Visualization in Medieval Alchemy

Abstract: This paper explores major trends in visualization of medieval theo-ries of natural and artificial transformation of substances in relation to their philosophical and theological bases. The function of pictorial forms is ana-lyzed in terms of the prevailing conceptions of science and methods of trans-mitting knowledge. The documents under examination date from the thir-teenth to the fifteenth century. In these, pictorial representations include lists and tables, geometrical figures, depictions of furnaces and apparatus, and fig-urative elements mainly from the vegetable and animal realms. An effort is made to trace the earliest evidence of these differing pictorial types