as part of a war scene. In the small left-hand panel, naked riders joust from
horses in the levade position, the horses both rearing. The combatants are identi
fied in small, barely legible script at the top of the frame: Achilles and Hector. In
the central panel of the frame, about three times the length of the side panels, a
ruler, identified clearly as Alexander in block print below the feet of the figure, is
seated with a raised sword; at least five horses can be discerned to the right of his
throne. None of these horses is in any of the positions typical for royal portraiture:
two of the horses in the forefront appear to kneel, the one farther left kneels on its
front legs and turns its head toward Alexander, the opposite one kneels on all fours
and looks away from the royal scene. Three horses in the background are mostly

14In the Splendor Solis, J. K. also verbally describes the illustrations he includes. The pictures
reproduced, in black and white, are described by identifying the colors in the original British Library
manuscript.
15Such omissions characterize this edition as a whole. See, for example, the commentary on the
sixth picture and "other parable," Splendor Solis, ed.]. K., 45-46.

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680 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVII/3 (2006)

obscured; only their heads and necks are visible. The landscape in the central panel
shows tents in the left background and a river and castle beyond to the right; there
are also two illegible words in the right-hand corner of this panel.
These two panels in which horses appear juxtapose and conflate historical and
legendary events, real wars that are also mythical wars. They serve as a foundation
for the symbolic meeting of heaven and earth, which marks the end of the world
and the creation of a more perfect one-not Troy, or empire, but the ideal condi
tions required to reach the soul's perfection and its physical manifestation (the phi
losopher's stone) that reveal true alchemy. War is part of the past and the present;
it also signifies the combating, or reaction, of elements. In alchemical terms, sun
and moon must be controlled, subordinated, as suggested by the figures standing
on them. The horses in the illustration are also subordinate to rule, as their kneel
ing implies.16
Each illustration provides an allegorical image representing one stage of the
arcane process. Horses, where they appear, literally frame, and often metaphori
cally mirror or interpret, the stages of the alchemical process. For example, in the
sixth picture, illustrating "the other parable," horses appear at both corners of the
frame at the top of an archway that reveals another central allegorical image of
alchemy (figure 5). The horses at the top of the frame face outside the picture; only
the top half of their rearing bodies is visible; they have riders but no apparent reins.
At the bottom of the central image is a frieze in which the outlines of a number of
horses appear: at least five can be identified in the left panel; only one is clear in the
panel right of the circle that divides the two sides of the frieze. Neither horses nor
riders are apparently accoutered, no reins or saddles or other trappings are visible.
The frame in which the horses appear contributes to the impression of artificial
design, of art drawing attention to itself
Reinforcing this impression of artifice, four naked women, one bathing and
three seated, with two clothed attendants standing, are in the foreground. The head
of the bather blocks part of the frieze, making it difficult to see the bodies of the
horses. The borders on both sides are galleries or royal boxes as in a theater; in the
upper right box a crowned male figure looks out with two attendants; there are also
two figures below him as well as figures in the opposite box. The effect is to make
the central image appear as if on a stage, the frieze as decoration of that stage. In
this illustration, the horses are more than a part of the art of alchemy, they also spe
cifically reinforce one of the central metaphors that signify the process: namely, sex.
The "Other Parable," from the Third Treatise that explains the imagery, is
suggestive, introducing the sexual language of alchemy made more obvious by the
border.17 Describing the dominant image of the tree, the putative alchemist writes,

16Unique to this particular picture is a caption at the bottom of the central alchemical image and
above the classical pedestal: "Via Universalis particularibus. Inclusis." Such is the particular, universal
way of alchemy, which has meaning only to those who can decode the metaphors.
17The central image is of a tree with various birds flying away from it; a man on a ladder leans
into the tree, presumably picking its fruit, while looking down on two men who are fully clothed.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 681

"This tree gives us as well the fruit of health, it makes warm what is cold, and what
is cold it makes warm, what is dry it makes moist, and makes moist what is dry, and
softens the hard, and hardens the soft, and is the end of the whole art" (28). In
medieval and early modern iconography, horses, especially when unreined, repre
sent lust.18 The images framing the allegorical central image of these alchemical
pictures provide a kind of interpretive aid on the central image whose sexual asso
ciations are veiled at best.
The unreined horses juxtaposed to naked women suggest the significance of
sexuality necessary for finding "the very finest pearls" and "the very purest gold"
(28). Initiates would be expected to know these central metaphors of alchemy:
sowing/seeding, marriage, sexual intercourse, dismemberment/death, and repro
duction. The fourth illustration, showing what is necessary at the end of the world,
alludes to the metaphor of death, the destruction that is necessary to creation (fig
ure 4). This sixth illustration with its border of horses and naked women illumi
nates the same treatise by alluding to another requisite condition for successful
alchemy: sexual congruence. In short, the allegorical meaning would be still more
obscure, were it not for the frame in which horses again offer a gloss on the key
alchemical image (compare figures 4 and 5).
Horses, then, reinforce the conventional metaphors of alchemy, while also
providing symbolic commentary on them. By serving two seemingly contradictory
purposes, horses suggest the need for balance while also, perhaps, embodying the
paradoxes of this mystical natural philosophy. Although identified symbolically
with lust, they may also be literal horses, the animals used for both work and war.
In alchemy, striking such a balance is imperative for success.
Another metaphor of alchemy, death, might seem to be absolute. But this step
of the process is not the final one; for, without death, there can be no resurrection,
the final stage that signifies success. Death, specifically by dismemberment, alludes
to process itself: what must be deconstructed to be constructed, unmade to be
made, undone to be done. The representation of horses contributes to the allegory
of death and resurrection, specifically the balance necessary to achieve the latter.
Horses serve this balancing function in the alchemical allegory of death and
dismemberment in the sixth parable appearing in the tenth illustration (figure 6).
The central image represents a man holding a head in one hand and a sword point
ing down at a dismembered corpse in the other. The horses appear in a frame at
the base of this central image. On the left, there are four horses apparently reined.

18For a review of the characteristic way horses were portrayed in literature and art of the Middle
Ages, see V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984),
236-47. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 39-40, also
comments on the medieval representations of sexuality as represented by "animal 'vignettes.'" As he
explains, "What we are now in the habit of seeing as unconscious 'sexual' associations are, in fact, quite
conscious.... It was because sex was marginalized in medieval experience that it so often became an
image on the edge." The point he makes about medieval attitudes to sexuality and its representation is
also true for this sixteenth-century manuscript that appropriates so many medieval alchemical texts and
symbols. As an early reader of this manuscript remarked, the sexual association is a long-standing one,
going back to Plato's Phaedrus.

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682 Sixteenth CentuiryjJournal XXXVIJ/3 (2006)

They are lying down with their heads up. The man, who wears a crown, holds the
reins in one hand and a whip in the other. In the left-hand panel of the frame at
the base is a reined horse behind a naked, seemingly winged female with a trident.
Two raised arms of two other naked figures also appear, though the features of all
are obscured. In the foreground is a rearing horse next to what looks like a boat's
figurehead shaped as a horse's head, behind which is another naked figure.
Obscured, and just behind the horses but to the left of the trident, is what seems to
be a person with a banner in the shape of a scythe.19 The partner parable to this
picture relates a vision whose allegorical meaning makes clear that death is a pre
requisite to growth: "'I have killed thee, that thou mayest receive a superabundant
life, but thy head I will carefully hide, that the worldly wantons may not find thee,
and destroy the earth, and the body I will bury, that it may putrefy, and grow and
bear innumerable fruit"' (33). The one who kills is not "villainous," and the alle
gorical scene is intended as quite other than ghastly, for the image represents death
as necessary to life in general and alchemy in particular; the one who kills to bring
forth life acts as a god or alchemist.
The border at the base supporting the central image and the text represent par
allel scenes of power, control, and transcendence. To the left, the horses are stilled,
threatened by a whip; at right, horses surround the central image of the winged fig
ure, seemingly transporting her. The gendered character of the foundation repre
sents balance as well: the image of control on the left is male, and the image of
transcendence on the right is female.
The next series of pictures in which horses appear all have a glass flask at their
center. These also reinforce the conventional metaphors of alchemy. I began by
discussing one of these illustrations, XV, complementing the fourth treatise, in
which the Sun God's chariot is pulled by horses and the vessel is filled by a three
headed dragon (figure 3). In this group of pictures, the first illustration (XII), sig
nifying the "Fourth Treatise, Firstly," has a team of dragons pulling the chariot of
the planet (figure 7). Yet, the domestic horses, not the mythic creatures, indicate
two other key alchemical metaphors: sowing and reproduction.
This twelfth illustration from the fourth treatise represents various estates and
their associated production, including sowing a field, tanning, doing business, and
engaging in charity. The scene in which horses appear is right of the niche holding
the symbolic flask in which a naked child appears to be feeding a dragon emerging
from a shell, a double image of reproduction and nurture both human and super
natural. Outside the flask, the scene in which the horses figure is archetypically
rural. Used to plow and plant, the horses represent another key metaphor of
alchemy: sowing and growth.
Here, horses demonstrate an early stage of the necessary alchemical pro
cesses-preparing the ground and seeding it. This picture juxtaposes the symbolic
central image of the flask against the daily activity of a farm that is clearly part of a

^Splendor Solis, ed. J. K., 50, describes the appearance of the man as "ferocious, villainous" and
the scene as "ghastly," descriptions at odds with the alchemical text.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 683

larger community that implicitly includes the alchemist. Various scenes of compar
atively ordinary life appear on all sides of the glass flask containing a dragon and
child. To the left of the container, people enter from the city gates following a
funeral procession and someone gives alms to a one-legged man while another
extends an alms-bowl from his knees. At the bottom of the frame, a man in a barrel
stomps animal skins while to his right another man scrapes a hide stretched on a
board, his legs and feet bare;20 an old man fills a leaking cask with water from a
well touching the barrel in which one man stands; and a business exchange takes
place in the left-hand corner, an older man leaning on a staff hands money to a man
who appears to be a courtier. Across the river (that is bisected by the central image
of the flask in its niche), a pig is being lured by a kneeling woman, and a man seems
to grab another hog, perhaps to butcher it; behind the man is a trough or wagon
in which the outline of a pig appears and to the right of which is a stunted tree.
Horses appear in this agrarian scene.
Above the tree a man plows a field with four horses, while another encourages
the team with what appears to be a whip; J. K. identifies the color of the horses,
three as brown, one as white.21 The complementary text identifies the necessity of
the stone undergoing seven processes and what is required, in this case, "a heat
powerful enough to soften and melt these parts of the earth that have become
thick, hard, and baked" (34). As usual, the connection between text and illustra
tion may seem tenuous. The obvious symbol is the naked child, at the center of the
illustration, who holds a bellows in his right hand and a small flask in his left while
attending to a small dragon, another heat producer. Less obvious in significance but
still relevant are the plow horses. The process alluded to, then, involves both the
child and the horses: the heat may be signified, if not generated, by the bellows
bearing child in the flask; but the intention of applying heat, to soften and melt the
hard earth, may be represented by the plow and the horses that more customarily
effect the necessary state for fruitful sowing.
Making connections is everything to the reader of signs, which is what
alchemy requires. In alchemy, there are no images without purpose. For example,
recall the almsgiver in the scene to the left of the central flask. This small action
could conceivably allude to the Parable of the Talents, for alchemists saw the Bible
as offering a code from which to garner clues and recipes that would lead them to
their goal, the philosopher's stone itself. The Parable of the Talents (Matt. 15:14
30) is a key text, for it concerns the multiplication of a gift and the best use of that
gift. Burying one's gift is not the answer. On the other side of the flask, the plow
pulled by the horses will keep anything from being buried long.
In the thirteenth picture, illuminating the "Fourth Treatise, Secondly," there
is only one clearly discernible horse, which appears roughly in the same place as the

20Splendor Solis, 53; J. K. identifies the contents of the barrel as animal skins and the other action
as "shaving animal skins," both comparatively difficult to discern in the reproductions.
2unremarked are two smaller horses higher up the hill near a gallows that is, however, duly
mentioned.

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684 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVII/3 (2006)

plow horses of the preceding one: to the right of the niche containing the central
and more conventional image of alchemy, three seemingly entangled birds, the
black on the bottom, the red above the black, and the white above both (figure
8).22 The birds look to be in motion, perhaps circular or cyclical, suggesting the
possibility of one bird in three color stages. The three colors themselves reflect the
words of the text, "that heat turns every black thing white, and every white thing
red" (35), which are physical changes necessary to the alchemical process. The
horse may reinforce one of these stages, the black to white, perhaps even signifying
the completion of one stage. The white of the horse is on a line with the white of
the white bird to its left. Both horse and rider to the right of that symbolic mani
festation of the process face away from all the action taking place, from the crown
ing of a king catercorner on the other side of the niche to various discussions in the
foreground. The exchanges seem to involve courtiers in the right-hand bottom
corner and, toward the center, possibly merchants, or even students and teachers,
with their books. The first stage would seem to be nearly at an end, each action
suspended: the king about to be crowned, the horse and its shadowy double about
to leave the scene, the white bird facing down about to tumble over to the bottom
in the black bird's place. Although the action of the picture is busy, it is compart
mentalized, ordered, and more apparently process-oriented than what follows.
Order seems to give way in the next illustration, just as the presence of the
horse multiplies exponentially. As with their presence in the preceding pictures,
horses in the fourteenth picture complement or mirror a key metaphor in alchemy
(figure 9). In this illustration, however, they do something else as well: they suggest
the indeterminacy of metaphoric language. Horses appear on both sides and at the
bottom of the central symbolic image-another crowned flask in a niche that this
time contains a crowned three-headed chicken or rooster. At the top is one of
Beham's astrological chariots, this one of Mars, whose presence informs the action
below: surrounding the flask are scenes of war, and horses appear in many of these
depictions. On the left, a building appears to be burning, two tiny human figures
and a bull run away from it; an armed warrior, sword on high, rides a leaping horse
between the cow and two other fleeing people. A hill separates the next scene in
which a man seems about to behead or beat another, below which, at the bottom
of the ornamental border, are numerous knights on caparisoned horses. Six are
distinguishable. The riders carry lances and move in to attack infantry with spears.
They are also being attacked from behind. One horse in the foreground is without
a rider but reined; a commoner with a spear reaches with one hand toward the
horse's neck and with the other seems to be about to pierce its forelock or has just
withdrawn the spear from the now fallen rider prostrate at its side. On the right of
the central image of the flask are three other horses, reined and ridden by armed

22There is another, much smaller, darker mounted horse in the picture, approximately a third the
size of the horse focused on here; it is positioned about an inch and a half above and faces the same
direction, but moves toward a field, where it appears to follow hunting dogs or deer, or perhaps to herd
some other animal toward a tree bordering the right outer frame of the picture.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 685

knights carrying spears. Between them appear cattle that the knights could be
driving.
As in the fourth illustration, this one representing the "The Fourth Treatise,
Thirdly," the scene is war.23 Here the knights and horses are armed, and the con
test is not explicitly mythical or historical. There are bodies on the ground closest
to the bottom border. This is a scene of carnage, of anonymous death. No one is
identified. The text to this illustration refers to "the heat," which causes "earthly
things to be penetrated by a spiritual force" (35). Another source, the Turba, com
mands the reader to "spiritualize the bodies and make volatile that which is fixed."
In the alchemical process, the elements must be unstable for a reaction to take
place. This process is likened to war and the chaos it causes as revealed in the illus
trative border. Ultimately and ideally, though, the result will be the soul rising up
to God and perfection, to heaven. This war is neither singular nor cause specific;
instead, it represents a condition or state of being.24 The reined horses suggest
some measure of control, yet they, too, are potential victims of war, and, in this
picture, appear vastly outnumbered by the armed masses. Notably, the outcome is
uncertain, and that, of course, is as accurate a representation of alchemy as any.
The remaining pictures in which horses appear place them in the background,
even less prominently than in the earlier pictures. Horses themselves appear far to
the right and, increasingly, in the background in two illustrations toward the end
of the manuscript (XVI and XVII). In illustration XVI, that of the "Fourth
Treatise, Fourthly," the pervading spirit is love (figure 10). The chariot, drawn by
sparrows, belongs to Venus. While Venus is transported by sparrow power,
however, her front wheel has the image of a horse in its roundel and the larger
back wheel shows a pair of scales. The scene surrounding the central image, a
peacock in a crowned flask held by chains to the columns within the container's
niche, is festive, with a variety of couples paired off, a tnro of musicians, a table of
three with one drinking from a flask, and, in the background left, bathers.25 The
horse to the right of the niche holding the peacock is trotting or prancing toward
the woods at the edge of the picture. There are two riders, one sitting sidesaddle
likely a man and woman. The horse is reined. Here, the horse, as conveyance, is
simply one of the many signifiers of love in the picture. The correspondent text for
this picture concerns heat and how it works, "elevatingly" (36); it rises. This force,
in turn, "raises" "the spirits hidden in the earth." A "master of the art" is one who
"can bring to light a hidden thing" (36). Love could be the spirit to which these
lines refer. Illustration XVII extends this idea, reinforcing the relationship of love
and art (figure 11). A queen, naked to the waist, perhaps Venus, seems to be
contained in the glass flask, while men study and perform various arts-music,

23Cf. figure 4 and its representation of war.

24Splendor Solis, 56; J. K. identifies the scenes as perhaps depicting the Swiss War of Emancipation.
He offers no reason for this identification.
2^Splendor Solis, 58; J. K. identifies the wheels as the astrological characters he believes them to
represent, Libra for the scales and Aries for the front wheel, though the image does not appear to be a
Ram.

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686 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

sculpture, geography, mathematics-in the forefront of her container. Here, horses

recede from the street action on either side of her flask: on the left three pull a cart
toward the back of the picture, before which is another smaller, and before that
another still smaller; on the right, one horse and rider follows another. All journey
to unclear destinations.
Similarly marginal are three horses that appear in picture XVIII, representing
the "Fourth Treatise, Eighthly" (figure 12). In XVIII, the central image is of a
crowned man with the icons of rule, a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other;
he stands on the convex arc of a crescent moon, and he is enclosed in a crowned
glass flask placed in a niche. The surrounding images are those of recreating men
and working women: a woman, likely the goddess Diana, drives a chariot that
appears to be led by two women; two women to the right of the niche either
gather water or do laundry.26 In the distance to the right, beyond the two women,
one standing and one bending with a bucket and behind two buildings, is the tiny
outline of a horse, followed by two smaller animals, perhaps dogs. Closer, on the
left, as if riding out from the flask are two horses, possibly ridden by women. A
number of other images show the hunt or attempted capture of animals, as one
might expect in a picture in which the huntress Diana figures: in the foreground,
is a duck hunter pointing a gun, a dog beside him; a fisherman on the bank with a
rod, and, to his right above him, two fishermen in a boat, both paddling while one
drags a net; to the left of the niche are what appear to be falconers and another dog;
less clear images of boating appear in the distant background. The partner text
identifies a "peculiar method to govern heat or the fire" and concludes by noting
that "in the sign of Sagittarius is the third grade, this being not of a burning heat,
and under the rule or order of rest and pause." The visual images also represent
rest, or at least a pause, from the more demanding processes represented earlier in
the manuscript: work and war, as well as love.
In the twentieth picture, the last in which horses figure, the animal has
shrunken to that of a child's toy, a hobbyhorse (figure 13). Yet this illustration
represents a sort of metamorphic alchemy itself: the physical animal becomes the
child's toy, the hobbyhorse or horse-head on a stick. The picture (XX) represents
the "fifth treatise, second chapter," which compares the alchemical "Art" "to the
play of children, who when they play, turn undermost that which was uppermost."
This picture has five children in the foreground, three of whom are naked. One
lies on a cushion and is attended by two others, one clothed holding him from
behind, another clothed bending over and reaching for him with his arms, and two
standing naked children, one obviously male. Behind this scene, in the middle

26If they are doing laundry, as J. K. writes, then they, too, could be part of male recreating, for
laundresses were commonly identified with prostitutes in the early modern period. See, for example,
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: University
Press, 1996), 54?55. In a reader's report for Studies in English Literature (SEL) in February 1992, the
reader, later self-identified as Anne Lake Prescott, wrote, with regard to my discussion of Gosson's ref
erence to laundresses, "the 'launderers' were of course the whores who followed the army and also took
in washing."

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Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 687

F1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~;

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Figure 3. Illust
By permissi

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688 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

Figure 4. Illustration IV in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1 582), Harley MS 3469.

By permiission of The British Library.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 689

Figure 5. Illustration VI in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582), Harley MS 3469.

By permission of The British Library.

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690 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI I/3 (2006)

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 691

Figure 7. Illustration XII in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582), Harley MS 3469.

By permlission of The British Library.

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692 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

Figure 8. Illustration XIII in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582), Harley MS 3469.

By permission of The British Library.

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 Feinstein /Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 693

&~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Figure 9. Illustration XIV in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1 582), Harley MS 3469.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By peniisio ofTeBiihLbay

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694 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"1

Figure 10. Illustration XVI in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582)

By permission of The British Library.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 695

Figure 11. Illustration XVII in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582), Harley MS 3469.
By permission of The British Library.

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696 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

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Figure 12. Illustration XVIII in S. Trismosin, Splendor Solis (1582), Harley MS 3469.
By permission of The British Library.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 697

Figure 13. Illustration XX in S. Trismosin, Splendor Sobis (1582), Harley MS 3469.

By permission of The Bnitish Library.

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698 Sixteentil CenturyJournial XXXVII/3 (2006)

distance between the clothed child and the one he leans toward, is a smaller naked
child riding a hobbyhorse and playing with what resembles a whirligig or wind toy
of four small squares. To his back is a crow and its shadow; above two standing
naked children is a clothed child playing with a similar wind toy as the child with
the hobbyhorse whom he faces. There are also two clothed attendants sitting
down: one, on a window seat to the left, helping a naked child walk; behind and
to the right of the one beneath the window but located more in the center of the
picture, the other sits in front of what could be a cabinet or still. To the right of
this latter figure, who holds one child in her lap while another leans beside her left
side, is an open door, above which are two glass flasks. There is, as well, a figure in
the dark doorway. The border is ornamental with botanicals, birds, butterflies, and
bugs. In this scene, the toy horse is part of the play and the metaphor of play. As
to the solution of the riddle regarding what was uppermost now made undermost,
I have no answer. I simply note the presence of the animal that extends the motif
and its associations introduced in the fourth illustration.
When the ornamental borders are excluded in modern reproductions of the
manuscript, they leave out a piece of the puzzle that is alchemy. Alchemical artists,
like alchemical authors, contribute clues, commentary, or questions, and in so
doing, share in the mystery and its meaning. The early artists are anonymous like
most of the early authors, and, like them, their identities are as shrouded, if not as
mythologized, as the originators and transcribers of the verbal texts.27 Whoever
the authors and artists, in alchemy, all the parts work separately and together as
clues and signs, recipes and directions; they are secret messages revealed to the
believers, those most worthy and able to accept that a sign may be found any
where. It is understood that these allegorical texts must be deconstructed and
reconstructed; that for the process to succeed, attention to the smallest detail, how
ever seemingly inconsequential, is necessary. Who wrote what doesn't matter; that
a border is added by an artist or an alchemist, consanguineous with the text or later
than it, is irrelevant. It is accepted that God works in strange and wondrous ways.
As Michael Camille wrote of the marginalia in medieval manuscripts, "Things
written or drawn in the margins add an extra dimension, a supplement, that is able
to gloss, parody, modernize, and problematize the text's authority, while never
totally undermining it."28 Eliminating or disregarding the marginalia would be
little different from omitting one of the parables or symbolic stages of the process.
Alchemy is typically described as an arcane, obscure language, a language that only
an adept can truly understand, one intended to be impenetrable to all those who

27Mythic alchemists include Hermes, Mary the Copt or Jewess, and numerous others, including
authoritative philosophers turned into proponents and prophets of alchemy such as Aristotle and Alber
tus Magnus, and, no doubt, Salomon Trismosin, to whom authorship of Splendor Solis is ascribed.
28Camille, Image on the Edge, 158, sees a change in representation and respect of the margins after
the Reformation, which he views as resulting in a "great rift" opening up "between words and images."
But alchemy is a pre-Reformation art and science that retains most of its features over time, including
its symbology, secrecy, and codes hidden in words and images.

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 Feinstein / Alchemy in the Manuscript Illustrations of the Splendor Solis 699

are not among the initiates or believers.29 The images of alchemy are no less
obscure; they test the sight. The marginal action, whether in the outlying areas of
the picture or the ornamental frames, inevitably provides additional clues or glosses
to the foregrounded symbolic images of alchemy that they frame and the verbal
instructions the manuscript text provides. The pictures in their entirety, from the
center to the borders, including the many depicted roles of horses in particular,
represent the processes of alchemy. In short, they contribute to making the process
more complete than it would be otherwise. To disregard any detail is, potentially,
to miss the point, one possibly essential code and meaning. Since there are more
horses in these plates than any other animal excepting humans, to take them out of
the picture, to ignore them, changes the meaning and creates a different text.

29See, for example, David Knight, Ideas in Chemistry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1992), 14-15, one of numerous examples where alchemy is remarked for its obscurity intended for ini
tiates alone.

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