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GAUTIER D'AGOTY, Jacques and Joseph Guichard DUVERNEY. Anatomie de la tête, en tableaux imprimés... Paris: Gautier, Duverney and Quillau, 1748.
Broadsheets (554 x 394 mm). Title printed in red and black, dedication and advertisement, and 8 full-page color mezzotints, each varnished. (A few short marginal tears.) Contemporary green stained vellum, gilt (rebacked, old spine laid down). Provenance: Fort Hill (bookplate); Lurley Manor (bookplate).
FIRST EDITION. The startling detail of the intricate network of blood vessels shows the superiority of Gautier's magnificent work. Blake, p.169; Choulant-Frank, p.271; NLM/Blake, p.169; Wellcome II, p.97.
[Bound with:]
Anatomie generale des visceres, et de la neurologie, angeologie et osteologie du corps humain, en figures, de colours et grandeurs naturelles. [Paris: l'Auteur and Delaguette, 1754].
2o. 18 full-page color mezzotints, 12 of the plates designed to fit together in threes to make four life-size human figures. (Bound out of order, plate 6 with small abrasion to image, plate one with some worming, affecting image.)
FIRST EDITION. Between the completion of Anatomie de la Tête in 1748 and the complete Anatomie Générale in 1754, Gautier terminated his relationship with the physician Duverney, and replaced him with Mertrud, the King's Surgeon. Gautier's work on the anatomy of the head includes several finely detailed images from dissections made by Pierre Tarin, who stepped in temporarily as a collaborator after Duverney's departure. The image of the blood vessels of the skin of two dissected heads prepared by Tarin is particularly striking. By this time Gautier was either performing his own dissections or directing others to dissect, and he had made wax models of the dissections, which were painted and on view in his studio.
The Anatomie Générale includes several spectacular full-length plates, made from three plates which could be fitted together. "Perhaps Gautier achieved nothing finer in his art than the molding in mezzotint of that first full-length female figure, forming the first three of the Anatomie Générale,... The first man is almost equally grand, with some emphasis of bone structure... There is also a marvelous and perhaps erotic plate of a new-born child in dissection, peacefully asleep by the open womb-across a double page, surely one of the great plates of all anatomic illustration" (Franklin, Early Colour Printing, p. 46).
"Gautier's pictures seem to us to be in the tradition of the early gravida illustrations and the figures of Berengario and Charles Estienne--often attracting attention through sexual emphasis: dissected parts were placed within a living body, usually possessing a lively face, whose expression is sometimes quizzical, sometimes erotically inviting, sometimes serene, always with a romantic and elegant hair-style. In one of Gautier's plates there are two naked women, one standing with emphatic breasts and dissected pregnant uterus, the other sitting at her feet with open thighs so disposed as to exhibit her external genitalia. Such erotic figures may have also played a useful role in the sex education of physicians and others; they may be contrasted in their romantic extravagance of feeling with the matter-of-fact illustration in William Smellie's work (1754) an illustration that was often torn out by nineteenth century bowdlerizers. (Most previous illustrations of this area, such as those of Leonardo or Vesalius, were remarkably inaccurate.) The Gautier figures could, within the confines of anatomy, be quite tender, as in the fine plate in Anatomie générale... of a new-born child, asleep but dissected, lying close to the recently-delivered mother, whose uterus has been opened for display" (Roberts & Tomlinson pp. 524-25). Anatomie de la Couleur, 103; Choulant-Frank p.271; Singer 21-28 & 117-134.
Broadsheets (554 x 394 mm). Title printed in red and black, dedication and advertisement, and 8 full-page color mezzotints, each varnished. (A few short marginal tears.) Contemporary green stained vellum, gilt (rebacked, old spine laid down). Provenance: Fort Hill (bookplate); Lurley Manor (bookplate).
FIRST EDITION. The startling detail of the intricate network of blood vessels shows the superiority of Gautier's magnificent work. Blake, p.169; Choulant-Frank, p.271; NLM/Blake, p.169; Wellcome II, p.97.
[Bound with:]
Anatomie generale des visceres, et de la neurologie, angeologie et osteologie du corps humain, en figures, de colours et grandeurs naturelles. [Paris: l'Auteur and Delaguette, 1754].
2
FIRST EDITION. Between the completion of Anatomie de la Tête in 1748 and the complete Anatomie Générale in 1754, Gautier terminated his relationship with the physician Duverney, and replaced him with Mertrud, the King's Surgeon. Gautier's work on the anatomy of the head includes several finely detailed images from dissections made by Pierre Tarin, who stepped in temporarily as a collaborator after Duverney's departure. The image of the blood vessels of the skin of two dissected heads prepared by Tarin is particularly striking. By this time Gautier was either performing his own dissections or directing others to dissect, and he had made wax models of the dissections, which were painted and on view in his studio.
The Anatomie Générale includes several spectacular full-length plates, made from three plates which could be fitted together. "Perhaps Gautier achieved nothing finer in his art than the molding in mezzotint of that first full-length female figure, forming the first three of the Anatomie Générale,... The first man is almost equally grand, with some emphasis of bone structure... There is also a marvelous and perhaps erotic plate of a new-born child in dissection, peacefully asleep by the open womb-across a double page, surely one of the great plates of all anatomic illustration" (Franklin, Early Colour Printing, p. 46).
"Gautier's pictures seem to us to be in the tradition of the early gravida illustrations and the figures of Berengario and Charles Estienne--often attracting attention through sexual emphasis: dissected parts were placed within a living body, usually possessing a lively face, whose expression is sometimes quizzical, sometimes erotically inviting, sometimes serene, always with a romantic and elegant hair-style. In one of Gautier's plates there are two naked women, one standing with emphatic breasts and dissected pregnant uterus, the other sitting at her feet with open thighs so disposed as to exhibit her external genitalia. Such erotic figures may have also played a useful role in the sex education of physicians and others; they may be contrasted in their romantic extravagance of feeling with the matter-of-fact illustration in William Smellie's work (1754) an illustration that was often torn out by nineteenth century bowdlerizers. (Most previous illustrations of this area, such as those of Leonardo or Vesalius, were remarkably inaccurate.) The Gautier figures could, within the confines of anatomy, be quite tender, as in the fine plate in Anatomie générale... of a new-born child, asleep but dissected, lying close to the recently-delivered mother, whose uterus has been opened for display" (Roberts & Tomlinson pp. 524-25). Anatomie de la Couleur, 103; Choulant-Frank p.271; Singer 21-28 & 117-134.