Robertus Vallensis's De Veritate et Antiquitate Artis Chemicae is a sixteenth-century treatise defending the antiquity and legitimacy of alchemy, which includes an allegorical interpretation of the Atalanta myth as an alchemical parable. De Jong (1969) identifies this text as a direct source for Maier's frontispiece commentary, where the race between Atalanta and Hippomenes is read as the pursuit of the volatile by the fixed principle. The frontispiece engraving thus draws its interpretive framework in part from Vallensis's defense of alchemical hermeneutics applied to classical mythology.