At JSTOR:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/sla....90.3.0401

"Flemish painter, a pupil of David Teniers the Younger. He was a member of Antwerp's guild of painters by 1646. His abundant production, generally signed or monogrammed, but seldom dated, spreads out between 1638 and 1670. Influenced greatly by his master and Adriaen Brouwer, van Helmont specialized in the painting of genre subjects, particularly village scenes, kermesses and interiors, but also produced still-lifes and several versions of The Temptation of St Anthony. In addition, he painted Italian markets and fairs, which suggests he visited Italy at some point in his career. Apparently of an unruly character and often involved in brawls, he left Antwerp in 1674, leaving many paintings with his creditors, and settled in Brussels where he died five years later."

https://www.wga.hu/bio_m/h/helmont/biograph.html

An Alchemist in his Laboratory.

   

The Alchemist.

   

"Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language."

"The theory he propounds is that the ancient and therefore uncorrupted Hebrew characters are actually diagrams illustrating how the lips and tongue should be positioned when uttering the sounds they make. A series of woodcuts in the book show cross sections of heads in profile with the speech organs exposed to reveal how they are shaped exactly like Hebrew letters."

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/fra...of-nature/

By Jan Matejko.

   

By John Considine.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...ode=yamb20

By Ute Frietsch.

Full text:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....21.1936800

"The second part of the book concludes with Allison Kavey’s essay on popular English alchemical texts in the seventeenth century, which represent, she argues, an alternative tradition to the dominant Aristotelian model of the natural world. Instead of a system of binaries, as in most early modern medical and other scientific works, Paracelsian alchemical discourse was based on ‘systems of sympathy’ exemplified in the metaphor of the ‘chemical marriage’ (p. 223); and if that metaphor seems simply to reinforce Aristotelian principles of balance or tension between opposites, Kavey suggests that in alchemical writing the element mercury – often associated with Ganymede – ‘hermaphroditically confounds these divisions’ (p. 223) and in effect dissolves the apparent difference between male and female elements into a unitary or ‘shared, fluid essence’ (p. 228). Kavey does not actually discuss human same-sex desire or love; rather, she focuses on the use writers on alchemy made of figures of gender instability and metamorphosis, including (albeit rarely) images of male-male coupling, to illustrate the otherwise occult process of chemical transformation."

The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe
edited by: Kenneth Borris, George Rousseau
London, Routledge, 2008, ISBN: 9780415446921; 292pp.


https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/701

Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600

"The rise of print culture in early modern England is one of the most important and most frequently studied changes of the period. Often viewed as a marker of modernity, this shift provides the starting point for Books of Secrets, which illuminates how sixteenth-century English culture was influenced by one particular type of print matter--"books of secrets." Ranging from alchemy to necromancy, these texts offered medieval [sic] readers an affordable and accessible collection of knowledge about the natural world."

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c032097

By Cynthea Masson.


https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/fl...5361/20245

By Liana Saif.


At Scribd:

https://www.scribd.com/document/52045367...lgrave-Mac