La anatomia del corpo humano [...].

Folio: [18]-154-[4] ff. (sl. dampstaining, some marg. spotting, marg. hole in f. 24 due to ink stain, ink staining to ff. 31-32, marg. wormtrack, marg. soiling, esp. to upper corners of ff. 100-103).

Contemp. vellum, spine with raised bands titled in ink.

Reprint of the 1559 & 1560 Rome ed., except for the renewed title and some minor changes. Variant B issue with Giunti's mark at colophon. Illustrated with an engr. title, Valverde's portrait and 46 copper-engr. full-page ill., incl. 4 new plates added by the Giunti. The plates after Gaspar Becerra, contemporay of Michelangelo, show for some of them the initials "NB", attributed to Nicolas Béatrizet (1510?-1577), French engraver working in Rome. The Spanish physicist Valverde (1525?-1588?) studied medicine at Padua at the same time Vesalius was operating his human dissections. The plates of his work are actually largely copied, in smaller size and inverted, from Vesalius; the Belgian physicist attacked him for plagiarism and accused him of having performed very few dissections himself. However, Valverde corrected some omissions and errors of Vesalius. Valverde published his work for the 1st time in Spanish in 1556 in Salamanca, under the title "Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano" but he decided to translate it in Italian in 1559 to claim the authorship of this work and not confound it with a Spanish translation of Vesalius as it was the case.
Ref. EDIT16 28039. - Cushing p. 148. - Choulant-Frank pp. 205-208. - Wellcome 6477. - Adams V-231. - Bibl. Walleriana 9806. - Cp. Mortimer, Italian, 513, (Venice, 1560). - Vésale [exhibition cat.]. Brussels, KBR, 1993, p. 112.