Gabriel Rollenhagen, Les emblemes, Cologne: S. Erffens, 1611, First engraved plate after D4v, plate size 13.2×10.1 cm, Rel.c.61.5. This French edition was translated from the Dutch.

Gabriel Rollenhagen (1583-1619) was a poet and writer who had studied at the universities of Marburg, Leipzig and Leiden. He is known for publishing an imaginary travel to India (based on classical authors) and for a collection of emblems that circulated widely.

An additional line has turned Vesalius’s Virgilian verse into an exhortation of learning:

Learn the good arts, eschew the ephemeral things;
One lives on by the spirit, the rest shall belong to death.

The circle is divided into two halves by a tree, one side of which has branches with leaves, the other just a withered branch. On the withered side is a skeleton, holding a scepter in front of a table laden with earthly trappings of a crown, an insignia, coins, jewelry and a decorative jug. On the leafy side sits a scholar in a fur-lined coat, resting one hand on a book and the other hand holding an armillary sphere, the traditional symbol of the study of astronomy and heavenly things.

Tycho Brahe deployed the same verse as a decoration for one of his instruments in his Astronomiae instauratae mechinae (1588).