H F J Horstmanshoff, A M Luyendijk-Elshout and F G Schlesinger (eds and trs), The four seasons of human life: four anonymous engravings from the Trent Collection , Rotterdam and Durham, Erasmus Publishing and Trent Collection, Duke University, 2002, pp. 109, €85.00 (including CD Rom) (hardback 90-5235-136-8).

This beautiful book presents for the first time a critical edition, transcription, translation, and commentary of a fascinating set of four seventeenth-century medical-astrological prints. Labelled spring, summer, autumn, winter, the prints fit into a medieval genre of the “Schema of the Fours”, but are much more complex. They follow a pattern: in the centre of each are human figures that portray the four seasons of human life—children for spring, a young couple for summer, an adult couple (she, pregnant, and he with a full-on erection) for autumn, and an elderly man and woman stepping into a grave for winter. The sun is on the upper left and the moon is on the right; and each is over-arched by the quarter of the sky (in months and zodiac) that corresponds to the season illustrated. Unlike the usual schemata, however, each print also displays numerous, mainly medical texts, mostly from the Hippocratic Aphorisms but also from the Bible, Pliny, Seneca, Aristotle, and others. Even more unusually, as compared to the medieval schemata, are the paper flaps placed over sun, moon and other figures, which illustrate the anatomy of muscles, ligaments, and vessels. There can be as many as twelve of these flaps over a single figure, each taking the viewer to a different level of anatomical complexity. For instance, underneath the corner maps are diagrams of the anatomies of liver and lung. There are also paper dials built onto the prints, including a pregnancy calculator. The authors provide not only excellent copies of the prints, but also a Latin transcription of the texts, an English translation and extensive footnotes. There are five chapters of commentary, covering the anatomy shown in the prints; the art history of their numerous hermetic and alchemical images; their astronomical and astrological contexts; a horoscope hidden under one of the flaps; and the botany and horticulture of the plants and trees portrayed. The visual problem of presenting the texts of the flaps was solved by including an animated CD-ROM that gives the reader some sense of how the various flaps open to uncover a new layer or new complexity. For instance, the sun of the print for spring is covered by flaps that progressively detail the anatomy of the eye, including its musculature and its vessels. Of course, the programme was not perfect; it did not allow the reader to zoom in on any random piece of text or flap and it crashed several times, but still. Even with the CD-ROM, the excellent copies, transcription, translation, and commentary, however, I was still left pleasantly mystified by these prints. For instance, for whom were they composed? They seem to be too medically detailed to have been merely a conversation piece, but the medicine (texts and anatomies) is too disorganized and sketchy to have been used by an actual physician or surgeon. Is there some unifying significance to their extravagant use of alchemical symbols? Can these prints have had an occult meaning? Is that, possibly, why all the hundreds of other copies have disappeared? Is the use of a particular horoscope, 22 May 1605 (originally printed in a medical text by Magini) a hint? In short, is the “text” which ostensibly seems to be a kind of visual Family Medical Digest, a seventeenth-century Da Vinci Code? The authors do not tell us, but no matter. With this fine production of an important and previously unknown work, we can look forward to further research focused on answering just such questions, and more.