In the winter of 1542, at the anatomical theatre of the University of Padua, a young Flemish physician stood over a partially dissected cadaver and made a decision that would alter the course of medical illustration forever. Andreas Vesalius, then twenty-eight, had grown weary of the errors perpetuated by Galen's inherited texts — errors copied faithfully by every anatomist since the second century. That evening, with a fresh scalpel and three students holding tallow candles close, he began the dissection that would produce the most celebrated plate in the history of scientific illustration.
The woodcut that resulted — the first of the famous écorché figures — was not drawn by Vesalius himself. It was almost certainly the work of an artist from Titian's Venetian workshop, likely Jan van Calcar, who brought to anatomical rendering the same sensitivity to musculature and pose that his master brought to portraiture.