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BERENGARIO DA CARPI, Giacomo Isagogae Breves, perlucid[a]e ac uberrim[a]e, in anatomia[m] humani corporis a co[m]muni medicoru[m] academia usitata[m] / a Carpo in almo Bononiensi Gymnasio ordinariam chirurgi[a]e doce[n]te, ad suorum scholasticoru[m] p[re]ces in lucem dat[a]e. Bologna Benedictus Hectoris 1523

[21.5 x 16.2 cm], 80 leaves, with numerous full-page, framed woodcuts and pointing hands. 19th c. speckled paper over boards with leather corners, spine in leather with morocco title label, gilt. Spine, edges of boards rubbed with some worming, light spotting in margins not affecting images or text. Exlibris of crown with interlocked “LI” letters on front pastedown. Contemporary annotations to frontispiece, 5r, 8v.

Second edition of Berengario da Carpi’s Commentaria, a condensed version revised with improved versions of the spectacular, cutting-edge woodcuts, two of which are printed here for the first time. Berengario was the first to publish treatises based on his own dissections. His text was the “starting point of the new anatomy, as it was the first work since Galen to contain a significant amount of anatomical information derived from his own experience and observation. A commentary on the 14th-century anatomical text of Mondino de’ Luzzi, who had reintroduced human dissection into anatomy, the work contains numerous observations by Berengario himself based on his own dissections. It also includes the first references to the vermiform appendix, the thymus gland, and the sphenoid sinus, as well as Berengario’s denial of the presence of the rete mirabile, a structure described by Galen and found in some animals but not humans. Berengario’s “use of full-page illustrations in which figures are posed in natural settings . . . presage the fuller development of these iconographic techniques found in Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. The illustrations in the Commentaria and in other works by Berengario suggest that he was familiar with the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci; these may be the only examples of 16th or 17th century anatomical work in which any hint of Leonardo can be found” (Grolier 100 Books Famous in Medicine, 15). Berengario aimed the present condensed edition at students, much as Vesalius’ shorter Epitome was an accessible (and portable) version of the Fabrica. Copiously illustrated with all the stunning woodcuts from the first edition, plus two new ones, Berengario’s resulting volume is even more graphically arresting.

*Grolier 100 (1521), p. 15; Norman 188; Choulant-Frank pp. 136-42; Herrlinger pp. 80-83; Garrison-Morton 368; Durling 534; Wellcome 783.

$US85000

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