The transformations of a mercury jar

It all started with a pair of beautiful, hand-painted eighteenth-century apothecary glass jars from the Pharmacy Museum in Cluj. The items were once used in the "Red Crab" Apothecary Shop from Bratislava, hence the red crab depicted on top of the signatures that read "Mercurius niger mosc[at]" and "Mercurius Phoshpor[ic]." In the Early Modern period many mercury preparations were actual used as medicine, though toxic in higher concentrations and/or dosage. The jars are included in the temporary exhibition on show, The History of Poison.

Working with the items I felt inspired and prepared a large linocut depicting historical apothecary jars, among which one of the jars in question. The signatures proved rather tricky, as due to the printing itself, left and right become reversed, so inscriptions have to be rendered flipped horizontally (a usual procedure is to draw looking at the model through a mirror, though my hemispheres seem to get too much confused and I simply transfer such elements). The full work is available in my Etsy shop.

Mirrored drawing of the signatures

Detail of the linoleum plate

 

Detail of the printed linocut

 

 

Historical engravings

Among the fabulous exhibits of the History of Pharmacy Collection I discovered three engraving plates for apothecary labels. Used in the nineteenth century, they are a collage of various such labels, with decorated cartouches, symbols of pharmacy, inscriptions with the name of the pharmacy they were used in (for commercial purposes, naturally) and sometimes the initials of the pharmacists themselves. The plates have been recently used to create new prints, thus revealing the details. Such labels were then cut out of the common sheet, filled in by hand with the details of the respective products, and used individually either to wrap a small number of pills or other types of solid medicine or they were glued to wooden boxes that contained larger quantities of cures.

Detail of one of the plates, with a cartouche inscribed "Apotheke der Kaiserlicher Adler" (the Imperial Eagle Apothecary) - in reference to the double-headed eagle of the Austro/Hungarian monarchy

Detail of a plate with the depiction of the imperial eagle and of pharmaceutical implements.