Tabulae Anatomicae, Casserius 16th C.

Here is a copperplate engraving from De formato foetu liber singularis, commissioned by the Paduan anatomist Casserius. It shows a classic renaissance Venus filleted lotus-like to reveal her child. The plate, as well as some 95 others, represent the high point of Paudan/Venetian anatomical illustration and were published in three separate titles after Casserius’ untimely death. 

Julius Casserius (AKA Giulio Caeesrio, Giulius Casseri, or Casserii Placentini) was born ca.1556 or ca.1561 in Piancenza, Italy. Casserius’ father died when he was young and, being nearly destitute, he entered the houshold of the noted Paduan Anatomist, Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente (AKA Fabricus). After showing extraordinary initiative, the master took it on himself to teach Casserius anatomy. Casserius went from family servant to auditor to surgical disciple.

Casserius enrolled in the Università Artista and studied under both Fabricus and Gerolamo Mercuriale (Mercurialis). After his graduation, ca.1580, he acted as Fabricus’ preprator, university surgical examiner, as well as a physician and surgeon.

But there would soon be trouble in Padua. In 1595 Casserius became a substitute for Fabricus and his lectures were a bit too enthusiastically received for Fabricus’ taste. The old master, enraged with jealousy, banned Casserius from giving private lectures through an old statutory rule. According to the records it would be nearly eight years until Casserius lectured again.

During this time Casserius began to publish his first works on anatomy: De vocis auditusque organis Historia anatomica was published in 1601 and Pentaestheion in 1609. After these books he began writing the text and compiling the drawings for a comprehensive atlas of anatomy.

Back to the rivalry: In 1613, after 50 years of public lectureship, Fabricus was permitted to scale back his teaching, and his replacement, against his wishes was, of course, Casserius. In 1616 Casserius began his first and only public anatomy lecture. Shortly after the three week course he caught a fever and died on 8 Mar 1613. His master and nemesis, Fabricus, would survive him by three years.

After Casserius’ death his commissioned plates, via his heirs, ended up with Adriaan van der Spieghel (Spigelius), who had succeeded both Casserius and Fabricus as professor of Anatomy and Surgery. Spigelius intended to use the plates in his own anatomy atlas, but died an untimely death in 1625.

Here is where all the bibliographic fun begins. After Spigelius’ death, his son in law, Liberale Crema, edited one of his manuscripts and illustrated it with nine of Casserius’ plates. The book, De formato foetu liber singularis, published in 1626, was perhaps the first OB-Gyn classic. A year later, Jan Rindfleisch (AKA Bucretius) edited Spigelus’ unfinished altas and illustrated it with Casserius’ plates. In 1627 he also published 95 of the plates with his own annotations, as Tabulae Anatomicae. Some time later the Tabulae and De formato foetu were published as a single volume.

Here are some plates that appeared in both Spigelius’ Fabrica and Casserius’Tabulae:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since Vesalius’ de Fabrica, the Paduan anatomists relied on the artists of Venice and Casserius was no exception. His plates were drawn by the Venetian painter and print-maker Odoardo Fialetti (AKA Edoardus Fialettus), who studied under Tintoretto, and the engravings were prepared by Francesco Valesio (Franciscus Vallesius).

If Vesalius’ illustrations were the model for the woodblock then Casserius’ illustrations were the model for copperplate. It would be nearly 80 years before better anatomical illustrations were published and Casserius’ work would be plagiarized well into the 18th century.

Here are few more plates from De formato foetu:

 

 

Venetie, 15th C.

Virtually nothing is known about the early life of Jacopo de’ Barbari. He may have been born as early as 1450 or as late as 1470, probably in Venice but possibly in Nuremburg. He may have studied under the Italian painter Alvise Vivarini, or maybe not. The first thing we know for certain is that he met Albrecht Dürer during Dürer’s Wanderjahre in 1495.

Not much more is known about Anton Kolb. He was a merchant from Nuremburg who ended up in Venice as a member of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Guild of German Merchants), where, according to later records, he was trying to sell Latin copies of Schedel’s Weltchronik.

Sometime around 1497 Kolb approached Barbari with a proposal to prepare a large-scale bird’s-eye view of Venice. The result – the Venetie M.D. or Pianta di Venezia or Plan of Venice – simply had no precedent in the history of cartography or printmaking. It was also, somewhat suprisingly, Barbari’s first attributed work.

Kolb never stated exactly how Barbari composed the view, but as Juergen Schultz points out in his classic analysis, it must have been prepared from dozens, perhaps hundreds of bell tower sightings:

“... Jacapo’s view is neither a giant landscape drawing made in the field, nor a carefully compiled, foreshortened plan, it can only be a studio fabrication. It must have been assembled mosaic-fashion at the drawing table from a myriad of small view details made from heights throughout the city.” ²

The final plan, which took Barbari at least two years to complete, shows the city from a vantage point somewhere above San Giorgio Maggiore. It sweeps outward and upward in a great curve to the horizon – a perspective that was designed to be best viewed horizontally, perhaps unrolled across a great table.

Every step in the map’s production was unprecedented. Kolb obtained six of the largest (as large as 684 × 1000 mm) fine-grained woodblocks ever prepared. Barbari traced his plan on them and they were then cut by master engravers in Venice or Nuremburg. The final printing required six sheets of specially commissioned paper twice the size of an imperial folio, then the largest sheets produced by any Venetian paper maker. The result was a monstrous 1.3 × 2.8 m (or nearly 13 ft²) map. Kolb’s capital outlay for the project must have been enormous.

Kolb stated that he was issuing his map “principally for the fama (glory) of this illustrious city of Venice” and in Oct 1500 he appealed to the Venetian government for a copyright as well as the right to recoup his costs by selling the print for the shocking price of three ducats.³ The Collegio must have known the nature of the map well in advance; although it wasn’t cartographically rigorous by modern standards, it was still accurate enough to aid an invading army. Perhaps out of civic pride – after all the city was at the height of it’s imperial power – they gave him a four-year copyright and a tax-free export license:

College. Notatorio, register 15, c. 28r. 30 Oct 1500.

Although Barberi played fast-and-loose with cartographic conventions like perspective and scale he, nevertheless, included an amount of detail that would literally take years of close reading to fully appreciate. He included several hundred place names, several thousand buildings and, as one commenter wrote, tens of thousands of windows and chimney pots. As the major sea power of the day he, of course, included every imaginable type of Venetian ship – from the ever-present gondolas to the Doge’s 1462 Bucintoro. He even went so far as to include – perhaps as a cautionary tale – the former Senate Secretary Antonio Landi, hanging by his neck in Canal de San Secondo. It was a stunning achievement and the largest woodblock image for more than a century.

Detail, St. Mark’s Square

Detail, Rialto Bridge

Close detail, Santa Maria dei Frari Monastary

Close detail, Ghetto Nuvo (the Jewish Ghetto)

Detail, Murano

By the time the plan was offered for sale in the autumn of 1500 Barbari had already moved to Nuremburg to work as a portrait painter and miniaturist for Emperor Maximillian I. In 1503 he was reported in Wittenburg working for the Great Duke Frederick of Saxony. In 1504 he again met Dürer where they apparently discussed drawing human proportion. By Mar of 1510 he was in the employ of Archduchess Margaret in Brussels. In Jan 1511 he became ill and in Mar of the same year, the Archduchess gave him a pension for life on account of his age and weakness. He died sometime around 1516.

The plan was reprinted, with minor corrections and updates in 1514 (the example presented here) and again in the late 16th century.

Detail, NE wind putti. The bearded figure may be Barbari’s self-portrait

1. Unless otherwise noted, all the images here are from the ca.1514 second-state copy at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (online).

2. Schulz, Juergen. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500. The Art Bulletin. 1978 Sep; 60(3): 425–474 (Jstor). For another analysis see: Howard, Deborah. Venice as a Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View. Artibus et Historiae. 1997 18(35): 101–111 (Jstor).

3. The orignal woodblocks (as well as three of the first-state maps) are now in the collection of the Museo Correr. They were last used to print sheets of the plan in the 1830s.