Brain & Nervous System Anatomy Prints
The brain and the nerves that run from it, as drawn in three great atlases: Johannes Sobotta's colour plates of 1920, the brain from above, in median and sagittal section, with its veins and with its arteries; Andreas Vesalius's woodcut of the whole nervous system from 1543; and Bartolomeo Eustachi's engravings of the brain in section and of the nervous system from brain to spinal nerves, published in 1714.
12 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Sobotta's brain plates
Seven plates from Sobotta's atlas of 1920 cover the brain as a neurologist would want it: the whole organ from above, the base of the brain with its cranial nerves, the arteries of the base, the brain with its arteries from the side and with its veins from above, and two sections, median and sagittal, the latter printed in colour. They are chromolithographs, so the grey matter, the vessels and the membranes carry their own colour, and at 24×36 the sagittal section is the plate that stops people in a corridor.
The nerves: Vesalius and Eustachi
Two whole-body nerve figures join them. Vesalius's woodcut of the nervous system, from De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, shows the brain and the thirty pairs of nerves as a standing figure, one of the best-known images of Renaissance science. Eustachi's engraving of 1714 does the same in copper, brain to spinal cord to the nerves of the limbs, inside the numbered border that lets every structure be referenced without a label on the body. His separate plate of the brain in seven sectional views is here too, with Sobotta's plates of the nerves of the face, scalp and head.
Who hangs them, and how
Neurologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists and psychologists hang these in the consulting room; neuroscience labs and departments take the Vesalius for the corridor; the rest go to studies and home offices, where a brain in section is the most quietly interesting thing on the wall. Sobotta and Vesalius plates print up to 24×36, the Eustachi engravings up to 16×24. Each is offered full-bleed or as a captioned specimen on cream, unframed or framed in black or dark wood with no mat. A sagittal section and a base-of-brain plate make a natural pair.