artists, printers, and new audiences -- 2/12/25

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Today's selection-- from Andreas Vesalius and his Fabrica, 1537-1564 by Vivian Nutton. Preparing the 1543 Fabrica.

“How much of a hurry is often underestimated. The Fabrica is of a size and complexity greater than any previous book on the subject. A large folio, approximately 43 cm in height, and, excluding the index, over 660 pages in length, it contains an enormous number of woodcut illustrations. Each of the estimated 277 images had to be drawn and cut individually, even if some of the blocks themselves would later be set together on the same page to show the same structures from different angles or, as with the spinal vertebrae, at different levels. Nonetheless, by mid-August 1542, the wood blocks were ready for dispatch from Venice, where they were cut, and almost all the text would have been written by August 1 or soon after, the date given in the dedication. The text itself was well over 300,000 words long, a remarkable achievement in little more than two and a half years of writing. In addition, Vesalius had devised and organised a complicated system of references and fonts that had to be carefully explained to Oporinus when the blocks were about to be sent. Vesalius' copy text that was sent to Basie was marked up with indications of where the illustrations should go and the type of font that should be used. A book of such size and complexity is extremely impressive even today and made possible, so Niccolo Massa later claimed, only by the relative absence of other duties and distractions such as those that filled much of his years in imperial service after 1543. Decisions about what to include must have been made at an early stage, for creating images took time. All would have involved one or more preparatory drawings, and once made to Vesalius' satisfaction, even more time would have been required for the images to be transferred to the blocks and then carefully cut. The process would not have been speedy, even with the involvement of several artists and block-cutters.It is perhaps not surprising that they became bad tempered at being made to work so quickly and so long by such a demanding client.

The Fabrica is known for its highly detailed illustrations of human dissections, often in allegorical poses.

“Who these unnamed artists were has exercised Vesalian scholars for generations. The length of time required to produce the images, as well as the different styles of drawing that can be seen, sometimes, as in the musclemen figures, even within the image itself, excludes any notion of 'the' artist of the Fabrica. Rinaldo Canalis divided the plates into three groups: some schematic drawings, a large number of small and medium­ sized figures of isolated or compound anatomical structures, and, thirdly, the famous 'musclemen' and the three skeletons. The witty initial letters that open each chapter and depict putti and sometimes humans engaged in creepily playful activity as dissectors or surgeons may also have formed a distinct category of work. This classification is helpful, but only up to a point, for an artist could very well have worked on more than one type of image, and the identification of the block-cutters still remains mysterious. 

“Vesalius, who used schematic images in his lectures and in the China Root Letter, contributed to those in the first category himself as well as giving advice and criticism throughout. Sometimes in describing the images he used the first person singular 'I', but elsewhere, when he employed the plural 'we', his personal involvement is less certain, although not excluded. In Book II, Chapter 26, he sketched a geomet­rical diagram of the outline of the muscle moving the scapula to clarify what had been depicted earlier, as well as, underneath, another diagram explaining what Galen had meant ‘obscurely’ when he compared it to a trapezium. He likewise included his own reconstruction of what the vena cava would look like if Galen had been correct in his oft-repeated statement that it split into two at the right side of the heart, inviting his readers to compare this with the true picture at Book VI, Fig. 5. Later, in commenting on a small drawing of the seminal veins, he explains that ‘we decided to depict an alternative pattern’ that is seen only rarely but which he then describes verbally. A rough sketch of what the right and left cerebral ventricles look like from the side on is also likely to be his. A further illustration in the notes to Book IV specifies how the schematic picture of the plexus of nerves above the first rib had come about: in his last dissection at Padua he had cut away all branches of the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth pairs of nerves going to the arm of the corpse from which the illustration was made. He also warned that the plexus did not always display the same appearance, a useful way of deflecting criticism. Other parts of the vena cava system, for example, the depiction of the fibres in the veins, he had earlier drawn for use in his teaching. Those showing minor features of the vena cava system seem to have been prepared early and had their initial identifiers added later to coincide with those on the full length figure. He may also have contributed to drawing some diagrams and small figures, such as the oblique line in the margin of p. 69 or the picture of two thoracic vertebrae from the body of a child that shows their ligaments, something that other noise would have been difficult to reproduce without having attended the actual dissection.”

author:	Vivian Nutton
title:	Andreas Vesalius and his Fabrica, 1537-1564: Changing the World of Anatomy (Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine)
publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
pages:	83-85