Introduction

The treatise De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) was a landmark atlas of human anatomy that provided readers in early modern Europe with a new standard in medical illustration and instruction from the moment that it was published in Basel in 1543. The book represented an epistemic shift from a tradition that privileged the literary canon of medical texts, centered on the writings of the second-century Greek physician Galen, to a practice that depended on the author’s purportedly direct observation of dissected cadavers. From an early moment in the book’s history, contemporary readers saw Vesalius’s anatomy as a mutable font of knowledge ready to be folded into an ever-growing mass of information in text and image about the human body.

In 1556, the Spanish physician Juan Valverde de Amusco (1525–1587) published in Rome Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, a Spanish commentary on and translation of the Latin Fabrica. With the support of his patron, Spanish cardinal Juan Álvarez de Toledo (1488–1557), who was called to Rome in 1553 to serve as inquisitor general, Valverde contracted with the reputable publishers Antoine Lafréry (1512–1577) and Antonio Salamanca (1478–1562) to print the engravings, and papal printer Antonio Blado (1490–1567) to print the text.