Musurgia Universalis — Frontispiece

The engraving is vertically oriented, structured in three distinct tiers. At the apex, a radiant triangle with an all-seeing eye emits beams of light toward a central seated woman who wears a laurel wreath, holds a small lyre and panpipes, and sits atop a terrestrial globe divided into sections containing astronomical and natural symbols. The middle ground consists of clouds with musical angels holding banners of notation. The foreground shows a landscape: on the left, a bearded man in robes (Pythagoras) points a rod toward a cave where three smiths strike an anvil with hammers, while on the right, a woman in classical dress holds a lute and other instruments, surrounded by scattered books and musical paraphernalia.

This image serves as the frontispiece to Athanasius Kircher's 'Musurgia Universalis' (1650), a foundational text in musicology that links the mathematical proportions of music to the structure of the cosmos and the 'music of the spheres.' The scene of the smiths and Pythagoras refers to the apocryphal story of Pythagoras discovering the mathematical ratios of musical intervals through the varying sounds of blacksmiths' hammers.