Bernardi Siegfried Albini Tabulae Sceleti Et Musculorum Corporis Humani.

Of the first sequence of plates (pl. 1-3) there are bis pl. 1-3. Of the second sequence of plates (pl. 1-25) there are bis pl. 1-9.

The plates carry publication-dates of 1747, 1748 or 1749.

The plates have been regarded as one of the high points of anatomical engraving. The first three display the skeleton; the following twenty-five display the human figure 'clothed' with muscles. They set the human body before scenic backgrounds, which in some cases include the figure of a rhinoceros.

In the same year the Knaptons published an English version, Tables of the skeleton and muscles of the human body (q.v.).

By 1802 the Royal Academy had acquired several studies of human anatomy - most of which had been published for physicians rather than for artists. The earliest-printed of their collection was Vesalius's Anatomia (2nd ed, 1555); but most were by eighteenth-century authors, including Errard (1723), Parsons (1745, 1747), Albinus (1749, 1750, 1754), Brisbane (1769), Cheselden (1769), Blane (1790) and Camper (1794). During the 19th century the Library added works by Casserio and Spigelius (1645), Cowper (1745), J. Bell (1794), Stubbs (1802), Gray (1858) and C. Bell (1865). Of books of anatomy devised specifically for artists the Academy acquired in the 18th century only Tortebat (1667), but later added works by J. G. Salvage (1812), J. Cloquet (1821-31), John Flaxman (1833) and J. Fau (1845).

Like other academies the Royal Academy appointed as its first Professor of Anatomy a medical man, Dr. William Hunter, who used in his lectures an écorché of a standing man (shown in Johann Zoffany's painting, 'Hunter lecturing at the Royal Academy', ca. 1772). From the same era survives a cast of a figure anatomised to two different levels; and from a slightly later date, an écorché of a crucified man (by Thomas Banks, ca. 1800). The best known of the Academy's écorchés is that of the smuggler set in the pose of the ancient Greek sulpture known as the 'Dying Gaul' (1775; recast 1834). John Flaxman, the Academy's first Professor of Sculpture, kept a skeleton, which survives in Sir John Soane's Museum, London.