Atalanta Fugiens - Emblem 2d

A central female figure stands with a large celestial or terrestrial sphere as her body, inside of which a small child is visible. To her left, a goat suckles an infant, and to her right, a she-wolf nurses two infants, all set within a wide landscape featuring a distant town and mountains. The engraving uses classical motifs of miraculous nursing to illustrate the concept of natural and philosophical nourishment.

This image is Emblem 2 from Michael Maier's 'Atalanta Fugiens' (1617), visually interpreting the line 'The Earth is its nurse' from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. it argues that the alchemical 'Philosopher's Son' must be nourished by the elements of the earth, just as the gods and founders of Rome were sustained by animal milk.