A wide valley opens under a pale sky, with a river, a bridge, church spires and a sloping town. In the clouds above, three small squared stones tumble toward the earth. More of them lie scattered on the ground, and others float on the lake. In the foreground two travelers walk a path with staffs, and a horseman waits at a gate. This is the thirty-sixth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto says: the stone was cast down to earth, raised on the mountains, dwells in the air and feeds in the river, and this is Mercury. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, loved sayings that spread across the whole landscape. The Motto The Latin line is a chain of four places. The stone is thrown down to the lands, lifted to the mountains...