The identity of the artists involved in Vesalius's Fabrica 1543.

INTRODUCTION ANDREAS VESALIUS failed to mention by name the illustrators of his De humani corporis fabrica (1543) and no marks can be found on the woodcuts which help to identify the draughtsman or the engraver. Although the name of Jan Stevens, better known as J. S. van Calcar [1499-1546] appeared in the colophon of the Tabulae anatomicae sex, 1538, the analysis by O'Malley (1964) of the production of the Fabrica casts doubts upon the idea that Jan Steven van Calcar also made the drawings for the Fabrica. Vesalian scholars, on the other hand, have never made any attempt to identify the engraver. Four centuries after Vesalius's death the identity of the Fabrica's illustrators is, therefore, still far from established, and a perusal of Ivins' essay (1952) tends to make a solution seem more unlikely. Recent studies superseding Choulant's (1852) classic monograph are discarded by Ivins; Cushing's information (1942) on grounds of misinterpreting technical facts, and the study by Singer and Rabin (1946) on account of their uncritical statements. The problem is far from being a literary quest because historians rank Vesalius's Fabrica 1543 as the great medical achievement of the Renaissance, and the fame of this book was very much dependent on its breakthrough in anatomical illustration. The artists of that period were devoted to anatomical studies of their own for aesthetic reasons, and an unbiased study of this problem might acknowledge in fair terms the credit due to Vesalius without overlooking the credit due to the artists of the Fabrica. Evidence is now offered bearing upon the identity of the engravers of the Fabrica, which also confirms the role of Jan Steven van Calcar in the drawings. But it must be acknowledged that the pursuit of this research has proved to be an exercise in rectifying references from sources hitherto accepted as consistent and reliable.