Guido da Vigevano

As an inventor, Guido can be regarded as a distant forerunner of later Renaissance artist-engineers like Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo da Vinci.

He attended the prestigious medical college at the University of Bologna where he learned from Mondino de Luzzi, one of the most influential doctors of the late Middle Ages.

Vigevano fled north to France and found employment as physician to Queen Jeanne of Burgundy and later to her husband King Philippe VI.

Guido wrote two medical works: a regimen sanitatis or health manual to accompany Philippe on his crusade, and a treatise on dissection named the Anothomia Philipi Septimi, which he also dedicated to the French king.

It follows the approach used by Guido's mentor Mondino de Luzzi, exploring the three "venters" or regions of the human body: abdomen, chest, head.

A drawing of a female cadaver is especially notable as a rare illustration of the so-called "seven chambered" uterus hypothesized by a Pseudo-Galenic text titled De Spermate spuriously attributed to Galen of Pergamon.