Splendor Solis is known for its pictures. The work consists of a treatise in seven parts accompanied by twenty two full page illuminations, and the illuminations are the reason the manuscripts were made and the reason the work is famous. They are among the finest painting in the alchemical corpus, framed in elaborate Renaissance borders, and several are reproduced constantly in modern books about alchemy, generally without the text.
The images run the sequence of the Work: a knight with a flask, the drowning king, the dismemberment and the black sun, the vessels containing successive stages, and a series of flasks each holding a scene. The black sun rising over a townscape is the single most reproduced alchemical image there is.
The text itself is a fairly conventional treatment of the stages of the Work, drawing on earlier authorities, and its content does not account for the manuscripts' reputation. That mismatch is worth noting: this is a case where an esoteric work's influence is carried almost entirely by its illustration programme, and where most people who can recognise an image from it have never read a line.
The attribution to Salomon Trismosin, said to be Paracelsus's teacher, is not supported outside the tradition's own claim.