These six facsimiles are reversed-image reproductions based on six woodcuts of “muscle men” from Andreas Vesalius’ masterly treatise on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel, 1543). To be precise, and as explained in this page, they are images of enlarged woodcuts that were printed by using computer technology as well as a laser-cutting machine.
The illustrations of Vesalius’ Fabrica reflect the artistic standards of Renaissance art, depicting the human body according to idealized classical proportions. Particularly, the series of fourteen one-page woodcuts of large muscle men are among the most outstanding artistic achievements of the book. We see these naked figures slowly pacing through the pages, displaying the gradual stages of dissection layer by layer. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars noticed that if the landscape backgrounds of each of the muscle men are placed side-by-side, we see the continuous panorama of the Euganean Hills by the river route from Padua to Venice, which is a journey that Vesalius himself made very often.