In a recent post about Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music engraving, illustrator John Coulthart made the following observation:
It’s only very recently I’ve paid much attention to the writings of people such as Fludd and Kircher, in the past I’ve been more interested in the illustrations from their books, inevitably when they’ve been used so often for completely frivolous reasons. Looking through the Utriusque Cosmi it’s immediately evident what an astonishing work it is; anyone with that breadth of knowledge is going to make some interesting connections.

Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music.
It’s a shame that Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, his encyclopaedic masterwork, has not yet been fully translated into English – for while the engravings are beautiful, they belong to a textually dense work of more than 1,000 pages in length, providing an overview of subjects as diverse as the creation of the universe, music, optics, chemistry, ars memoria, geometry, warfare, geomancy, surveying, drawing and cabala, all unified by an overarching Hermetic worldview that bridges the heritage of Renaissance neoplatonism with 17th century natural philosophy.