De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres. Una cum figuris, & incisionum declarationibus, Stephano Riverio Chirurgo compositis.
Paris: Simon de Colines, 1545. First edition, a large-paper copy — measuring 392 × 260 mm, with every one of its pinholes preserved along the fore-edge, from the library of Haskell F. Norman — of one of the finest woodcut books of the French Renaissance (Schreiber) and the most magnificent anatomical atlas of the sixteenth century (Hagelin), ranking behind only Vesalius’s Fabrica. The present copy surpasses in dimension every other whose measurements we have been able to trace. It exceeds the noble copy of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg chosen by Hagelin for description in Rare and Important Medical Books; William P. Watson’s catalogue copies of 2001 and 2006 measured 390 × 258 mm and 325 × 218 mm respectively; the Sokol large-paper copy of recent years, in eighteenth-century three-quarter vellum, measured 380 × 250 mm; the Bonhams (Smirl) copy of 2017, in nineteenth-century quarter vellum, 363 × 245 mm; the Metropolitan Museum’s copy, 359 × 234 mm; and the ordinary run traced in the market sits considerably smaller still. Norman himself designated his copy a large-paper copy in his entry for it, and within the modest population of copies answering to that designation this one sits at the upper edge of the range. The surviving pinholes — the marks left by the press-points that held each sheet in register as it was printed — measure how little the margins have been trimmed over nearly five hundred years. Charles Estienne’s De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, printed at Paris by his stepfather Simon de Colines in 1545, occupies a position in the history of anatomy as distinctive as it is unfortunate. Though its title-page carries the year 1545 — two years after the appearance of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica — the work was essentially composed during the 1530s, and but for a lawsuit begun in 1539 and a subsequent delay at the Paris Faculté de Médecine, it would have preceded the Fabrica into print. Had it done so, it would almost certainly have displaced the Vesalian volume as the inaugural monument of modern anatomical illustration, and the history of early Renaissance anatomy would today read in ways very different from those set by the canonical sequence of 1543. Charles Estienne (ca. 1504–1564), Carolus Stephanus in his Latin publications, was the younger son of Henri I Estienne and a member of the second generation of the Estienne dynasty of scholar-printers. His father died in 1520; the press passed to his mother’s second husband, Simon de Colines, who directed it until Charles’s elder brother Robert came of age, and who would, many years later, print De dissectione on his stepson’s behalf from his own independent press. Charles studied medicine in Paris, completing his training in 1540, and attended the anatomical lectures of Jacques Dubois — Jacobus Sylvius in Latin — who in the 1530s was the most influential teacher of anatomy in the city; in 1535 Andreas Vesalius sat in the same classroom as a fellow pupil. The only illustrated manuals of dissection then available were those of Berengario da Carpi, whose Commentaria super anatomia Mundini of 1521 and its shorter descendant the Isagogae breves of 1522 had been the first anatomical treatises to publish illustrations grounded in the author’s own dissections. The need for a more comprehensive and better-illustrated manual was obvious to any student of anatomy and most obvious of all to the medical-student son of one of the world’s leading publishing houses. Estienne began what became De dissectione in the early 1530s, collaborating with the surgeon Étienne de la Rivière (Riverius, d. 1569), who carried out much of the dissecting and assisted in preparing the plates. The woodcuts were assembled in three distinct stages. Estienne first drew on a set of blocks cut by Jean ‘Mercure’ Jollat (ca. 1490–ca. 1550) and stored in his father-in-law’s atelier — four of these plates bear dates from 1530 to 1532, the earliest work on the book. He then adapted, for sections illustrating internal anatomy, a series of blocks originally cut for non-anatomical purposes, inserting small anatomical vignettes into the pre-existing larger figures. Among the adapted materials were the striking female nudes whose source lay in the series Gli amori degli dei — eighteen erotic mythological prints commissioned by the printmaker Baviera shortly before the Sack of Rome in 1527, designed by Perino del Vaga and Rosso Fiorentino and engraved by Giovanni Giacomo Caraglio — of which eight are adapted here to frame the representation of the female reproductive organs, the borrowing still visible in the ecstatic postures preserved into the anatomical context. Finally, between 1534 and 1539, Estienne commissioned a set of new anatomical plates to complete the programme. Six of the Jollat blocks, together with one further cut, carry the cutter’s signature of a Lorraine cross, associated with the atelier of Geoffroy Tory (Tory himself died in 1533, so the execution lies with his successors); Jacquemin Woeiriot has been proposed as the cutter. The manuscript and its illustrations were substantially in place by 1539, and the book was already in press, with composition carried halfway through Book III, when publication was halted by a suit brought against Estienne at the Parlement of Paris by Rivière, who had attended Sylvius’s lectures from 1533 to 1536 — overlapping Estienne’s own time as a student. According to the eighteenth-century surgeon-economist François Quesnay, Rivière had given Estienne a French manuscript to translate into Latin, and Estienne had then attempted to claim the whole as his own composition. The settlement required him to credit his collaborator for the anatomical preparations and for the pictures of the dissections; he did so on the title-page, which names Stephanus Riverius as the author of the incisionum declarationibus — the descriptions of the incisions — and of the accompanying figures. Two-thirds of the work had already been printed when the suit was lodged; the remainder, together with prefatory matter recording Rivière’s credit, was submitted to the Faculté de Médecine for its approbatio in 1541, and the book at last appeared in 1545 — by which time the Fabrica had been in circulation for two years and the kingdom of anatomical fame had another claimant. A French translation followed from the same press in 1546. The opening of De dissectione announces the new anatomical method: knowledge of the body is not to be derived from books but from the observer’s own eyes, in the observer’s own dissecting-room. The formula is Berengarian in descent, but Estienne had it in print a full decade before Vesalius and was the first to organise a whole book’s worth of observations under it. His text covers the body in systematic order across three books, giving — as Norman has remarked — what would, had it appeared in 1539, have been the first serial presentation of dissection stage by stage; the first to treat and illustrate the whole human body; the first to give instructions for the wiring of the skeleton; and the first to set its anatomical figures within a fully developed panoramic landscape, a tradition whose origins lay in Berengario’s Commentaria but whose visual maturity was first achieved here. The delay of six years, followed by the supervening appearance of the Fabrica, has permanently obscured how large a share of the firsts of printed anatomy belongs in fact to Estienne. Even after its tardy appearance, the work made original contributions across most regions of the body. It offers the first published illustrations of the entire external venous and nervous systems; of the morphology and physiological function of the vascular foramina — the so-called feeding holes of bones; of the tripartite composition of the sternum; of the valvulae in the hepatic veins, described by Estienne as apophyses membranarum (their function still a mystery to him, but the anatomical recognition prior to any other in print); and of the scrotal septum. Its eight dissections of the brain give more anatomical detail than any previously published work. Within its descriptive text the book is the first in print to report the cartilaginous meniscus of the temporomandibular joint, the orbicular ligament of the radius, the courses of the trigeminal and phrenic nerves, the distinction between the sympathetic chain (which Estienne regarded as a nerve) and the vagus, the central canal of the spinal cord and the segmental enlargements of its substance, and the cerebrospinal fluid — together with a discussion of the ideal anatomical theatre and its technique for the preparation of cadavers and the articulation of skeletons. Estienne’s specific contributions to neuroanatomy, recovered in detail by Tubbs, Loukas and Tubbs in their 2014 study, have only relatively recently been given their proper weight. He was, so far as can be established, the first to trace blood vessels into the substance of bone; the first in print to describe what would later be named Glisson’s capsule of the liver; and the first to recognise that the oesophagus and the trachea are distinct organs with distinct functions — not a self-evident observation in an age that routinely grouped them together. His arthrological descriptions of the clavicular joints, of the spine and its ligaments, and of the temporomandibular articulation are among the best of their day. His neuroanatomical chapter — the optic chiasm, the hippocampus, the cerebral ventricles stripped plate by plate through the successive removal of the coverings of the brain, the central canal of the spinal cord, the observation that Galen had missed some of the spinal nerves — is illustrated with a fidelity that on several points exceeded what Vesalius himself had published two years earlier. Estienne also emphasised the parotid, lacrimal, thymus, and lymphatic structures at the root of the mesentery and in the armpit and groin, and his plates of these systems are the first of their kind. The quality of the wood-cutting is correspondingly high, and its diversity of manner is itself an index of the project’s long duration. The opening figure is signed with the initials S.R. of Stephanus Riverius, credited both with the anatomical preparations and with the drawings of the dissections as they were made. Of the large blocks, seven are signed by Jollat, either by name or by his punning sign of the god Mercury; a Lorraine cross on six of these and one other signals the Tory atelier; still other blocks carry blank tablets or scrolls where an artist’s signature might have been added and was not. A characteristic feature of the book, noted by every bibliographer of it, is that the anatomical detail is frequently on a small inset block dropped into a recess cut in the larger surrounding figure: the dissected torso or set of viscera is a late, small block from the 1530s, mortised into a pre-existing heroic or classical figure of an earlier order of composition. This procedure of insert-and-surround explains both the classical dignity of Estienne’s figures and their occasional stylistic disjunctures — the small late anatomical blocks being the work of a different hand and sensibility from the older, larger figures within which they sit. On a number of the male figures — nudes supported upright by trees, arches, and pieces of classical masonry, in attitudes whose ambition has invited comparison with Buonarroti’s — the governing design is probably derived from drawings that Giovanni Battista Rosso (Rosso Fiorentino) is known to have made from disinterred corpses in the cemetery at the Borgo; the decorative frame, as it were, pre-existed the anatomical content eventually set into it. The classical frame is not simply decorative. Estienne’s introduction — an unusual text for a sixteenth-century anatomical book — declares that the work is not intended as a didactic manual for medical students but as a volume for cultivated friends, in which the reader is to approach anatomy as he might approach a work of art: to learn about it, certainly, but also to take aesthetic pleasure in the knowledge and in the order of divine providence that the structure of the body displays. Estienne’s governing verbs are pascere and oblectere — to nourish and to delight — and they apply to the soul as much as to the eye. He writes against the prolixity and ponderousness of academic anatomical writing, preferring concise formulations in the service of comprehension, and frames the book’s religious and aesthetic dimensions as continuous rather than opposed: the body is a divine artefact, and to understand it is as much a devotional as an intellectual act. Images in this conception are not only transmitters of information (although they are that, conveying truths for which words are inadequate); they are also the means by which the reader holds together the intellectual pleasure of understanding and the aesthetic pleasure of beholding. Carlino’s analysis has shown, with the help of the female figures adapted from Gli amori degli dei, how explicitly this programme is figured in the book’s iconographic choices, and how deliberately the latent association between eroticism and anatomy is allowed to surface: the ecstatic postures of Caraglio’s mythological subjects are preserved into the new context, producing a set of images that has no real precedent in anatomy and few direct heirs. The same iconographic register governs the male figures, which transmute the gruesome business of the dissecting-room into the heroic vocabulary of Greek and Roman antiquity. The title-page carries Simon de Colines’s Tempus device (Schreiber’s Tempus I; Renouard Colines no. 1), a winged figure of Time astride a plinth, scythe in hand, his ribbon unfurling with the motto Hanc aciem tempus, sola retundit virtus — Time’s is this blade, which virtue alone can blunt. The device had been in use by Colines for a generation, but nowhere else in his output does it so nearly frame the book’s argument: on the front of an anatomical treatise whose subject is the mortal body, the motto reads with a precision of application that feels less decorative than programmatic. The closeness of the Estienne and Vesalius projects in time and place has long prompted speculation about the direction of influence between them. Vesalius was in Paris from 1533 to 1536, heard Sylvius’s lectures alongside Estienne in 1535, and can hardly have failed to see some part of Estienne’s programme during those years — the early Jollat blocks were by then cut and work on the book was actively under way. The influence, at least with respect to the serial presentation of whole-body anatomy in a landscape setting, may in fact run in the direction one would not otherwise expect: from Estienne to Vesalius rather than the other way round, a suggestion first pressed by Herrlinger. Whatever the balance of borrowing, the historiographical damage of delay was lasting. The Fabrica of 1543 fixed what a modern anatomy book looked like, and Estienne’s volume of 1545, however prior in conception, arrived as its successor rather than as its precursor. Only in the twentieth century have scholars working through De dissectione plate by plate — notably Herrlinger, Kellett and Choulant in the older literature, and more recently Carlino, Sappol, and the neuroanatomical team of Tubbs, Loukas and Tubbs — begun to restore to Charles Estienne the share of early anatomical priority that the lawsuit of 1539, the successful Vesalian claim of 1543, and three and a half centuries of consequent neglect had put beyond his reach. Provenance: a few contemporary marginalia in an Italian italic hand, visible in the lower margins of several text pages; Carolo Moadini (early ownership signature on the front pastedown); Haskell F. Norman (bookplate on the same leaf; his sale, Christie’s New York, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, Part I, 18 March 1998, lot 82). Adams S-1725; Carlino, ‘Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets 1538–1687’, Medical History 43 (1999), Supplement S19, pp. 5–45; Choulant-Frank, pp. 152–155; Cushing (Vesalius), pp. 33–35; Durling 1391; Garrison-Morton 378; Heirs of Hippocrates 256; Herrlinger, History of Medical Illustration, from Antiquity to A.D. 1600, 1970; Kellett, ‘Perino del Vaga et les illustrations pour l’anatomie d’Estienne’, Aesculape 37 (1955), pp. 74–89; McHenry, p. 40; Norman 728; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 5c; Renouard, Colines, pp. 409–410; Sappol, Dream Anatomy, pp. 2, 75, 94–97; Schreiber, Colines 222 and pp. xxxiv–xxxvi; Stillwell Science 626; Tubbs, Loukas & Tubbs, ‘The 16th century anatomist Carolus Stephanus and his contributions to neuroanatomy’, JSM Neurosurgery and Spine 2 (2014), pp. 1014–5; Wellcome 6076.
Folio (392 × 260 mm, with all pinholes preserved). Collation: *–**⁶; A–Z⁸ AA⁶. 202 leaves. Roman type with italic side-notes and index. Simon de Colines’s Tempus I device on title; 62 full-page woodcut illustrations printed from 56 blocks — one signed S.R. (Stephanus Riverius), seven others signed by Jean Jollat either by name or by his Mercury symbol, with a few of the Jollat blocks dated 1530, 1531 or 1532, and six of them plus one further cut signed with the Lorraine cross and ascribable to the Tory atelier (Jacquemin Woeiriot?); 101 small woodcut diagrams in the text (including repeats); 9-, 6- and 3-line white-on-black criblé initials, with a few 3-line woodcut initials. Marginal foxing; some spotting in quires L–S; marginal soiling to title; leaves in first two quires with slight tearing along upper gutters; a few minor marginal wormholes at front; short marginal tears to four or five leaves. Contemporary vellum over pasteboard, the upper layer of the boards made up from a fourteenth-century manuscript leaf in small gothic script (visible through the vellum on both covers); contemporary manuscript title lettering along the lower edges of the boards; later lettering on upper cover and spine; traces of four pairs of ties (eighteenth-century vellum rebacking, some wear).
Item #6596
Price: $95,000.00
