Andreae Vesalii bruxellensis, scholae medicorum Patauinæ professoris, de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem
THE RENAISSANCE OF ANATOMY,
THE ANATOMY OF THE RENAISSANCE
Basel: Johannes Oporinus, June 1543. First edition.
Folio in 6s (15 11/16” x 10 3/8”, 399mm x 264mm): *6 A-Z6 a-l6 m8(+χ1) n-z6 Aa-Ll6 Mm8 [$4 signed; –*1; +Mm5; p5 signed “p4”]. 359 leaves, pp. [12] (woodcut title, blank, 6pp. dedication to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 2pp. letter to Oporinus, woodcut portrait, blank) 1 2-312 2213-312 [6] (legend to the double-page illustration, double-page woodcut of the arteries, blank, supplemental half-sheet of diagrams, blank) 315-352 353 354 [2] (second leaf of double-page woodcut of the nerves, blank) 355-391 492-661 2658-659 [37] (errata, 34pp. index, colophon, printer’s mark). [=xii, 669, xxxvii] With more than 200 woodcuts, of which ca. 25 are full-page (including the title-page and portrait of Vesalius) and 2 double-page (including an additional half-sheet (2m3) intended to be cut and pasted onto the first double-page woodcut). Collated complete against the register, Cushing et al.
Bound in paneled and stabbed Dutch vellum (remboîtage) with yapp edges and (the remains of) two pairs of ties, with the author and title (“ANDREAE. VESALII./ DE. HUMANI.CORPORIS./ FABRICA.”) gilt to the front cover. On the spine, five panels. All edges of the text-block gilt.
Remboîtage (i.e., old material reused). Some creasing and soiling, with the ties perished. Washed and pressed (perhaps mid-XXc?), but still nicely patinated. Repairs with infill to the title-leaf (*1), portrait-leaf (*6), S5 (pp. 213-214), Cc5-Dd6 (pp. 585-600) and Ll1-Mm8 (pp. 9-34 of the index and the colophon leaf). Graphite corrections to pp. 214, 348 and Ll6v (index). Ink marginalia to p. 607 (“Henrico Regi”) and to Kk2v (the errata: “Non mea, sed tua sunt, quae sunt bona, nõ tua ?caeli/sed mea sunt, si q~ sunt mala, fuimus Deus.”). Presented in a cloth clam-shell box.
Andreas Vesalius (Andries van Wesel, 1514–1564) at the tender age of 29 revolutionized medicine. He published, in the De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (“seven books on the substance of the human body”), the first modern work of anatomy, based on his own dissections and analysis. The woodcut title-page depicts the revolution: in a grand neoclassical hall Vesalius dissects a woman, holding his finger up in the timeless pose of teachers, while the barber-surgeons — who dissected while doctors stood at a distance and opined — quibble over their unused blades below.
Born in Brussels to a family long in medical service to Holy Roman Emperors, he studied at Leuven (Louvain, not to be confused with the modern Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven) and briefly at Paris before completing his doctoral studies at Leuven. On the day of his graduation — a fantasy to modern scholars — he was made the chair of surgery at the University of Padua (within the Republic of Venice). During a tour through Italy he met Jan Steven van Calcar (1499–1546), a pupil of Titian’s, who is generally agreed to be responsible for many if not most of the woodcut illustrations.[1] Armed with the ability to disseminate visually the work of his own dissections, he set about correcting the errors of the great Roman anatomist Galen, who used macaques and other mammals to extrapolate the principles of human anatomy. The court at Padua allowed Vesalius to use the cadavers of executed criminals, which he supplemented with a little grave-robbing (particularly for women).
Although the understanding of the circulation of the blood under the action of the heart wouldn’t come till Harvey in 1628, the Fabrica (not to be confused with the Epitome, a highly abridged summary with just 11 woodcuts) wholly remade — as perhaps no other single book has — the entire field of anatomy, surgery and medicine, which had remained mired in the ancient world much as geography was essentially limited to Ptolemy until the discoveries of Columbus. And just as maps began to reshape geographies into atlases, the woodcuts of the Fabrica created for the first time an anatomical atlas — still indispensable to medical students and doctors today — that could be used for teaching as well as for the practice of medicine. Indeed, the full-page woodcuts of skeletons (particularly the famous “Alas, poor Yorick” of a skeleton regarding a skull,[2] p. 164) and écorchés (i.e., flayed figures revealing layers of muscle) have become icons of the field. The smaller illustrations throughout — including inhabited initials depicting babies and dwarves doing medicine — are as rich or richer sources of practical knowledge rendered clear through the bold line of woodcuts.[3]
No medical book has a richer Nachleben. It is included in the epochal list of the monuments of printed books in the history of thought, Printing and the Mind of Man (no. 71: “no other work equals it”). Heirs of Hippocrates, the compendium of medical books in the collection of the University of Iowa calls it “the heart of any library of medical history” and Garrison-Morton “the greatest event in medical history since Galen.” The work has long commanded strong prices. Haskell F. Norman’s (uniquely) fully colored copy — probably Vesalius’ presentation copy to Charles V (a very good job application; he was named imperial court physician subsequently) — made over $1.6M at his 18 March 1998 sale at Christie’s. Vesalius’ own copy of the second edition, marked with his annotations for the unrealized third, sold in the same rooms for over $2.2M in 2024; that volume is now at KU in Leuven.
The present example, rebound in old vellum (perhaps from an Ortelius atlas; it’s certainly Dutch), has little to connect it with specific owners but at least three distinct phases of marks of reading. Beneath a dissection of the skull an early hand has written “Henrico Regi” (to King Henry), which must refer to Vesalius’ attempt (considered by some to be apocryphal; he certainly consulted) to save the life of Henri II of France, who was injured during a joust celebrating the weddings of both his daughter and his sister 30 June 1559. When a splinter of his opponent’s lance went through the visor of his helmet, it entered his skull through the eye. Ambroise Paré, the king’s physician, called on Vesalius to come from Brussels; treatment was not successful, and the modern consensus is that Henri died from meningoencephalitis. The two verses at the errata verge on doggerel; they might be rendered “they are not mine but yours, those things that are good; not yours from heaven, but they are mine, if any are ill; we have been God (?)” It might have been written by any student in the XVIc or XVIIc. Finally, the graphite corrections are minor (“externo” corrected to “interno” on p. 214, an “et” inserted on p. 348, “Musc. pectoralis minor 263 unten” in the index suggesting a German annotator).
Cushing, Vesalius VI.A.-1; Garrison-Morton 375; Heirs of Hippocrates 281; Osler 567; Printing and the Mind of Man 71; Wellcome 6560.
[1] Scholarly opinion has vacillated on this question for centuries; in 2014 the art-historian Martin Kemp, an authority on the relationship between medicine and science, reasserted Calcar’s role in most of the illustrations, adding that Vesalius himself likely contribued some of the smaller ones; he suggested Giuseppe Porta (alias Salviati) as the artist responsible for the title-page.
[2] On the altar is inscribed “vivitur ingenio, caetera mortis erunt” from pseudo-Vergil’s first of two elegies on the death of Maecenas (I.38). It has long been a scholar’s rallying-cry, and might be rendered “one lives through genius; everything else is death’s.”
[3] The woodblocks themselves survived into the XXc. They had been lost and rediscovered many times, but finally by Dr. Willy Wiegand in the 1930’s. He located 227 of those original 277 blocks stored in the attic of the library at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and with additional support from the New York Academy of Medicine printed them in a limited edition in 1935. The blocks were reduced to splinters by Allied bombing in WW2.
Item #JLR0766
Price: $475,000