the library attic in 1936.^32 Tragically, they were all destroyed during
World War II bombings and none survive today.)
In De fabrica, there are two large, introductory images. The first is the
title page and the second image is that of Vesalius himself. The title page
image is one of the greatest woodcut images ever produced; its
perspective, clarity, composition, and technical mastery would be wonders
to behold if it were a mere drawing. To realize that a master cutter carved
this image in relief is mindboggling. The scene is a public dissection, with
a throng of people (at least eighty-five, by my count, not including the
corpse, a dog, and a monkey) crowded around the dissection table with
Vesalius demonstrating the innards of a cadaver. It recalls Raphael’s The
School of Athens, completed in 1511, and in fact, there is a figure on the
right side of the image that resembles Raphael’s Plato (by tradition,
modeled after Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519), but here he is not
pointing heavenward, as Plato did, but motioning toward the body. Is this
Vesalius’s ideal? If astronomers were mapping the heavens, was our
anatomist mapping our bodies?
The muscle men encompass entire sheets of paper, and in fact, in the
few remaining original copies of De fabrica, the sheets are larger than
folio size, unfolding to become another one-third larger. These large
drawings are macabre representations of the corpses in action, skinless,
yet not lifeless, their faces contorted in agony. Successive illustrations
show increasing degrees of dissection, with less and less muscle still
attached. The muscle men are situated in a pastoral scene, perched high on
a hill with the Venetian countryside in the background, with churches and
village buildings dotting the horizon.
The historiated initials throughout the book offer a whimsical, if not
ghastly, interlude between sections of the writing. The large capital letter
that starts a new passage was formerly decorated by hand but after the
advent of printing could be efficiently printed from woodblocks. Two-
thirds of the letters of the alphabet are used, and all include putti, or
angels, mischievously participating in bodysnatching, boiling bones,
setting fractures, and more gruesomely, experimenting on a live pig.^33 All
are a reminder of the dreadful epoch that our ancestors endured but from
which all future generations greatly benefitted.
The anatomical figures themselves are the main attraction. In his letter
to Oporinus, Vesalius exhorted him to print everything as “handsomely