Paolo Mascagni's Anatomia Universa consists of 88 plates. The book was published in a series of nine parts between 1823 and 1832 at Pisa.
The plates are so designed that a man five and one-half feet tall can be assembled from three of the plates if they are joined together. The plates were superbly engraved and the hand-coloring by pen and brush was done so carefully and with such skill that the artist often achieved a three-dimensional effect. The plates are so large that the text block has never been bound and is stored in a large book-shaped wooden box especially constructed for that purpose.
Each plate is 99 cm x 72 cm and the image itself measures 72 cm x 53 cm. The colored plates were photographed during the 1980s on high quality 35-mm color film from which 2x2 slides were made. In 1999 the 44 slides were scanned at high resolution directly into Adobe Photoshop using a Polaroid SprintScan scanner and archived at three resolutions on a CD-ROM.
