 Distillation was a key artisanal model for Porta, because he maintained that by means of this technology, one could extract the essences, that is the ‘spirits’ or souls of all things. Porta was here following a tradition in alchemy that in his day was associated with Arnaldo da Villanova and Ramon Llull. In accordance with this tradition, Porta applied the conceptual model of distillation to many different arts: to describe techonologies for the purification of metals, to meteorological phenomena, such as rain or clouds and even as a design for processes of social reform (conceived of as a purification of society). In this last sense Porta’s art of distillation resonates with his claims about policing society made in his physiognomics. This art spilled over into Porta’s ideas about the refinement of substances: for the De distillationibus also describes the use of different animal shapes of alembics for the distillation of different substances. Thus for instance Porta maintains that a bear-shaped alembic is ideal for the refinement of coarse substances (Kahn &amp; Perifano 2018, Perfetti 2001, Eamon 2017, Borrelli 2019).