Detail of title page of Berengario da Carpi

Detail of title page of Berengario da Carpi's Commentaria, from which the Isagoge was condensed. Please click on image to view entire page.

Detail map of Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy Overview map of Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

A: Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Berengario da Carpi Issues a Condensation of his Commentary on Mondino

1522
Detail of recto 32 of Berengario da Carpi

Detail of recto 32 of Berengario da Carpi's Isagoge breves perlucide ac uberime in anatomia humani corporis.  Please click on image to view entire page.

One year after publishing his Commentary on Mondino, Giacomo Berengario da Carpi issued Isagoge breves perlucide ac uberime in anatomia humani corporis. . . . from Bologna. Consisting of about 150 pages, but with most of the same woodcuts, the Isagoge is a condensation of the much larger and more expensive Commentaria (1521) intended as a manual for his students, and as a replacement for his obsolete 1514 edition of Mondino's Anathomia. It has the same arrangement of contents as the Commentaria, and includes some additional anatomical observations, such as the report of a fused kidney with horseshoe configuration seen at a public dissection in 1521, and a description of the valves of the heart.

One year later Berengario issued a revised and expanded second edition of his Isagoge, containing three more anatomical woodcuts, as well as some revisions to the illustrations that had appeared in the first edition; these alterations and additions emphasized the anatomy of the heart and brain, and included the first published view of the cerebral ventricles from an actual dissection. The architectural title-border was first used in Berengario's Commentaria (1521); here, it has been altered to read "Maria" instead of "Leo P.X.," and Berengario's surname "Carpus" appears both in the architrave and the vignette. The shield has also been altered to read "YHS."

Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration (1920) 136-142. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) nos. 188, 189.

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