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SALVAGE, Jean Galbert (1770-1813). Anatomie du Gladiateur combattant, applicable aux beaux arts, ou traité des os, des muscles, du mcanisme des mouvemens, des proportions et des caractre du corps humain. Paris: chez l'Auteur, 1812.
2o (594 x 430 mm). Half title. 22 engraved plates including frontispiece (16 printed in red and black), all after Savage. Modern quarter blue morocco preserving original boards (some wear to board edges). Provenance: indistinct monogram ink stamp on most plates.
FIRST EDITION. Salvage, an army surgeon at the military hospital of Val-de Grâce, studied drawing and the art of plaster casting. He created three monumental écorchés of a gladiator in combat, preserved at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, on which he based this beautiful atlas. Salvage's atlas was in the tradition of Genga's anatomy for artists, which presented the anatomy through the ideal forms of ancient sculpture, except that Salvage based most of it on his own sculptural studies. Salvage's frontispiece was engraved by Nicholai Outkin (1780-1868) but most of the rest of his drawings were engraved by Jean Bosq. "His plates are based on three casts of bodies dissected to different anatomical layers and set in the pose of the Borghese Gladiator. For these casts he preferred to use the bodies of soldiers in their prime killed in duels rather than patients who died as a result of illness... The plates are colour-coded, with the muscles in red ink and the bones in black ink. The anatomy of the Borghese Gladiator is depicted in four views in a series of eleven plates. The contour of the body in the skeleton plates is given in red ink, and a broken line of the same colour is used for the detached muscles in the plates of deeper dissection... This system of transparent anatomy serves as an effective aide-mémoire for the viewer of the different anatomical layers and was a popular method of anatomical illustration" (Cazort, Kornell & Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy [1996], pp 219-220). Salvage's atlas also incorporates anatomical representations of the Belvedere Apollo, the Apollo of Florence, the infant Bacchus and the Farnese Hercules. Choulant-Frank, p. 332; Duval & Cuyer, Histoire de l'Anatomie Plastique (1898) pp. 262-78 (reproducing two of Salvage's écorchés); Sappol, Dream Anatomy pp. 136 and 138; Waller 8435.
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FIRST EDITION. Salvage, an army surgeon at the military hospital of Val-de Grâce, studied drawing and the art of plaster casting. He created three monumental écorchés of a gladiator in combat, preserved at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, on which he based this beautiful atlas. Salvage's atlas was in the tradition of Genga's anatomy for artists, which presented the anatomy through the ideal forms of ancient sculpture, except that Salvage based most of it on his own sculptural studies. Salvage's frontispiece was engraved by Nicholai Outkin (1780-1868) but most of the rest of his drawings were engraved by Jean Bosq. "His plates are based on three casts of bodies dissected to different anatomical layers and set in the pose of the Borghese Gladiator. For these casts he preferred to use the bodies of soldiers in their prime killed in duels rather than patients who died as a result of illness... The plates are colour-coded, with the muscles in red ink and the bones in black ink. The anatomy of the Borghese Gladiator is depicted in four views in a series of eleven plates. The contour of the body in the skeleton plates is given in red ink, and a broken line of the same colour is used for the detached muscles in the plates of deeper dissection... This system of transparent anatomy serves as an effective aide-mémoire for the viewer of the different anatomical layers and was a popular method of anatomical illustration" (Cazort, Kornell & Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy [1996], pp 219-220). Salvage's atlas also incorporates anatomical representations of the Belvedere Apollo, the Apollo of Florence, the infant Bacchus and the Farnese Hercules. Choulant-Frank, p. 332; Duval & Cuyer, Histoire de l'Anatomie Plastique (1898) pp. 262-78 (reproducing two of Salvage's écorchés); Sappol, Dream Anatomy pp. 136 and 138; Waller 8435.