Born in Calcar, Westphalia, Jan Steven van Calcar (ca. 1499–ca. 1546) spent his career in Italy. In Venice, he studied with Titian and absorbed the Italian master’s style so thoroughly that Karel van Mander claimed that their drawings could barely be distinguished.(2) The artist’s life ended in Naples, where he befriended Giorgio Vasari. Vasari mentioned Calcar several times in his Vite, praising the northerner’s rare ability to work in an Italian style and naming him as the designer of woodcut illustrations for the works of the pioneering anatomist, Andreas Vesalius.(3)
Although Calcar certainly contributed to Vesalius’s earlier work, Tabulae anatomicae sex (1538), the artist’s precise role in the illustration of Vesalius’s most famous treatise, the De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) is a matter of much debate.(4) Vasari mentioned only Calcar in connection with the treatise, but most art historians have concluded that a number of artists were probably involved.(5) Vesalius’s lament that he had “to put up with the bad temper of artists and cutters who made me more miserable than did the bodies I was dissecting,” corroborates the view that a number of artists were involved, but their identities are unknown.(6) The Crocker drawing was not reproduced directly in the treatise, but most of the individual bones appear reversed and rearranged into a tidier composition in Plate IV, Book I, of the Fabrica.(7) The drawing, or more likely its related woodcut, was further adapted by the famous anatomical illustrator Jan Wandelaar (1690–1759) for a later edition of the collected works of Vesalius.(8)
The scarcity of drawings securely attributed to Calcar and of preliminary studies clearly related to the Fabrica makes it impossible to evaluate the Crocker sketch.(9) As a result, despite the monogram on the drawing, the attribution to Calcar must remain tentative. As Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has noted, the reversals in the finished woodcuts as well as the presence of incised lines in the drawing suggest that it was a working preparatory study. His description of the drawing as “an accumulation of studies relatively close to the final cutting of the block” is perhaps as close as we can come at the present time to pinpointing its role in the preparatory process.(10) Variations in both composition and details between the drawing and the woodcut as it appeared in the treatise imply the existence of at least one other preliminary step between the two. For example, the femur is shown at the left of the drawing as a whole and in rough sketch to the right with its head detached. The careful delineation and modeling of the bones as well as the small sketches investigating the relationships of the working parts are all in keeping with Vesalius’s belief in direct experience with human anatomy and his rejection of traditional, theoretically-based medicine. This study provides a tantalizing glimpse into the working methods behind some of the most groundbreaking scientific illustrations ever published.
Stacey Sell, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010
Notes:
(1) Based on a statement in Choulant 1852 in Literature above, p. 179 that the drawing was given from Amstetten to Weigel. By 1920, when the English edition was published, the drawing was described as “lost.”
(2) Karel Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck 1616–1618, intro. and trans. Hessel Miedema, Doornspijk, 1994, fol 217v and 218r. Cited in Rosand and Muraro1976 as in Literature above, p. 212.
(3) Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, V, p. 434, and VII, pp. 462 and 582. Cited by Rosand and 1976 as in Literature above, p. 212.
(4) For a review of scholarship on this issue, see Boris Röhrl, History and Bibliography of Artistic Anatomy, Hildesheim, 2000, pp. 77–78.
(5) See, for instance, Röhrl 2000 as in note 4 above, p. 78, and Rosand and Muraro 1976 as in Literature above, pp. 214-215.
(6) Quoted in Rosand and Muraro 1976 as in Literature above, p. 214.
(7) Reproduced in J. B. de C. M. Saunders and Charles O'Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, Cleveland, 1950, p. 51. A skull related to that in the drawing appears in the same sense in Plate V of the same treatise (reproduced ibi, p. 53).
(8) Andrea Vesalius, Opera Omnia Anatomica & Chirurgica, ed. Hermann Boerhaave and Berhard Siegfried Albini, Leiden, 1727, p. 5. Here, the bones have been rearranged yet again, with most of them appearing in a single image. The Crocker drawing was also reproduced in a print by Albert Kretschmer (1825–1891) in Choulant 1852 as in Literature above.
(9) For other possible attributions to Calcar, see Nicole Davos, “Jan Stephan van Calcar en Italie: Rome Florence, Venise, Naples,” in Napoli, l’Europa: Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Ferdinando Bologna, ed. Francesco Abbate and Fiorella Sricchia Santoro, Naples, 1995, pp. 145–148, and Marta Ausserhofer, Johann Stephan van Calcar. Das Porträt des Melchior van Brauweiler von 1540, Kleve, 1992. See also Martin Kemp, “A Drawing for the Fabrica; and Some Thoughts upon the Vesalius Muscle-Men,” in Medical History, XIV, 1970, pp. 277–88. Kemp attributed a red chalk drawing for one of the muscle men in the Fabrica to Calcar, noting that the artist’s use of chalk was more Northern than Venetian and admitting that “the existing clues do not indicate any wholly feasible alternatives” (p. 286).
(10) Kaufmann 2004 as in Literature above, p. 19. The incised lines do not follow the forms precisely and may indicate the existence of another preparatory stage.
Inscriptions: red chalk, lower right corner, possible monogram: JSK; dark brown ink, center of bottom margin: Jan van Kalkar; verso, graphite, lower margin: Geschenk des Herrn v. Amstetten, Breslau / copirt in Holzschnitt v. A. Kretzchmer für Choulant’s Buch; verso, dark brown ink, upper margin: No. 15
Marks: none
Provenance: Baron von Amstetten, Breslau; Rudolph Weigel, Leipzig, by 1852(1); Edwin Bryant Crocker, Sacramento, by 1871; gift of his widow Margaret to the Museum, 1885.
Literature: William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010, no. 16; Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Turnhout, 2004, pp. 17–20; Jeffrey Ruda, The Art of Drawing, exh. cat. Flint, 1992, no. 22; David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, exh. cat. Washington, 1976, p. 215, note 14; Master Drawings from Sacramento, exh. cat. Sacramento, 1971, no. 15; Jürgen Schultz, Master Drawings from California Collections, exh. cat. Berkeley, 1968, no. 22; Numa S. Trivas, Old Master Drawings from the E. B. Crocker Collection, the Dutch and Flemish Masters, unpubl. ms., Sacramento, 1942, no. 22; Ludwig Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, trans. M. Frank, Chicago, 1920, p. 417; Ludwig Choulant, Geschichte und Bibliographie der anatomischen Abbildung, Leipzig, 1852, p. 179, no. 43.
