Alchemical and hermetic emblems
1116 images coloured by Adam McLean
on four CD-Roms
This is the most significant collection that has ever been made of alchemical and related emblems. These have been hand coloured by Adam McLean from original woodcuts, engravings and drawings in manuscripts. An enormous amount of research has gone into uncovering rare and previously unknown emblems, and obtaining high quality images of these items. McLean has handcoloured these images to make them more approachable by the modern eye. In some cases, with the most complex emblems, it took over 15 hours to paint an image. The painting respects the original traditional colouring of images in alchemical manuscripts. Creating this resource has taken about ten thousand hours of work over the past ten years. These images have been used in McLean's books and study courses.
Over the past ten years or so I have been making handcoloured emblems by painting with watercolours copies of woodcuts and engravings from printed books and drawings from alchemical manuscripts. In colouring these I made use of my intensive study of the original coloured manuscripts of the 15th to 18th centuries, which have been the main focus of my research over many years.
I have found that contemplation and meditation on these handcoloured images helps us resonate with and enter into the complex symbolic world of alchemy. In the autumn of 1999 I began to make these images available in the form of high quality prints that people could frame or use for study. In late 1999 I began my e-mail study course on the interpretation of alchemical imagery and I drew upon this resource for the course lessons.
Sorry these CD-Roms are now discontinued.
Many of the images are available in the Coloured Alchemical Sequences book