Dr. John Dee, Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, a genuine alchemist but something of a modern scientist too.

This figure reminds us that magicians were part of current Elizabethan experience, so that neither Faustus nor Prospero would seem incredible characters. Dee helped develop the idea of "experimental science" in his influential preface to Billingsley's translation of Euclid (1570). The original painting in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford is by an unknown artist of the sixteenth century. According to Charlotte Fell Smith, this portrait was painted when Dee was 67. It belonged to his grandson Rowland Dee and later to Elias Ashmole, who left it to Oxford University. Courtesy of the Yorck Project, under GNU Free Document License.