VESALIUS, Andreas.

Folio, 6 leaves, pp. 510, (46). With 20 full-page and about 130 smaller anatomical woodcuts in the text. Printer’s woodcut device on title. Early 18th-century mottled sheep, spine gilt. Bookplates of Piergiorgio Borio, M.D. A nice crisp copy in attractive condition.

Fourth edition (the third in folio with illustrations), and the first to be posthumously published. This edition is well printed on durable paper and set up with marginal notes exactly as in the Basel 1555 edition. In 1564 Vesalius stopped in Venice on his way to the Holy Land and submitted his last book, a reply to Falloppio, to the printer Francesco Senense for publication. Vesalius died later than year on the island of Zante. Four year later and in collaboration with a Pomeranian engraver, Joannes Criegher, Senense printed the present edition, the complete text of the 1555 Fabrica but in smaller folio format and with the woodcuts slightly reduced. “The new woodcuts for the illustrations, however, were so well executed that the engraver might almost have passed for the same person who in Venice at the behest of Vesalius had cut the original blocks for the larger work” (Cushing). It must have been an expensive undertaking, but it shows that there was still a demand for the Latin text and the illustrations that could be met by a less costly edition than the ponderous 1555 edition. Cushing, Bio-bibliography, VI.A.-4.