Typus montis Aetnae (Type of Mount Etna Observed by the Author, 1637)

The image is a black-and-white copperplate engraving showing a cross-section or landscape view of Mount Etna. The mountain dominates the center, with dense plumes of smoke and ejected boulders rising into the sky. At the base, a fortified town is nestled on the coast where waves lap against the shore. The engraving uses fine cross-hatching to define the rocky textures of the mountain, the rolling clouds, and the agitation of the sea.

This print appears in Athanasius Kircher's 'Mundus Subterraneus' (1665), a foundational text in early modern geology that theorized the Earth as a system of subterranean fires and channels. It represents the transition from mythological understandings of volcanoes to the early scientific observation of geological phenomena.