VALVERDE DE HAMUSCO, Juan de (fl. 1560). Anatomia del corpo humano. Rome: Ant. Salamanca, 1560.
VALVERDE DE HAMUSCO, Juan de (fl. 1560). Anatomia del corpo humano. Rome: Ant. Salamanca, 1560.

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VALVERDE DE HAMUSCO, Juan de (fl. 1560). Anatomia del corpo humano. Rome: Ant. Salamanca, 1560.

2o (290 x 195 mm). Engraved title-page within an architectural border with skeletons and small scenes of anatomy lessons and 42 full-page engraved plates. (Some pale dampstaining and occasional pale spotting.) 18th-century Spanish limp vellum (inner hinges reinforced, some soiling); quarter cloth folding case. Provenance: Conde de Fuentes (booklabel on title verso).

FIRST EDITION IN ITALIAN, second-issue title-page (dated MDLX). Valverde improved upon Vesalius's anatomical observations of the ear, the pregnant uterus, and above all the pulmonary circuit of the blood (a discovery in fact due to Valverde's teacher Colombo), illustrating the work with engraved, reduced and reversed copies of Vesalius's woodcuts (all but 15 of the plates are based on those of the Fabrica). Valverde's justification of this plagiarism was that the re-use of the Vesalian figures would permit the reader to perceive better the differences between Vesalius's theories and Valverde's. Many of the cuts embellish on the original Vesalian figures through the addition of new details, such as suits of armor or different heads; others are combinations of two or more of the Vesalian woodcuts. The 15 new cuts include the famous image of a flayed body holding his own skin and a dagger, "possibly suggested by Michelangelo's flayed skin in the Sistine Chapel" (Harvard/Mortimer Italian 513). Adams V-230 (first issue); Brunet V:1067-8; Choulant-Frank, pp. 205-8; NLM/Durling 4532.

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