Atalanta Fugiens

Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens.

This intriguing and complex text from 1618 reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices.

Furnace and Fugue

Furnace and Fugue brings to life in digital form an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text from 1618 reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced digital publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now.

furnaceandfugue.org

“There is in the gardens of the wise - of Wisdom - a tree that bears golden apples. If you wish to obtain it, put an old man with it and shut him up in a glass house filled with dew, and allow him to remain there for several days. Then - an admirable thing! - he will be satisfied with the fruit of the tree, so that the one who before was old will be made young.”

Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, Emblem 9. From the Manly Palmer Hall Collection of Alchemical Manuscripts at the Getty Research Institute, Box 4, MS 19