What Is Wrong with this Picture

Distillatio, an engraving (ca. 1580) by Phillip Galle after a painting by Stradanus. How many laboratory safety violations can you 

1523-1605), who painted other alchemical scenes as wellh This beehive of activity would cheer the heart of any modern-day research director or university professor. The alchemist is perhaps reading from the contemporary chemical literature and, in the manner of the recently born scientific method, trying to replicate a recent advance (Porta s 1558 work on the distillation of scorpion oil ). 

John Read describes this picture as a depiction of a late-sixteenth-century Italian laboratory bustling with ordered and affluent activity. This is in marked contrast to the poverty depicted in the 1558 An Alchemist At Work by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The sheaf of grain lying on the floor in the Stradanus Distillatio is said by Read to typify the vital principle although we would recognize it today as a fire hazard. 

This engraving is from the author s private collection. 

The Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art, Thomas Nelson, London, 1947, pp. 66-68. 

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