Folio (457 x 310 mm). Title printed in red and black with engraved vignette, engraved head- and tail-pieces; 27 engraved plates printed in sepia by Luca Ciamberlino after drawings by Berrettini PRINTED ON BLUE PAPER. (Title-page soiled with slight marginal chipping; dust-soiling to a few leaves, some light spotting, small wormtrack to last few leaves affecting two plates.) Later vellum (a few tears to paste-downs). 

Second edition, A BLUE PAPER COPY. Berrettini was one of the most influential painters of the Italian Baroque. He began his anatomical drawings in 1618, and they were engraved by Luca Ciamberlano. The plates remained unpublished for 123 years, and were not first published until 1741. By that point, they had been "improved" with intrusive and distracting figures. Francesco Petraglia removed the figures which had been added, returning them to a state more closely resembling Berrettini's original drawings. Choulant-Frank, pp. 235-239; Norman, The Anatomical Plates of Pietro da Cortona (1986).