BIDLOO, GOVARD 1649-1713.

Anatomia humani corporis, centum & quinque tabulis, per artificiossis. G. de Lairesse ad vivum delineatis. Amsterdam: for the widow of Joannes van Someren, the heirs of Joannes van Dyk, Henry Boom and widow of Theodore Boom, 1685.

Anatomia humani corporis, centum & quinque tabulis, per artificiossis. G. de Lairesse ad vivum delineatis. Amsterdam: for the widow of Joannes van Someren, the heirs of Joannes van Dyk, Henry Boom and widow of Theodore Boom, 1685.
Folio (485 x 350 mm). Extra engraved title page and 105 plates, hand-colored except for plates 50, 51, 52, 55, and 58-86. 17th century calf, rebacked by J. MacDonald. Lacking portrait, bookplate of J.G. Mazziotti on front paste-down, blindstamp on title page, trimmed closely affecting some plate margins and numbers, worming to last few leaves at upper inside corners including last 2 plates, some light staining and marginal repairs.
Provenance: J.G. Mazziotti (bookplate).

FIRST EDITION of the first large scale anatomical atlas since Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543). "The value of Bidloo's Anatomia lies chiefly in the 105 fine copperplate engravings drawn by G. de Lairesse (1640-1711)" (Garrison-Morton). "For Lairesse, the anatomical illustrations Bidloo asked him to undertake were an occasion for an artistic meditation on anatomy: he displayed his figures in an emotional, almost tender manner, contrasting the raw dissected parts with the full, soft surfaces of uncut flesh, placing flayed, bound figures in ordinary nightclothes or bedding, setting ordinary household objects such as books, jars, or cabinets in the same scene as cut-up torsos or limbs. His illustrations brought the qualities of Dutch still-life painting into anatomical illustration, and gave a new, darker spiritual expression to the significance of the act of dissection" (Norman). Choulant-Frank, pp 251-252; Garrison-Morton-Norman 385; Heirs of Hippocrates 667; Norman 231; Wellcome II, p 165.