Bidloo's Anatomy (1690): Baroque Engravings, and the Rival Who Took Them

The engraved title page. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

Govard Bidloo was born in Amsterdam in 1649. He was professor of anatomy at The Hague from 1688 to 1694, then at Leiden, and served as physician to William III of England, himself Dutch by birth, until the king's death in 1702. He then went back to his old post at Leiden and died there in 1713.

A beautiful failure

Bidloo's great work was the Anatomia humani corporis, published in Amsterdam in 1685 with 107 copperplate engravings. Like many big, expensive anatomical atlases of the time, it lost money. In 1690 he tried again with a Dutch translation, Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams ("dissection of the human body"), printed from the same plates. It did not sell well either.

The pictures were drawn by the painter Gérard de Lairesse (1640–1711) and engraved by Abraham Blooteling (1640–1690) and Peter van Gunst. The plates show bodies as they lay on the dissecting table, pinned open, draped in cloth, beside the instruments, along with figures in classical poses and skeletons posed as reminders of death.

A female figure in a classical pose. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The brain and spinal cord, pinned out on the table. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The muscles of the back. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The fetus in the womb. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The tendons of the hand and forearm. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A memento mori: a skeleton with an hourglass. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The plates change hands

When the Dutch edition flopped, Bidloo's publisher sold 300 spare sets of the printed plates to the English anatomist William Cowper. In 1698, in Oxford, Cowper published them with his own English text as The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, without mentioning Bidloo or the artists. He even used Bidloo's engraved title page, pasting over the Dutch title a scrap of paper printed with his own.

Bidloo’s title page and Cowper’s, with the new title pasted over the old. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A bitter quarrel followed, fought in pamphlets on both sides. Cowper claimed, with little to show for it, that the plates had never been Bidloo's at all: that Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) had commissioned them, and that his widow had sold them to Bidloo after his death.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web: Govard Bidloo, Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams (Amsterdam, 1690).