Andreas Vesalius and the 'Fabrica' in the Age of Printing: Art, Anatomy, and Printing in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Rinaldo Fernando Canalis, and Massimo Ciavolella (review)

The historical coincidence of the birth of Andreas Vesalius on the last day of December in 1514 and the death of Aldus Manutius a few weeks later in early February 1515 (according to the modern calendar) enabled the 500th anniversary of both these events to be simultaneously commemorated by a conference at UCLA in 2015. The present collection arose in part from papers presented at this conference and has been edited by two senior UCLA professors, one with a medical and medico-historical background (Rinaldo Canalis) and the other coming from Italian studies (Massimo Ciavolella).

The lives of Vesalius and Manutius are not as unconnected as they might seem at first glance, despite their minimal overlap. Manutius, an eminent humanist in his own right, set up the Aldine Press in Venice and established the scholarly practices of this firm that led to the publication, in Vesalius's childhood years, of the complete works of Galen in Greek. The Aldine edition of 1525–26 made the most reliable known texts of this ancient medical authority available to humanists and physicians alike. Vesalius's familiarity with these texts, from his student days onward, contributed in turn to his break with Galenic anatomy.

Vesalius's De fabrica humani corporis (On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543) changed the way Western medicine understood human anatomy. It did this not simply by reporting the results of Vesalius's empirical studies as a master dissector of cadavers, in which he exposed many of Galen's errors. It also presented these results to an educated readership in a landmark publication of novel design. The Fabrica is a massive folio volume of 659 pages containing both the author's extensive text and a large number of memorable illustrations by Jan Stephan van Calcar, one of Titian's students. Renaissance developments in artistic and printing techniques, then, were important factors contributing to Vesalius's international success.

All of these elements are rightly caught up in the volume's title and explored in various ways in this collection, which consists of twelve substantive chapters in addition to the editors' introduction. I would suggest, however, that the title's reference to the 'Italian Renaissance' is unduly narrow, since both Vesalius and Calcar came from the Low Countries, although they worked in Italy, and the Fabrica was published by Johannes Opporinus in Basel, not by the Aldine Press or any other Italian printer. In addition, while two of the chapters in the present collection concern the work of Italian anatomists (Gabriele Falloppio and Girolamo Fabricius), another one deals with an English anatomical publication of 1545 that adapted the Fabrica for a domestic audience. Finally, two chapters in the present volume focus on rare book collectors and collections in North America.

The editors write in their introduction that the 'volume is aimed at a worldwide and varied readership, ranging from an educated popular audience to specialized academics' (p. xviii). This aim is not something that the book as a whole could possibly achieve, but individual chapters would certainly appeal to particular segments of the collection's intended 'varied readership'. The brief chapters by Kenneth Bartlett and Andrew Cunningham, for example, are written at a fairly elementary, introductory level and would be suitable for undergraduates and non-academic readers. At the opposite end of the spectrum the two chapters contributed by Rinaldo Canalis are much longer and more technical, and would be of interest primarily to medico-historical specialists. Other chapters fall between these two poles, so that both the educated popular audience and specialized academics will be able to find something appropriate to their level.

Volumes that aggregate material written at very different levels of scholarly detail and addressing a...