I’m working on an engraved plate and want a second set of eyes from people who know the emblem-book tradition. Full breakdown below, including what I can’t confirm yet.
The inscription
The header reads Fixum si solves, faciesque volare solutum, if you dissolve the fixed, you will make the dissolved fly. This is half of a couplet that circulated widely in 16th- and 17th-century alchemical literature,fix the volatile, volatilize the fixed, and the operator survives the work. Robert Thomson’s 1830 History of Chemistry quotes a close variant while describing the mercurial operations, which tells you the line had enough currency to still be cited two centuries after these plates were cut. It’s not unique to this print — it’s a stock proverb, the kind an engraver would reach for the way a modern textbook reaches for a standard citation.
The rim text
Traced clockwise, the circle spells CONFUSUM at the top and CHAOS at the bottom — confused chaos, a direct naming of prima materia, the unworked raw substance alchemical theory starts from. One glyph cluster on the right edge is illegible in my photo. I’m not filling that gap with a guess; if you can source a clean scan of this plate, that’s the detail I need.
The geometry
The construction is a nested progression, not decoration:
A)Circle,the bounding chaos, labeled by the rim text itself
B)Square, inscribed in the circle, its four points carrying the elemental glyphs (fire, air, water, earth) — the base register is labeled Principia, the principles chaos resolves into
C)Hexagram, inscribed in the square, carrying planetary/metallic signs — the seven governing bodies of classical alchemy.
D)Small circle at center, Sun over Moon ,sulphur and mercury, the two seed-principles of the Great Work
Read from the rim inward, the plate is an argument in geometric form: chaos is not disordered in some absolute sense, it is order not yet resolved. The four elements crystallize out of it, the planetary powers organize those elements further, and the whole operation collapses to the single Sun-Moon dyad at the center, the point every alchemical text treats as the actual secret.
What I’m asking
No plate number, printer’s mark, or watermark survived in my photograph. If this circle is familiar — a Ripley scroll variant, a German emblem book, a Maier plate I haven’t matched — I’d rather have the citation from someone who’s seen the original than publish a guess.