Gautier d'Agoty's Color Anatomy: Mezzotints of the Body, Paris, 1752

A male figure assembled from three plates (Tables 4, 5 and 6). Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty was born in Marseille around 1717 and trained as a printmaker under Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1670–1741), who came from Frankfurt am Main and was the first to print in color by mezzotint, using three copperplates inked blue, yellow and red. After Le Blon died, two of his pupils, Jan Ladmiral (1698–1773) and Gautier d'Agoty, each claimed to have invented the process. Gautier's one known improvement was a fourth plate, in black, which few thought important.

Anatomy for the eye

Gautier teamed up with the surgeon Jacques-François-Marie Duverney (1661–1748) to produce a series of large, colorful anatomical atlases, admired more for their style, and sometimes for their power to shock, than for their use to doctors. After Duverney's death he worked with Antoine Mertrud (died 1767). Gautier himself died in Paris in 1785.

His Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, de grandeur et couleur naturelle ("general anatomy of the organs in place, at natural size and color") is thought to have been printed in Paris in 1752. Duverney and Mertrud both helped, but in the colophon Gautier claims everything for himself: he was, he wrote, demonstrator, painter and engraver all at once.

The title page. Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

Bodies in pieces

The library's copy has 18 large plates; another edition has 24. Twelve of them fit together, three at a time, into four full-length figures: a woman showing the vessels and muscles; a man with organs, vessels and muscles; a figure seen from behind with nerves, muscles and vessels; and a skeleton with nerves and arteries. In the 24-plate edition, a woman's head goes with a plate of a pregnant woman whose womb is opened to show the fetus. The other five plates, of organs and other parts, stand alone.

A female figure from three plates (Tables 1, 2 and 3). Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

A figure from behind (Tables 10, 11 and 12). Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

Three views of the heart (Table 13). Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

The skeleton, with the brain and spinal cord (Tables 16, 17 and 18). Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, Paris, about 1752. National Library of Medicine.

The Flayed Angel

The library also holds one plate from Gautier's Suite de l'Essai d'anatomie en tableaux imprimés (Paris, 1745), the supplement to his Essai d'anatomie en tableaux imprimés of the same year, and one of his most famous images: a figure seen from behind, glancing over the shoulder, its back laid open so that the muscles spread like wings, known as "The Flayed Angel." The Suite and the Essai are bound together in one enormous volume, in a contemporary calf binding stamped with gold and inlaid with gold and aqua morocco. Who first owned it is not known, but clearly someone important.

"The Flayed Angel," from the Suite de l’Essai d’anatomie en tableaux imprimés (1745). National Library of Medicine.

The binding of the library’s volume. National Library of Medicine.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web: "Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty: Anatomie générale des viscères en situation." Further reading there: L. Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, trans. Mortimer Frank (1962), pp. 265–274.