"Rubens 'Theoretical notebook'...consists in a booklet or, in Michael Jaffé’s words, a «vade mecum», in which the Flemish master registered and developed art theoretical insights based on hermetic and esoteric traditions".

https://www.academia.edu/44287312/Rubens...tury_Italy


Rubens' 'Theoretical notebook':

https://www.heritage-kbf.be/collection/c...l-notebook


Rubens and Spontaneous Generation (some alchemical references):

https://jhna.org/articles/matter-as-an-a...eneration/

The Royal Typographer and the Alchemist: John Dee, Willem Silvius, and the Diagrammatic Alchemy of the Monas Hieroglyphica

Stephen Clucas
Birkbeck, University of London, UK



"John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) was a work which involved a close collaboration between its author and his ‘singular friend’ the Antwerp printer Willem Silvius, in whose house Dee was living whilst he composed the work and saw it through the press. This article considers the reasons why Dee chose to collaborate
with Silvius, and the importance of the intellectual culture – and the print trade – of the Low Countries to the development of Dee’s outlook. Dee’s Monas was probably the first alchemical work which focused exclusively on the diagrammatic representation of the alchemical process, combining diagrams, cosmological schemes and various forms of tabular grid."


https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/96658964.pdf

The Plantin–Moretus Museum (Dutch: Plantin-Moretusmuseum) is a printing museum in Antwerp, Belgium which focuses on the work of the 16th-century printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. It is located in their former residence and printing establishment, the Plantin Press, at the Vrijdagmarkt (Friday Market) in Antwerp, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005. It offers an exceptional insight into how printed books were produced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin%E2...tus_Museum


Video tour with commentary in German with not-too-bad automatic translation available
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMu0prR6-XE


Video tour without commentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=MZE0tFtTZis


Guidebook here:
https://museumplantinmoretus.be/sites/pl...klein_.pdf


   

At Scribd:

https://fr.scribd.com/document/115795502...of-Alchemy

A wonderful collection of books and articles at the website of ARAS, the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), a pictorial and written archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from all over the world and from all epochs of human history.

https://aras.org/library

A summary of Joseph L. Henderson's March 18, 1990 slide and lecture presentation before The San Francisco Friends of ARAS, entitled "The Rosarium Philosophorum"

Daniel S. Benveniste, Ph.D.

https://aras.org/sites/default/files/doc...derson.pdf

An undergraduate effort by Shelley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Irvyne

"St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is a Gothic horror novel written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1810 and published by John Joseph Stockdale in December of that year, dated 1811, in London anonymously as "by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford" while the author was an undergraduate. The main character is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who encounters Ginotti, an alchemist of the Rosicrucian or Rose Cross Order who seeks to impart the secret of immortality."


Downloadable from:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli...5/mode/2up

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem of the same name about the poisoner Madame de Brinvillers, whose lover, Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, started an alchemy business after being released from the Bastille to allow him to work with poisons, of which he now knew a lot about from his time in prison, by obtaining the necessary license to use certain equipment in order to distill his poisons. It was under his tutelage that the Marquise de Brinvilliers started to experiment with poisons and concoct ideas of revenge.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Collier_(painter)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laboratory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_de_Brinvilliers

   

“The Alchemist” by Carl Spitzweg (February 5, 1808 – September 23, 1885), a German romanticist painter, especially of genre subjects. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the Biedermeier era.

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The baffling imagery and riddling writings of European alchemy present a formidable challenge to the rational mind. The fact that it commanded the attention of many of the most brilliant minds may reassure us that there are true treasures to be found within its dragon-guarded precincts. When subjected to its own processes – reduced to ashes and tried in the fire of our closest attention – we are able to distil from its purified prima materia the very principles upon which Creation itself is founded, according to Tradition. Learning to understand how union can be achieved through separation, and purity through degradation sets us on the path that leads to the sacred event referred to as the Chemical Wedding, the union of the material and the spiritual, whose offspring is the Sovereign Good. 

About the lecturer: Guy Ogilvy has been a student of alchemy since stumbling across it as a living tradition focused on medicine while living in Mexico in the mid-nineties. He returned to Europe and studied under the illustrious German alchemist Manfred Junius until the latter’s death in 2004. He has written several books on alchemy and related subjects, sometimes under the pen name Francis Melville. His recent books include 'The Alchemist’s Kitchen' (Wooden Books, 2006) and 'The Great Wizards of Antiquity' (Llewellyn, 2019).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPj82YCgSwc