Many scenes crowd one rocky landscape. A crawling infant with a bandaged foot looks at the ground at the lower left. Beside him, a winged woman with a serpent's tail raises a hand, and another sits far behind. At the center a man stands with open arms, and an old man bent over a staff walks beside him. At the right, a crowned couple and a crowned man stand near a hillside under a tall sky. This is the thirty-ninth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto tells a tragedy in one line: Oedipus, having conquered the Sphinx and killed his father Laius, takes his mother as his wife. 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, drew on Greek tragedy as easily as on chemistry. The Motto The Latin line is blunt. It names three acts:...