Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

Folio (394 x 267 mm). Ornamental frontispiece with 47 engraved plates (some spotting throughout.) Contemporary carta rustica (soiling, rubbing, darkening to spine). Provenance: Leo Samuele Olschki (1861-1940), Italian book publisher (ownership bookplate).

Second Rome edition. The plates included in the present volume are believed to have been completed by Eustachi in 1554 but only a few published prior to his death twenty years later. The plates were rediscovered in the Vatican Library in 1714 and presented to Giovanni Maria Lancisi, personal physician of Pope Clement XI, for publication. Eustachi is known to have utilized multiple cadavers in constructing his anatomical impressions of the human body, and printed them as etchings rather than woodcuts, allowing for far greater detail. It is believed that had the present etchings been published in Eustachi's lifetime it would have been he rather than Andreas Vesalius who would be considered the founder of human anatomy. Garrison & Morton 391; Wellcome II, 536.