Go to the Woman Washing Clothes

The engraving shows an ordinary domestic scene: a woman standing at a tub, pouring water over soiled linen while steam or mist rises around her. The Latin motto below, "Vade ad mulierem lavantem pannos, tu fac similiter" ("Go to the woman washing clothes, and do likewise"), turns the chore into instruction. Alchemists read household labor as a cipher for laboratory process: repeated washing and drying stood for the purification impure matter had to undergo before the Great Work could proceed — dirt lifted from cloth was dross lifted from the prima materia. Look for the vapor curling above the tub, meant to double as laundry steam and the vapors of a heated vessel. It is one of several plates in which Maier grounds abstract chemistry in scenes anyone could recognize.

Maker

Michael Maier (author); engraved by Matthäus Merian the Elder

Medium of the original

Engraving

Original held by

Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Wikimedia Commons · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00508