Anatomie du gladiateur combattant

Salvage, Jean Galbert (1772-1813). Anatomie du gladiateur combattant, applicable aux beaux arts . . . Folio. [6], iv, 64pp. (2 cols.). Frontispiece & 21 plates, mostly printed in red & black, mostly engraved by Bosq after the author. Paris: the author, 1812. 582 x 422 mm. 19th-century quarter cloth, marbled boards, paper label on front cover, extremities and corners worn, inner hinge cracking. Some offsetting from plates, some foxing mostly affecting the text, but very good.

First Edition of this magnificent atlas of anatomy for artists, "illustrated with twenty-one plates and a frontispiece after drawings by Salvage himself . . . His plates are based on three casts of bodies dissected to different anatomical layers and set in the pose of the Borghese Gladiator. For these casts he preferred to use the bodies of soldiers in their prime killed in duels rather than patients who died as a result of illness . . . Salvage, like Genga and Lancisi, presents the anatomy of the ideal forms of antique sculpture . . . The plates are colour-coded, with the muscles in red ink and the bones in black ink. The anatomy of the Borghese Gladiator is depicted in four views in a series of eleven plates. The contour of the body in the skeleton plates is given in red ink, and a broken line of the same colour is used for the detached muscles in the plates of deeper dissection . . . This system of transparent anatomy serves as an effective aide-mémoire for the viewer of the different anatomical layers and was a popular method of anatomical illustration" (Cazort, Kornell & Roberts, The Ingenious Machine of Nature, 105; also featuring an illustration from Salvage's work on the cover). Salvage studied medicine at Montpellier and served as an army surgeon before joining the staff of the military hospital of Val-de-Grâce in 1796. His classically-inspired Anatomie, published the year before his death, also incorporates anatomical representations of the Belvedere Apollo, the Apollo of Florence, the infant Bacchus and the Farnese Hercules. Choulant / Frank, p. 332. Garrison-Morton.com 14179.