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Details
EUSTACHIUS, Bartholomaeus (ca 1505-1574). Tabulae anatomicae. Edited by Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720). Rome: Francesco Gonzaga, 1714.
2o (363 x 240 mm). Engraved title vignette after Pier Leone Ghezzi, 47 full-page copperplate engravings by Giulio de' Musi after drawings by Eustachi and Pier Matteo Pini. (Lacking the unnumbered engraved graduated scale plate as often, some light foxing, mostly marginal.) Modern half calf and marbled boards.
FIRST EDITION. Perhaps because of the success of Vesalius' Fabrica (1543), Eustachi did not publish the series of 47 anatomical copperplates which he completed in 1552. Instead he issued only the first eight plates as illustrations in his Opuscula Anatomica (1564), while the remaining thirty-nine were lost for over a century after his death. The long search for these missing plates, culminating in their discovery in the hands of a descendant of the artist, Pier Matteo Pini, and their publication by the papal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, is a familiar anecdote in the history of medical illustration. Eustachi prepared the series to illustrate a projected book entitled De Dissensionibus ac Controversiis Anatomicis, the text of which was lost after his death. The plates are strikingly modern, produced without the conventional sixteenth-century decorative accompaniments and framed on three sides by numbered rules providing coordinates by which any part of the image could be located. An unnumbered plate with graduated scales was provided by the publisher to be cut out and used as a location aid. The images are generic figures, composites of many anatomical observations, and are mathematically as well as representationally exact. Choulant-Frank, pp. 200-202; Garrison-Morton 391; Heirs of Hippocrates 324; Herrlinger, pp. 132-122; Lilly, p. 41; Norman 740; Wellcome II, p. 536.
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FIRST EDITION. Perhaps because of the success of Vesalius' Fabrica (1543), Eustachi did not publish the series of 47 anatomical copperplates which he completed in 1552. Instead he issued only the first eight plates as illustrations in his Opuscula Anatomica (1564), while the remaining thirty-nine were lost for over a century after his death. The long search for these missing plates, culminating in their discovery in the hands of a descendant of the artist, Pier Matteo Pini, and their publication by the papal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, is a familiar anecdote in the history of medical illustration. Eustachi prepared the series to illustrate a projected book entitled De Dissensionibus ac Controversiis Anatomicis, the text of which was lost after his death. The plates are strikingly modern, produced without the conventional sixteenth-century decorative accompaniments and framed on three sides by numbered rules providing coordinates by which any part of the image could be located. An unnumbered plate with graduated scales was provided by the publisher to be cut out and used as a location aid. The images are generic figures, composites of many anatomical observations, and are mathematically as well as representationally exact. Choulant-Frank, pp. 200-202; Garrison-Morton 391; Heirs of Hippocrates 324; Herrlinger, pp. 132-122; Lilly, p. 41; Norman 740; Wellcome II, p. 536.