Nationalmuseum, Sweden, NHM 1864/1854, ink on paper, 35.3 x 25.1 cm, with a later inscription at the bottom, ‘Jean Calkar 1675’.
By kind permission of the Nationalmuseum, Sweden

This is a hasty, exploratory sketch for the frontispiece of the Fabrica. The main compositional elements are all preserved in the woodcut: Vesalius in the centre of the theatre, touching the dissected female cadaver and pointing upwards; the three large men at the front dressed in classical robes; the dog to the right and the monkey to the left; a naked man clinging on the left-hand column; the acanthus capitals of the columns; and the cartouche for the title of the book and the coat of arms above. The skeleton that hovers over Vesalius is missing here, however. This emphasizes even more the central position of Vesalius.

In order to preserve the left-right orientation, this sketch would have been reversed and traced onto the woodblock before it was cut. It was also fairly usual in this period for the draughtsman to be different from the person who actually cut the woodblocks. We do not know for certain the identity of either. The attribution at the bottom of this drawing must be by a seventeenth-century owner when it was widely assumed that Calcar was responsible for the illustrations in the Fabrica.