De Humani Corporis Fabrica librorum Epitome.
Basel: Johannes Oporinus, June 1543. First edition of the illustrated summary of the Fabrica that Vesalius designed as its companion and that proved, over the following century, to be the more widely disseminated of the two. The Epitome was published simultaneously with the Fabrica. Where the Fabrica is a seven-book folio of more than seven hundred pages addressed to established physicians, the Epitome is a fourteen-leaf atlas of large anatomical plates with concise descriptive text. It was designed to be used as wall charts in the dissecting room and to be affordable enough for students. Vesalius described it in his dedication to Prince Philip of Spain as a footpath beside the highway of the larger work. The footpath reached further than the highway. Unauthorised translations and adaptations appeared in German (Torinus, Basel, August 1543, only two months after the Latin original), English (Geminus, London, 1545 and 1553), French (1560), and Dutch (1569), carrying Vesalian anatomy into vernacular medical education across Europe. No comparable sequence of translations followed the Fabrica itself. The present copy preserves all fourteen leaves including the two unsigned final sheets, printed on one side only with individual anatomical parts to be cut out and assembled as overlays. These are the sheets most frequently lacking in surviving copies, since they were designed to be destroyed in use. The Epitome’s approach to the body differs from the Fabrica’s. The larger work proceeds systematically from the skeleton outward — bones, muscles, vascular system, nerves, abdominal organs, thorax, brain — in the order an anatomist would encounter them in a progressive dissection. The Epitome reverses the sequence, beginning topographically with the surface of the body and working inward: first the two celebrated nude figures of a man and a woman (the ‘Adam and Eve’, placed at the centre of the book), then four muscular charts showing successive layers of musculature progressively stripped from the standing figure, then the skeleton in two views, and finally the vascular, visceral, and neurological systems. The plates are similar to but not identical with those in the Fabrica: they are approximately sixty millimetres taller, the figures are in slightly different attitudes, and the landscape backgrounds that give the Fabrica’s muscle-men their Venetian scenery are reduced or eliminated. The effect is closer to a modern anatomical atlas — the body presented for study rather than for contemplation. The nine principal anatomical plates were cut from the same Venetian workshops that produced the Fabrica’s woodblocks, and the question of their designer remains one of the great unsolved problems of Renaissance art history. Vesalius’s 1539 letter names Jan Steven van Calcar, pupil of Titian, as the intended artist; the skeletal figures in the Tabulae Sex of 1538, Vesalius’s first illustrated anatomy, are documented as Calcar’s work, and there are continuities of shading technique between those early plates and the Fabrica/Epitome figures of 1543. But the qualitative leap from the Tabulae Sex to the mature anatomical illustrations is so large that a single artist working over five years seems insufficient to explain it. The prevailing scholarly view is that several artists from or trained in the school of Titian were involved, with Vesalius himself possibly contributing to the more schematic diagrams; but no documentary evidence settles the matter. The woodblocks themselves survived at Basel, then at Munich, until the night of 30 March 1944, when an Allied bombing raid destroyed the library of the Universität München in which they had been deposited. Casts and prints taken from the blocks before their destruction confirm the extraordinary quality of the cutting, which translates the modelling of muscle and shadow with a precision that has no precedent in the history of woodcut illustration. The Epitome’s two final sheets — the unsigned leaves [N] and [O] present in this copy — are an exercise in instructional design without parallel in sixteenth-century printing. Each sheet carries printed images of individual organs, vessels, and skeletal parts, intended to be cut out with scissors and pasted in layers onto one of the standing figures to produce a three-dimensional paper anatomy. The technique owes something to the flap-plate tradition that had begun with Vogtherr’s Strasbourg broadsides in the 1530s; Vesalius’s innovation was to extend it into a full dissection exercise in which the student assembled the body from parts, reversing on paper the operation performed on the cadaver. The sheets’ presence here, the male intact and the female partially completed as intended, is a principal distinction of the copy. The technical achievement of producing such large and finely cut woodblocks at Basel was as remarkable as the achievement of the dissection on which they rest. Vesalius shipped the woodblocks themselves overland from Venice to Basel in the summer of 1542, sending a porter of high reliability with the precious cargo and writing to Oporinus from Padua with detailed instructions on the printing. The two volumes were to be set with the highest care, the woodblocks aligned exactly with their accompanying text, and proof sheets sent to Vesalius for correction. Oporinus, the celebrated humanist printer who had published Andreas Cratander’s editions of the Greek classics and would soon publish the first Latin Qur’an, treated the assignment as the central project of his career; the result is universally regarded as among the most beautifully printed books of the sixteenth century. The Epitome’s broadsheet folio format, larger than the Fabrica’s, was technically the more demanding of the two. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), born in Brussels to a family of physicians in the service of the Habsburgs, studied at Louvain and Paris before taking the chair of anatomy at Padua in 1537, at the age of twenty-three. He held the appointment for only six years, but in that time he transformed the discipline. The central act of that transformation was the insistence that the professor of anatomy must himself perform the dissection rather than reading from Galen while a barber-surgeon cut beneath him — a practice that had prevailed in the Italian medical schools for two centuries. The Fabrica and the Epitome, prepared simultaneously between 1538 and 1542 and sent together to Oporinus at Basel in the autumn of 1542 with detailed instructions for their printing, are the documents of that insistence: the first complete modern textbook of human anatomy based on the author’s own dissections, and its companion teaching atlas. Their combined effect was to discredit the Galenic anatomical tradition that had governed medical education since antiquity — not by argument but by observation, plate by plate, showing what the body actually contained against what Galen had said it contained. Vesalius left Padua for the court of Charles V later in 1543, served as army surgeon and imperial physician for two decades, and died on the island of Zakynthos in October 1564, on his way home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, at the age of forty-nine. The reception of the Fabrica and the Epitome in 1543 was bitterly divided. The Galenic establishment, led by Vesalius’s former Paris teacher Jacobus Sylvius (Jacques Dubois), denounced the new work in the most violent terms. Sylvius punned the author’s name as Vesanus, ‘madman’, and produced in 1551 a tract devoted entirely to defending Galen against him; Sylvius’s position was that where Vesalius’s observations differed from Galen’s, the difference proved that the human body had altered since Galen’s time, not that Galen had been wrong. Younger anatomists, however, rapidly recognised the work as definitive, and within a decade the Vesalian programme had taken root in the leading Italian, French, and Northern European universities. Realdo Colombo, Vesalius’s successor at Padua, and Gabriele Falloppio, professor of anatomy there from 1551, both built on Vesalian foundations while quietly disputing particular points; the discovery of the pulmonary circulation by Colombo in 1559 and of the Fallopian tubes by Falloppio in 1561 are direct consequences of the methodological revolution Vesalius had launched. By the time Vesalius died in 1564, his anatomical programme had effectively replaced Galen as the standard of medical education, and the Galenic resistance was confined to a diminishing rear-guard. The Epitome’s vernacular translations are a separate and independently important strand of its history. Albanus Torinus’s German translation of August 1543 was the first abridgement intended explicitly for the surgical-barber community; Vesalius regarded it as a piracy and complained to Oporinus, but the translation reached an audience the Latin text never could have. Thomas Geminus’s English Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio, London, 1545, is a copperplate engraving after the Vesalian woodcuts; it was reissued in 1553 with English text and was used by William Harvey’s teacher and by John Caius. Jacques Grevin’s French Les portraits anatomiques of 1560 and the Dutch Levende beeldenisse, ofte weergevinge ... van de deelen des menschelicken lichaems of 1569 carried the plates further. By the end of the sixteenth century the Vesalian anatomical figures were the visual lingua franca of European medical instruction, in some places encountered by physicians in the original Basel woodcuts and in others through the engraved or vernacular re-renderings that the Epitome in particular had made possible. Provenance: Pierre II Mariette (1634–1716), the foremost print dealer and publisher in seventeenth-century Paris, with his ink signature ‘P. Mariette 1684’ on the title; the binding, probably commissioned by Mariette, is contemporary with the 1684 date of his inscription. Thence to Henry Olcott Sheldon (1799–1882), Methodist minister, educator, and diarist, with his ink signature on the front flyleaf. The Vesalius descended thereafter through the Sheldon family. Mariette managed the business at the sign of the Colonnes d’Hercules on the rue Saint-Jacques, inherited from his first wife’s late husband François Langlois, and the family shop at the sign of l’Espérance; between them the two establishments handled the most important print stock in Paris and published, among others, prints after Poussin, portraits by Nanteuil, and the ornamental suites of Jean Le Pautre. Pierre II’s practice of inscribing his name and date of acquisition on items that passed through his hands is well documented across the major print collections of Europe; his grandson Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) became the most celebrated connoisseur of prints and drawings in eighteenth-century France. Sheldon assembled a working library of some five thousand volumes in Ohio in the service of the lyceum and seminary movement he helped to foster, a collection intended not for ornament but for instruction. The Mariette inscription is of particular interest for the history of print connoisseurship. The seventeenth-century Paris print trade was the engine that translated Italian and Northern European graphic art into a European-wide commercial vocabulary, and the Mariettes were at its centre for three generations. Pierre I, Pierre II’s father, had begun the business; Pierre II, who signed the present volume in 1684, expanded it; Jean Mariette (1660–1742), Pierre II’s son, ran it through the early eighteenth century; and Pierre-Jean Mariette, the grandson, lived to see his own collection of drawings sold at auction in 1775–76 in eighteen sales spread over more than a year, in what remains the most celebrated dispersal of an Old Master print and drawing collection. Pierre II’s commercial interest in the Epitome was therefore the same as a contemporary print dealer’s interest in a great album of Renaissance engravings: the volume offered him a fund of high-quality woodcut images of a kind he could compare against, and supply to, his most discriminating clients. By the time Pierre II Mariette acquired the present volume, the anatomical figures of the Fabrica and the Epitome had been copied, recopied, and adapted continuously for a hundred and forty years; almost every published anatomy of the period made some use of them, whether through engraved facsimiles like Geminus’s in England or through more or less faithful re-cutting in continental editions. The original Basel folios were prized by collectors precisely because they were the source from which all the later imagery descended. The binding of the present copy in elegant late-seventeenth-century brown and black acid-etched calf, with the spine titled Vesa | Epit, suggests both his commercial valuation of the work and his recognition of it as a key reference object for his trade in Italian and Northern European graphic art. The contemporary annotation in French on the front pastedown, attributing the designs to Calcar rather than to Titian, is a small but characteristic piece of late-seventeenth-century French connoisseurship of exactly the kind in which Pierre-Jean Mariette would later make his reputation. Choulant, Cushing, and Garrison-Morton all treat the Fabrica and the Epitome as a single bibliographical unit, two halves of a single radical intervention in the visual representation of the human body; Grolier/Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 18, describes the Epitome alongside the Fabrica as the joint foundation of modern anatomy, while the Epitome is not in the Norman catalogue (Norman owned the Fabrica but not the Epitome). The Joffe and Buchanan world census of 2015 locates ninety-five surviving copies of the 1543 Epitome, of which only four are in private hands. They estimate that nearly half of the original edition has survived — an unusually high rate for a sixteenth-century medical book, reflecting the care with which the large plates were valued and preserved. Nevertheless, copies preserving all fourteen leaves including the cut-out sheets are rare in any ownership, and first editions of the Epitome appear at auction only infrequently. The present copy, with all fourteen leaves intact, was unknown to the census and brings the recorded total to ninety-six. References: Garrison-Morton 376 — not in Norman — Grolier/Norman, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine 18 — Cushing, Vesalius, VI B-1 — Choulant-Frank, p. 180 — Durling 4581 — Heirs of Hippocrates 291 — Osler 571 — Waller 9908 — Stillwell 711 — Adams V607 — Joffe and Buchanan, ‘A Worldwide Census of the Vesalius Epitome’, Medical Research Archives 2, no. 1 (2015) — Lind (tr.), The Epitome of Andreas Vesalius, 1949 — Pozeg and Flamm, ‘Vesalius and the 1543 Epitome’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 103, no. 2 (2009), pp. 199–220 — O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564, Berkeley, 1964. Broadsheet folio (486 × 330 mm), ff. [14], including twenty woodcut illustrations: a frontispiece of Vesalius in a surgical theatre, seven historiated initials, a portrait of Vesalius, eleven full-page anatomical figures, and both mannikin leaves — the male intact, the female with parts excised and the figure partially completed, as intended (two of the small parts now missing, having become detached from the figure; final leaf backed with period paper; damp-staining, minor worming at bottom margin, horizontal mid-folds as usual). Contemporary ink underlining and two marginal annotations in Latin, with a discursive pencilled note in French on the front pastedown positing Calcar, not Titian, as the illustrator. Late-seventeenth-century brown and black acid-etched calf with six raised bands forming seven spine compartments, gilt foliate ornament in each compartment but the second, which is gilt-lettered ‘VESA | EPIT’; endpapers with watermarks of a grape bunch and the letters ‘I G’, on interior leaves with forked cross and crown, and on leaf M and the unsigned mannikin leaves with a Y symbol inside a window (rubbed corners, cords exposed on spine). A handsome large copy. Colophon bearing the same date as the Fabrica’s.
Item #6204
Price: $250,000.00
