Image: Trouble Comes to the Alchemist FA 2000.001.269

Description: Trouble Comes to the Alchemist Dutch School, 17th-century Although the title suggests this is an image of an alchemist, the scene is one of a physician conducting a uroscopy for a female patient. Similar objects are used in both practices, such as a mortar and pestle, a variety of flasks and containers, a human skull, an hourglass, a celestial globe, and books. The alchemist sits at a table, holding a uroscopy flask with fluid in it; he is looking upward, with one hand upraised. An old woman is deliberately emptying her piss pot on the physician's head. To the right of the man stands a woman in a red dress, his patient. Under the table a dog is curled up. The cello in the painting was traditionally a symbol of love and may be a warning about sexual promiscuity. The poem on the table, attributed to Socrates, implies that the furious woman above is like Xanthippe, the Greek philosopher's famously shrewish wife. It reads: ick wi[s]t wel vrou ten is geen wonder het reghenen [s]ou naer dit gedonder I knew well woman, it's no wonder, it would rain, after this thunder. "gedonder" also means "mess" or "trouble"
Title: Trouble Comes to the Alchemist
Credit: Science History Institute, Will Brown.
Author: Unknown authorUnknown author
Permission: This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Science History Institute as part of a cooperation project.
Usage Terms: Public domain
License: Public domain
Attribution Required?: No