Bernardi Siegfried Albini ... Explicatio Tabularum Anatomicarum Bartholomaei Eustachii

One of the most important of all anatomical books. It includes the first specific treatise on the kidney, the first account of the Eustachian tube in the ear, the first description of the thoracic duct, and the Eustachian valve, as well as the first systematic study of teeth. The fine etchings illustrating the edition “were the first eight in an intended series of forty-seven anatomical plates engraved by Giulio de’ Musi after drawings by Eustachi and his relative, Pier Matteo Pini, an artist. These were prepared in 1552 to illustrate a projected book entitled De dissensionibus ac controversiis anatomicis, the text of which was lost after Eustachi’s death. Had the full series of plates been published at the time of their completion, Eustachi would have ranked with Vesalius as a founder of modern anatomy” (Norman).

The long search for the missing plates culminated in their discovery in the hands of a descendant of Pier Matteo Pini and their publication as Tabulae anatomicae (Rome, 1714) by Giovanni Maria Lancisi, the physician of Pope Clement XI and a successor to Eustachio in the chair of anatomy at the Sapienza. “The plates are strikingly modern, produced without the conventional sixteenth-century decorative accompaniments and framed on three sides by numbered rules providing coordinates by which any part of the image could be located… The images are generic figures, composites of many anatomical observations, and are mathematically as well as representationally exact” (ibid.).