Paul Miner is a literary historian and iconographer whose article "Blake and Atalanta Fugiens: Two Plates, Three Conjectures," published in Notes and Queries (2012), investigates the visual influence of Maier's Merian-engraved plates on the art of William Blake. Miner's work opens a reception-history dimension largely absent from other Atalanta Fugiens scholarship, which has focused overwhelmingly on Maier's sources rather than his influence on later artistic and intellectual traditions.

Miner's approach is comparative iconographic analysis, placing specific Blake designs alongside the corresponding AF engravings to identify compositional borrowings, shared motifs, and transformed symbolic elements. He does not engage with Maier's alchemical philosophy directly but with the visual afterlife of the Atalanta Fugiens plates — a question that connects Maier's seventeenth-century emblems to the broader history of Hermetic visual culture in English Romanticism. His method requires demonstrating not merely thematic similarity (both artists depict hermaphrodites, for instance) but specific compositional parallels that imply direct knowledge of the source images.

Miner identifies four emblem-specific iconographic connections between Blake and the Atalanta Fugiens. He focuses particularly on the Hermaphrodite lying in darkness (Emblems XXXIII and XXXIV) and the standing Hermaphrodite born of two mountains (Emblem XXXVIII), arguing that Blake's hermaphroditic and hierogamic imagery — the union of contraries that is central to Blake's mature mythology in works like Jerusalem and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — draws compositionally on Maier's visual formulations. The argument is strengthened by the fact that Blake is known to have had access to alchemical source material through his patrons and associates.

Miner's work demonstrates that the Atalanta Fugiens was not merely a period curiosity but a visual resource that continued to shape artistic production nearly two centuries after its publication. His reception-history approach complements De Jong's backward-looking source analysis with a forward-looking study of influence and transmission.

For this site, Miner provides four emblem-specific references and a unique perspective on the cultural afterlife of Maier's images. His work supports the argument that the AF plates, as engraved by Merian, possess an aesthetic power that transcends their original alchemical function.