A new view of the Vesalian landscape.

OF all medical books, the De humani corporisfabrica of Andreas Vesalius in its two folio editions of 1543 and 1555 has probably been the object of most study and attention. Even today when its difficult late Latin and the absence of a full English translation make it inaccessible to all but a small number of scholars, its woodcut illustrations are still familiar to any one with the slightest interest in medical history. The larger illustrations have been pored over by art historians as well as historians of medicine, but there has been a marked lack of unanimity on many points including the identity of the artist or artists. Though there are more than two hundred illustrations in the book, most of the attention from the artistic side has been focused on the fourteen full-page figures of "muscle-men" in the second book. One distinguishing feature of these which is not found elsewhere in Vesalius or his contemporary anatomists is the use of parts of a detailed and convincing landscape as background to the figures. Whereas bits of rock and vegetation are drawn in as decoration for the skeletal figures, the muscle-men stand against hills and valleys, villages and trees, and even a Roman ruin. The total effect is one of actuality and close observation which is not characteristic of earlier anatomical books. At least since 1903,1 it has been recognized that the backgrounds of a number of muscle-men can be linked together to form a panoramic landscape, or more probably two separate landscapes. Cushing2 reproduced the anterior and posterior series of muscle figures arranged to show this feature. The curious thing is that when assembled this way in an order dictated by the landscape, the figures appear roughly in the reverse of the expected order, with the most dissected man at the beginning (left) of each series and the whole ecorche on the right. Besides being contrary to custom and logic, this is the opposite of the order in which they occur in the published Fabrica itself. This peculiarity was remarked on by Wiegand,3 who disposed of it by saying that whereas our twentieth-century minds expect a consistent presentation, the men of the sixteenth century were not so trammelled, and by O'Malley,' who used the