Faces of Hermes in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Iconographical representations of Hermes Trismegistus are, however, more rare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than would be expected—at least, this author is aware of no more than ten (see 

These instances, tied to politics and literature and specific to Britain, tend to fuse one Hermes-type in the other. In the visual arts of this period. Mercury is all too often drowned in academicism, relegated to a mere figure among others in the classical evironment. The further one goes from the Renaissance, the more he appears thus. The earlier epoch was expert in the art of giving the gods their 

In France, where alchemical iconography was less flourishing. Mercury still formed the object of interpretations directly inspired by the Art of Hermes. We mention here only the most famous French representative of the alchemical interpretation of the fables of Antiquity the Benedictine Antoine-Joseph Pern6ty, whose Fables egyptiennes et giecques devoilees (1758, reissued 1786) enjoys considerable success to this day, to judge from several recent reprints. This learned Benedictine borrowed in part from Michael 

It was also in France that Court de Gebelin devoted a long chapter 

1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures. 

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