On the Full- and Half-Sheet Inserts of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543 and 1555)

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeOn the Full- and Half-Sheet Inserts of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543 and 1555)Jacob MurelJacob Murel Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his book Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (2013), Jeffrey Todd Knight examines sixteenth-century book bindings, specifically how copies of diverse texts were bound, unbound, and repurposed by different owners throughout history. For Knight, differences in the collecting and binding of texts “reflect an early owner’s desire to appropriate and interact with the texts, to organize and repurpose them, or to transform existing works into new works.”1 From this, he writes, “Every bound volume was a unique, customized assemblage, formed outside of an absolute prescription issuing from an author or publishing house.”2 But as the present essay aims to demonstrate, early modern texts may not only have been assembled outside author or publisher prescriptions, but at times against them. As Suzanne Karr Schmidt writes of sixteenth-century interactive and sculptural prints such as anatomical flap prints, “[T]he ways the[se] prints were used diverged from the ways that they were meant to be used.”3 Building upon Schmidt’s and Knight’s theses, the present essay examines the inclusion of broadsheet-style, cut-and-paste anatomical inserts across multiple copies of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543 and 1555), proposing that how these inserts were assembled into their respective copies reveals a gap, and even conflict, between reader preferences for using the inserted illustrations and author or publisher intentions for their use. In this way, examining how broadsheet inserts were assembled into multiple copies of Vesalius’s anatomical treatise testifies to how book assembly in the sixteenth century could function as an act of deliberate customization by readers, that is, a means of consciously making the text one’s own by fitting it to individual reader preferences contra authorial prescriptions or intentions.To this end, this essay examines several copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica housed at Harvard University’s Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine in Boston. The Countway Library holds seven copies of the Fabrica—four 1543 editions and three 1555 editions. As might be expected, numerous differences exist among copies of the respective editions, such as alternate binding materials or annotations to both text and images. My reason for here focusing on the Countway copies is what I have come to consider their representative nature. In addition to the Countway copies, I have examined those housed at other American institutions, as well as digitized copies, and read through Margóscy et al.’s description of extant copies in their recent global census.4 From this wide survey, I believe the Countway copies can serve as a representative sampling for the diverse ways in which early binders and readers arranged the Fabrica’s full-sheet inserts beside or within their surrounding quires. Given the enduring prevalence and fame of the Fabrica’s illustrations, focus shall be given primarily to differences in the assembly, binding, and presentation of the Fabrica’s full-sheet inserts, of which there are two in both the 1543 and 1555 editions, one mapping veins and arteries across the body, the other nerves.There are several reasons for choosing the Fabrica and its full-sheet inserts as a case study for reader customization. Though disparate bibliographical examinations of this seminal anatomical text can be found, there exists little consideration of the Fabrica’s materiality. When such attention is paid to the Fabrica, it is considered as one among many works that utilized anatomical flap prints or cut-and-paste figures, for which Vesalius’s contemporaneously published 1543 Epitome is well known. In this way, although recent work by Susan Dackerman and Suzanne Karr Schmidt suggests a present turn in scholarship, the Fabrica’s illustrations have traditionally received attention as aesthetic images rather than material objects with which early modern readers would interact.5 In examining the customized arrangement of the Fabrica’s broadsheet inserts, this essay understands their full-body illustrations as learning aids with which nonspecialist readers were encouraged by Veslius to materially interact in their study of anatomy. Additionally, in the course of this examination, this essay challenges Eugene Flamm and Zlatko Pozeg’s claim that the Fabrica’s inserts were last-minute additions initially intended for Vesalius’s Epitome, arguing instead that the vascular and nervous broadsheet prints included in both the Epitome and Fabrica may in fact be revisions of similar broadsheet maps originally produced for Vesalius’s Tabulae sex anatomicae several years prior and intended for similar purposes.Researchers often speak of Vesalius’s Fabrica as a luxurious medical treatise, expensive and purchased by a few elites.6 Margóscy et al., however, argue against this position in their recent survey on the distribution and ownership of extant Fabrica copies around the world, concluding: “It has become clear that the two editions of the Fabrica must have been printed in higher numbers than previously estimated. It was not a luxury edition that no one ever used, but rather a book that was frequently consulted by many readers.”7 This wider than previously thought audience finds affirmation in the Fabrica’s prefatory letter to Charles V, in which Vesalius writes,Our pictures of the parts of the body will give particular pleasure to those people who do not always have the opportunity of dissecting a human body or who, if they do have the opportunity, are by nature so squeamish … they cannot bring themselves to the point of ever actually attending a dissection. But in any case I have throughout the work pursued single-mindedly the one aim of giving assistance to as many people as possible in a matter that is extremely recondite and no less arduous, by detailing as accurately and completely as I can the investigation of the fabric of the human body.8In this passage, Vesalius frames his audience as one unfamiliar with dissections and outspokenly claims that he aims to reach as many readers as possible—in other words, that he writes not only for the trained anatomist but also nonspecialist readers unfamiliar with anatomical research. While Vesalius’s contemporaneously published Epitome was intended for assisting anatomy students in their formal anatomical education, the Fabrica seems to have served a general education purpose. As can be gleaned from Vesalius’s preface as well as Margóscy et al.’s census of ownership, the Fabrica was meant to be regularly consulted and handled by a wide variety of readers with ranging interests in anatomy, from surgeons and anatomists to general readers.Coinciding with this aim, and as past Fabrica scholarship has noted, Vesalius understood his anatomical illustrations as material objects with which readers were meant to interact.9 As suggested in the above prefatory quote from the 1543 Fabrica, Vesalius also understood readers’ material interaction with his illustrations as a proxy for hands-on dissections. Although the former stood in no way equal to the latter, it nevertheless proved a useful aid to learning.10 Despite modern portrayals of Vesalius as a pioneer of hands-on anatomical investigation, the two chief faults of which he accused his contemporaries were the formalized separation of dissection from textual study and the proliferant lack of attentive, critical interaction with Galenic anatomical texts.11 In light of this criticism, as well as Vesalius’s noted intention for his illustrations, it does not seem unlikely that he intended for his famed anatomical treatise as a whole to be an object readers regularly handled and examined in the study of anatomy. Vesalius’s emphasis on hands-on experience extends just as much to the dissection of textual bodies as it does to corporeal bodies. Given the well-known planning and care Vesalius put into the Fabrica, even travelling to Basel in order to oversee its printing by Johannes Oporinus’s shop, one may reasonably expect Vesalius to have given consideration to how the Fabrica would be materially handled on a regular basis by readers. So how might Vesalius have imagined the foldout vascular and nervous maps being handled by readers?Before addressing this question directly, I will provide a descriptive overview of how the vascular and nervous inserts appear within the Fabrica additions housed at Countway, beginning with Countway’s four 1543 copies. The following description of the vascular and nervous inserts derives from copy 1 at Countway, although the remarks concerning the printed appearance and page order of the inserts among their respective quires applies to all of Countway’s four copies—regarding the inserts, the copies only differ in how the insert was oriented or inserted into the quire.12 The full-sheet insert of the vascular system (see fig. 1) appears between pages 312 and 315 as the final page(s) of the Fabrica’s third book on arteries and veins. The recto of the page immediately preceding the insert 311 is signed m2, while the recto of the immediately following page 315 is signed m4. The next quire, signed n, begins on page 323, leaving three blank rectos between it and m4. When holding the insert vertically (the printed figure’s head at the top of the sheet, its feet at the bottom), signature m3 appears on the insert’s bottom right beside the catchword “iori,” a reference to the insert’s verso where the printed figure’s keyed index finishes. There is no signature or catchword on the insert’s verso, although the page number 313 is printed on the top corner of both the insert’s recto and verso when held vertically. An examination of the page folds surrounding the vascular insert reveals that pages 316 (signed m4) and 317 are the middle of the quire. The vascular sheet, signed m3, is inserted between m2 and m4 but not assembled as part of the quire.Fig. 1. Full-sheet vascular insert (recto only) from C1 (same insertion as C2). Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe full-sheet insert of the nervous system appears between pages 352 and 355 at the end of the Fabrica’s fourth book on the nerves (see fig. 2). When holding the sheet vertically, the page numbers 353 and 354 can be found on the top left- and right-hand corners of the insert’s recto respectively, while the bottom right corner is signed p4. The sheet’s verso is entirely blank. The signature p appears on page 347 of the Fabrica indicating the beginning of the p quire, with page 349 signed p2, 351 as p3, and 357 as q. Although the leaf immediately following the nervous insert is void of any signature, the above markings suggest that leaf was considered to be the final leaf in the p quire. Additionally, a close examination of the page fold between pages 350 and 351 in all four Countway copies reveals that these two pages mark the middle of the p quire. Much like the vascular insert, the nervous insert is marked as a part of its surrounding quire but is not actually assembled and folded as a part of it. But while the vascular insert is part of a quaternion, the nervous insert is part of a ternion. Figure 3 visualizes the makeup of quires in which both the vascular and nervous sheets are inserted across all four Fabrica copies.Fig. 2. Full-sheet nervous insert from C4 (same insertion as C3). Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFig. 3. top left, diagram of full-sheet vascular insert in C1 and C2; top right, diagram of full-sheet nervous insert in C1 and C2; bottom left, diagram of folded full-sheet vascular insert in C3 and C4; bottom right: diagram of folded full-sheet nervous insert in C3 and C4. Author illustration.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAs revealed in the above description as well as visualized by figure 3, the nervous and vascular inserts are included among their respective quires differently. While the vascular sheet resides within one of the 1543 Fabrica’s only quaternions, the nervous sheet is one of three sheets comprising a complete ternion. This follows the 1543 Fabrica’s Series Chartarum, which reads,Omnes terniones, praæter m & Mm quaterniones. Caæterum in m propter inſutam extra reliquas chartas figuram quaternione, obſeruabis ſemifolium ideo iniectum, ut ex imaginibus ipſi impreſſis uariæ portiunculæ, inſutae illic figuræ committi queant. Sic & p, propter inſuendam figuram, triernio efficitur.Richardson and Carman translate this as:These are all groups of three, except for m and Mm, which are groups of four. In the group of four designated m there is an extra figure sewn in, and you will observe that a half leaf has been inserted bearing various small diagrams which may be cut out and pasted to the figure sewn in there. The group p is made into a group of three by the figure to be sewn in there.13The first sentence states that the whole book is composed of ternions, the exception being quires m and 2M, both being quaternions, while the last sentence dictates quire p is to be a ternion on account of the nervous insert’s inclusion therein. But while the Series Chartarum specifies the size of quires, it does not necessarily specify how the full-sheet illustrations are to be inserted into their respective quires. Of the vascular insert, the Series Chartarum’s longer middle sentence instructs that the sheet is to be sewn outside of the remaining sheets of the quaternion, and as the above description of that insert shows, this is precisely how readers and/or binders have placed the sheet in assembling the m quire, doing the same with the nervous insert and p quire, as the Series Chartarum directs with the original Latin phrase “Sic & p” (roughly translated as “and so with p”)—Richardson and Carman’s translation conveys this by simply restating that group is made into a group of three. All of the Fabrica copies here considered follow the Series Chartarum’s instructions regarding each sheet’s placement, but despite such similarities of page arrangement and quire assembly, the four 1543 Fabrica copies housed at Countway differ in how the vascular and nervous sheets are inserted into the quire; in fact, none of the four copies are the same in this regard.C1’s vascular insert is folded twice and attached at the human figure’s feet—thus, a correction should be made to Margóscy et al.’s description that the insert is “bound sideways by the head.”14 C2’s vascular sheet is inserted into the quire fold at the printed figure’s right-hand side, the insert’s bottom flush with that of the book, requiring the sheet’s top and right edges to be folded in order to compress the sheet back into the book. When folded shut, the insert’s top edge is approximately one inch shorter than the surrounding pages. Given there is no other nearby page with this non-uniform size, this difference—alongside the above examination of the quire fold—suggests the vascular insert is a single sheet inserted into the quire without a corresponding leaf, despite being signed m3. The difference between these two copies alone—that C1’s insert folds out horizontally to the reader’s right while C2’s is attached vertically, folding out primarily to the top—reveals a variance in how early modern readers and binders thought best to insert the full sheet. The method shown in C1 requires no cutting up of the insert to make it fit with the other page’s vertical lengths, while also leaving it to be folded conveniently and compactly one way (it may be worth noting how the surrounding pages of C2 are beveled by the extra thickness from folding the insert twice on separate edges). But in order to examine and read the sheet right-side-up in C1, readers must rotate this large and heavy tome on its side, while with C2, the reader need not rotate the book in order to read the illustration and its accompanying key.By comparison, C3 and C4 both reveal a decision on the part of their respective binders to avoid a fold-out insert. C3’s vascular insert is bound and folded at the center with the illustrated figure’s head and page number on the reader’s right, thereby turning the one sheet into two leaves. The vascular insert for C4 is inserted in the exact same manner, although this time mirrored, so that the figure’s head and page number are on the reader’s left. While avoiding the beveling of a double fold or even potential wear and tear from constant (un)folding of the insert as in C1 and C2, this method of insertion tends to obscure the already hard-to-read text near the sheet’s fold. Thus, while this method foregoes the more cumbersome shortcomings of inserting a large single-sheet foldout, it still requires the reader to rotate the entire book in order to adequately read the illustration while inhibiting any legibility of text near the sheet’s fold. C1 and C2’s respective binders appear to have been more concerned with enabling complete legibility and viewing of the vascular insert, while C3 and C4’s binders more so with keeping an already large text compact, whatever the sacrifices to reader experience. Across all four 1543 Fabrica copies, the nervous sheet is inserted in exactly the same manner as the vascular sheet within its respective copy.This variance in how the full-sheet illustrations were aligned and inserted into the books goes directly against what the Series Chartarum appears to instruct regarding their method of insertion. Admittedly, the Series Chartarum never explicitly states how the full-sheet inserts are to be positioned or aligned when inserted into a quire, that is, whether the inserts are to be attached right-side-up along their longer edge or whether they are to be inserted as a separate bifolium sewn into the surrounding quire at its fold. Nevertheless, its terminology implies a specific orientation via its direction to sew in the figures. Throughout the Series Chartarum, the Latin adjectives inſutam, inſutae, and inſuendam, all derived from the Latin verb insuo (to sew in), are used to describe the inserts. Given that a sheet could not be sewn in without a fold, the tacit instruction for readers to sew in the inserts would seem to imply Vesalius and Oporinus intended for the inserts to be inserted in as folded bifolia rather than merely pasted in. Contra these instructions, not only do C1 and C2 insert the full-sheet illustrations as upright broadsheets rather than a bifolium, but also in none of the four copies are the sheets sewn in. Instead, across all four copies, the inserts are pasted into their respective quires, attached to the surrounding sheets by small strips of paper running along the quire fold. Given the Series Chartarum’s implied instructions, inserting the sheets vertically as well as pasting them in goes directly against the publisher’s instructions for assembly, revealing a deliberate decision on the part of multiple binders or readers to assemble the book according to individual preferences. But if Vesalius intended for these sheets to be folded and sewn in as bifolia, why did he allow them to be printed like broadsheets as they are, that is, printed vertically across full sheets with page numbers and headings along the shorter top edge? After all, it is this design, restricted in the Fabrica to only the vascular and nervous inserts, that appears to have caused problems regarding their insertion, at times orienting them vertically and at other times horizontally.Given the immense care Vesalius put into the Fabrica’s illustrations, it is important to consider why the vascular and nervous inserts were printed as they are, that is, in a broadsheet format. The direction of print throughout the Fabrica runs, as customary, horizontally across its sheets, but the text and page numbers of the two full-sheet inserts are printed vertically, running along the full sheet’s shorter side. In this way, the inserts appear like broadsheets to be included at the end of the Fabrica’s third and fourth books. Yet because of their atypical size and directional run of print when compared to the rest of the Fabrica, any method of insertion inevitably causes some obscuration of the inserts due to folding, which is at times compounded by the cumbersome turning of an already large and heavy tome in order to view the sheets in some copies. Given the presence throughout the Fabrica of similar full-body maps that occupy only one side of a given leaf: if full legibility was to be maintained, why were the vascular and nervous maps each printed over a whole sheet, a decision that further prevented either from being folded into their respective quires? As previously mentioned, the nervous sheet’s verso is entirely blank while the verso of the vascular sheet remains mostly blank. It does not seem unlikely that, had Vesailus wished, the vascular and nervous figures could each have been confined to one leaf side, with their indexes printed over the surrounding leaves, even should this require the production of smaller-sized illustrations. Given the care Vesalius is known to have put into the Fabrica’s illustrations, the decision to include these figures as full-sheet inserts can reasonably be assumed deliberate.Zlatko Pozeg and Eugene Flamm have claimed that the vascular insert was “primarily intended for the Epitome but included in the Fabrica as an afterthought.”15 Unfortunately, Pozeg and Flamm never expand on their rationale behind this proposal. It may be prompted by near-identical versions of the Fabrica’s vascular and nervous maps appearing in the 1543 Epitome. But although the actual figures appear to be the same in both works, their surrounding texts vary significantly, as if only the figures themselves are reproduced between the Fabrica and Epitome. Though one may easily dismiss this similarity between figures, Pozeg and Flamm’s claim perhaps gains more weight when considering the presence of a single-leaf insert in select copies of the 1543 Fabrica. In both C2 and C4, an additional half-sheet insert appears immediately after the vascular insert but before the start of book 4 on page 315—in both copies, the single leaf is pasted into the quire (see fig. 4). All print appears on the leaf’s recto alongside the signature m3 (the same as the preceding vascular insert)—no page numbers or catchwords are printed on either side. The sheet portrays several organs that are, as Pozeg and Flamm write, “meant to be cut out and pasted as overlays,” presumably atop the vascular map.16 As Susan Dackerman writes, Vesalius designed similar cut-out organs alongside a vascular map figure in the Epitome for “the user to cut out and construct two anatomical manikins with up to twelve moving organ flaps, allowing for practice dissections on a significantly less perishable subject”17; or as Suzanne Karr Schmidt writes of other cut-and-paste or flap anatomical prints at the time, “the description of cutting up the body might well apply as easily to a paper version as it does to one of flesh and blood.”18 Given Vesalius writes in the 1543 Fabrica’s preface that the included illustrations can serve as useful proxies for actual dissections to aid in learning, it seems likely he would have intended a similar use for the 1543 Fabrica’s full- and half-sheet inserts as he had for their nearly identical counterparts in the Epitome. But this does not mean the former were last-minute inclusions initially designed only for the latter. As discussed above, Vesalius professes to have written the Fabrica for a general audience, while the Epitome was produced specifically for anatomy students. Given Vesalius’s predilection for hands-on learning, whether with corporeal or textual bodies, it is likely he designed these cut-and-paste figures for both texts to provide different audiences with opportunities for hands-on learning.Fig. 4. Single half-sheet insert immediately following vascular insert (fig. 1) included in C2 and C4 (also present as reprinted copy in all 1555 editions housed at Countway). Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThere remains one additional reason for doubting Pozeg and Flamm’s remark regarding the Fabrica’s foldouts. In writing that the Fabrica’s full- and half-sheet inserts were last-minute additions initially intended for the Epitome, they do not account for the lack of a half-sheet organ insert in Countway’s rare variant copy of the 1543 Fabrica, which is generally believed to have been published several years after the non-variant 1543 edition. C3 is one of the few extant variant copies of the 1543 Fabrica and is also the specific copy by which Richard J. Wolfe and H. Richard Tyler first discovered the existence of a variant Fabrica, being also one of the copies Michael Horowitz and Jack Collins examine in their census cataloguing the variant’s differences from other “standard” editions.19 These differences consist primarily of minor divergences in typesetting, largely restricted to the book’s first few pages. In what is perhaps the only scholarly examination devoted to examining these differences between the variant and non-variant copies of the 1543 Fabrica, Horowitz and Collins conclude that “the variant was most likely produced and distributed between 1546 and 1551, and thus represents an intermediate issue between the first and second editions.”20 Their reasoning largely extends from the use of a French-style italic type that Oporinus would not have utilized until a couple years following the Fabrica’s initial 1543 publication, as well as from deteriorations in select woodblocks evident in the prints.21 They make no remark on the full-sheet inserts however. While there appear to be no significant differences between C3 and the standard 1543 copies, C3 does lack the single half-sheet of cut-out organs that immediately follows the vascular insert in C2 and C4. If this variant was indeed issued between the 1543 and 1555 editions, and the single- and half-sheet inserts were a last-minute addition to the 1543 Fabrica, why, upon issuing this intermediate variant, did Oporinus not include the half-sheet or bother to make the full-sheet inserts part of their surrounding ternions rather than ad hoc insertions? Why not adjust the inconsistencies? In support of their theory of an intermediate variant issue, Horowitz and Collins suggest that “Oporinus had in his shop a few dozen copies … of the original sheets that he wished to dispose of—copies that lacked preliminary leaves.”22 This may explain why the inserts still appear like ad hoc additions, while the lack of a half-sheet insert could possibly be due to loss of the page during binding or transportation, or simply lack of these sheets. Of course, none of this may be known for certain—though it may be worth mentioning Margóscy et al. note the half-sheet’s presence in other extant variant editions. Given there is as yet no reason to disregard Horowitz and Collins’s theory on the variant issue’s intermediate release, why does the single-leaf organ insert not appear in Countway’s only variant copy, one of few known variants in the world? Even if inserted last minute into the 1543 Fabrica, the single-leaf insert would still be available for inclusion in the variant several years later.The one feature of the vascular and nervous inserts potentially lending the most weight to Pozeg and Flamm’s claim is the inserts’ broadsheet design; yet upon examination, this broadsheet design may suggest otherwise. As mentioned before, the Fabrica being composed of ternions, no other sheet throughout is printed as a broadsheet. Both the 1543 Epitome and 1538 Tabulae, however, were printed as broadsheets, the former composed of nine sheets, the latter of six. Perhaps the shared broadside format between the Fabrica’s full-sheet inserts and the Epitome, and that both were printed at the same time, prompted Pozeg and Flamm’s remark that the former were lifted from the latter. After all, should inspiration have worked the other way around—the Epitome’s vascular and nervous maps lifted from sheets initially designed for the Fabrica—one could reasonably expect the Fabrica’s full-sheet illustrations to be printed in a format more fitting with the rest of the book, even if this required producing or utilizing alternative images between the Epitome and Fabrica. Given Vesalius’s renowned attention to detail and his endeavors to insure high-quality illustrations—e.g., having woodblocks carved in Venice then carted to Basel for printing—it is not unreasonable to expect he could have had illustrations produced specifically for the Fabrica and Epitome should he have wanted.23 Moreover, as Schmidt’s survey of anatomical flap prints demonstrates, Vesalius was not the only individual responsible for producing cut-and-paste anatomical prints, whether single leaves, broadsheets, or anatomical atlases, and he was likely inspired by these popular prints “because [they] allowed users to simulate the act of dissection.”24 But of all the contemporaneous anatomical prints similar to Vesalius’s own that Schmidt examines, such as those by Hans Weigel, Giovanni da Sabbio, or Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, Vesalius’s Fabrica inserts remain unique in being broadsheet-style prints meant for inclusion among folded quires. As both Dackerman and Vivian Nutton explain, Vesalius designed the Epitome and Tabulae broadsheets for use as reference tools when attending dissections or