Nouvelles tables anatomiques, Laurens D’Houry, Parigi, 1678

Musei Biomedici Università degli Studi di Firenze - Sezione di Anatomia

Extremely rare, hand-coloured edition of a Seventeenth Century anatomical atlas, most unusual and enchanting in comparison with other medical atlases of the time. The author, Cambrai-born physician and anatomist Amé Bourdon – of whose life we know very little – drew and composed the sixteen large, double-spread colour plates himself, illustrating all the parts of the human body au naturel, as well as “toutes les nouvelles découvertes, le cours de toutes les humeurs, les lieux où elles fermentent et où elles déposent leurs excréments…” (“all the latest discoveries, the direction of all humours, the places they ferment and where they deposit their excrements …”). The singularity of these illustrations attracted the attention of early-Twentieth Century avant-garde artists, appearing alongside cubist works by Picasso and Juan Gris in “Documents” (no. 5, 1930), the subversive journal which advocated destructuralisation run by French philosopher Georges Bataille. The etchings of the illustrations in the book were made by Daniel Le Bossu.