Description

A copper-plate (Tab.VI) of the Pietro Berrettini (called “Pietro da Cortona”) from Tabulae Anatomicae (1741).

Framed into a later guillochè frame here an original copper plate from the Pietro Berrettini “Tabulae Anatomicae” treatise, first printed in 1741.

Plate is  28×19 cm (11 x 7″). With frame: 52×43 cm (19 x 15 ½”)

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The story of this book is intriguing: in about 1618 Berrettini prepared a series of twenty anatomical drawings on grey paper, made from dissections at the Santo Spirito Hospital. Why the drawings were unpublished at the time remains unknown. Drawings dealt cheafly with muscles, nerves and blood vessels.

Berrettini’s original drawings were aquired by Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to the King of Naples; in 1772 Hamilton presented them to William Hunter for inclusion in Hunter’s anatomical museum. They are now in the Hunterian Coll. In the University of Glasgow Library.

In 1741 Gaetano Petrioli, surgeon to Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia, published Berrettini’s plates for the first time. Petrioli’s edition contained the original twenty plates plus seven others with figures copied by Vesalius, Vesling, Casserio and others. As a supplement Petrioli has had them embellished with numerous smaller anatomical figures thaken from Vesalius, Valverde and others “engraved in an incongrous manner wherever there was sufficient space on the plate “ (Roberts & Tomlison).