3-061-814 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Vases of flowers and a botanic garden with Saint Peter. The first two lines of the inscription originate from the penultimate stanza of a recipe in verse within an Irish medical compendium, in eight quatrains, for the ailments known as atchomall ('dropsy') and loch tuile ('pulmonary disease'): 'Fair Colman son of Oilill / it is he who took the Island of Ireland / as the King of the Stars has ordained / from the settlement of the very strong men' (Hayden, op. cit. 2019). Hayden suggests the signboard might have been created as an advertisement for the herbal Athanasia Hibernica. The second of the two pairs of Latin hexameters is a garbled version of Horace, Epistles I.6.66-67: "Vive vale. Si quid novisti rectius istis, / Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum"