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"Syndesmologia siue historia ligamentorum corporis humani", published in 1742 by a German anatomist Josias Weitbrecht (1702-1747), who for a long time lived and worked in St. Petersburg, is the first comprehensive textbook of syndesmology. The accuracy and quality of the accompanying illustrations are fascinating, even after almost 300 years. Weitbrecht was also the first to describe the synovial folds of the hip joint, later named after him as the retinacula of Weitbrecht. This eponym appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century in the studies of femoral neck fractures published in the UK. In the study of syndesmology, Weitbrecht was followed by a number of outstanding authors of that time, such as Meckel, Barkow, Arnold, Henle, Humphry and Fick.

The anatomist whose name became a trademark for all that is high standard in medicine was more engaging and nuanced than his portrait suggests. Padua was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the XVI century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments where Vesalius started the revolutionary road towards the development of medical knowledge.

The vanguard that began to question Galenic anatomical dogma originated in northern Italy in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and not coincidentally this was where human dissection was introduced, which in turn eventually fostered the origins of realistic anatomical illustration in the late fifteenth century. With the advent of the printing press and moveable type at this time, printed books began to supersede hand-copied medieval manuscripts, and labor-intensive techniques were soon developed to integrate text and illustrations on the printed page. The same technology was used to pirate the illustrations of prior authors with varying fidelity. Specific medieval and Renaissance anatomical illustrations can often be traced from their inceptions through different stages of development to the final printed images, and then through subsequent pirated versions in various abridgements or other compendia. The most important milestone in the development of anatomy and anatomical illustration was the publication in 1543 by Andreas Vesalii of De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), commonly referred to simply as the Fabrica. With this work, Vesalii succeeded in coordinating a publication production team (author, artists, block cutters, publisher, and typesetters) to achieve an unprecedented integration of scientific discourse, medical illustration, and typography. However, despite Vesalii's valiant efforts to prevent unauthorized duplication, the illustrations from the Fabrica were extensively plagiarized. Although Vesalii found such piracy frustrating and annoying, the long-term effect was to make Vesalii's ideas known to a wider readership and to help solidify his own revolutionary contributions to anatomy., (© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Putative textual proof for Titian's central involvement in producing illustrations for Vesalius's anatomy book "De fabrica" (1543) requires reexamination. On the basis of orthographic, literary, and historical evidence, a phrase in Annibal Caro's after-dinner speech, here dated to 1536, is shown instead to refer ironically to a surgeon's notorious execution in 1517. "Anatomia" was a word in the satirical as well as the medical lexicon. It is important to understand the satirical tone of Caro's speech about a priapic statuette. Delivered during Carnival to the Roman Academy of Virtue, the speech respects neither antiquities nor artists like Michelangelo in its obscene humor.