This book is really good for art students and medical students if you want the deteils. I highly recommand it!

Albinus on Anatomy is a great book. I am a printmaking student;My teacher introduced this book to me when I asked her about detailed etchings of the human figure. I love how intricate and delicate the lines are to create figure. They remind me of the prints of Rembrandt. For anyone interested in art, I really suggest this book. It's great for those studying to be medical illustrators, print students, the everyday sketchers.......ANYONE! It's also great for those who just love to learn about the anatomy of the body.

This oversized book contains over 200 illustrations of the human body, posed so as to be of use to the artist studying the human form. Beautiful and highly accurate, the book can be a valuable tool for the artist wishing to improve his skill through a better knowledge of human anatomy. Albinus himself is not solely responsible for the engravings. He collaborated with an artist who did the drawings and finally the copper plate engravings of the figure. In the meantime, Albinus arranged the poses and oversaw the process from rough sketches to the manipulations of the printing press, ensuring that the accuracy and quality of the images were preserved. The figures are represented with various layers of tissue exposed, first the nude model, then the outer layer of muscle, the next layer of muscle, the organs, down to the bare skeletons. Each layer has an anterior and a posterior view. The potential for the engravings to become a grim lesson on internal anatomy is offset by the engraving artist¹s whimsy. He was allowed artistic freedom with the background on each plate, and the settings range from a Greek temple to a verdant forest. In one plate a rhinoceros grazes directly behind the model. For the student of anatomy, each bone is taken individually, and the proportions, muscle attachments, and major connective tissue are shown for each in turn. A passionate introduction to drawing the human body starts the book off, and a complete index ties it together. The playful, detailed drawings make this book attractive to the artist and the art admirer alike. For its size and complexity, this book is a great buy.

Very generic, some nice figure drawing but on the whole not worth the expense.

This is the best book for the art student that has ever been written, or ever will be written.

Mr. Hale's book has been invaluble in understanding figure drawing. He uses wonderful examples from the great masters. At times his commentary seems snobbish but if you can get past that then you will learn a great deal. I would highly recommend this book to anyone (novice to intermediate) interested in drawing the figure.

Robert Beverly Hale's three books on Artistic Anatomy should be owned by every beginning and professional artist. Beverly Hale shows the reader that to become an adept draftsman,it is best to learn from the drawing masters of all time. Beverly Hale also tells the reader how the best figure draftsmaen,from daVinci to Degas,learned from the works of past great masters.

Reading and learning from Robert Beverly Hale's three books on Artistic Anatomy is like learning the ways of the Force from Yoda himself.

I am currently in Figure drawing 2 and this book is a wonderful help. I have few figure drawing books that I feel compleatly happy with and this one is the best. It shows you how the masters worked with simple shapes, line, value, mass, and anatomy to represent the figure. It breaks up the chapters into body parts and each chapter deals with that specific part. By presenting works of master artists and disecting them you understand how the human form works and can be expressed. I would reccomend this book to anyone interested in drawing the figure, especially beginers.

Mr Coyle has done great justice to his old mentor Robert Beverley HALE with this magnificent book. The lessons are based on Mr Hales teachings on the techniques and thinking of the great master drawers, and not only are the examples all master works, but innovative use of coloured line overlays makes sometimes difficult concepts abundantly clear. The real point of this book, as with all R.B.Hale books, is that YOU can learn to think in the same highly visually intelligent way as these greats of the past, and learn to apply that thinking to your own creations. BRAVO Messrs Hale et Coyle!

This book is best used for viewing its selection of Master Drawings many of which are superb. However, its written text is filled with multitudes of factual errors and pseudo-intellectualizations. It should be noted that this book was not written by Hale; it was written by one of his students and lacks the quality of Hale's classic, "Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters." Instead, this book loses itself in unimportant, erroneous anatomical minutia which will baffle, confuse, frustrate and ultimatly demoralize the motivated reader. It greatly misses the mark in both clarity and presentation of important anatomical theory.

An excellent book on artistic anatomy. Reading this one book has taught me more than some figure drawing classes. A systematic deconstruction of how the masters of artistic anatomy have integrated their knowledge into some of the greatest drawings of all time. The book goes through the drawings of famous artists, categorized by the region of the body on which the drawings are focused, and attempts to explain how extensive knowledge of anatomy has been effectively applied. It touches on how these artists could create drawings which are more powerful than merely a photographic rendering of the model through their use of anatomy.

Unfortunately, the book is very cheaply bound. Entire leaves have detached themselves from the spine, though I have treated the book very well. My copy has turned into a stack of paper and scotch tape, wrapped loosely in its former cover. Despite that fact, I still consider it worth the purchase.

I have both this book and "Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters." Both are excellent books, but if you must only buy one, get this one. It is the better of the two.

I teach human anatomy, and I draw and paint the human figure. Not until I took up studying artistic anatomy through Hale's book, especially this one, did my drawing skills and drawings and paintings zoom ahead in quality. Well worth the money, will provide hours, indeed years of reference for study.

Although it's rather time consuming to read the text, but they go well with the corresponding illustrations. The illustrations are unbeatable, as they cover all bones and muscles that are of importance to the artiest. Many of the body structures are shown from more than one perspective.

I actually didn't read the book, I know enough anatomy not to. So I can't say anything about what is written in it. I bought it for the figure drawings, particularly the ones depicting the figure stretched and relaxed. These weren't "dynamic" poses, where the body is contourted into obscene shapes, but simple flexes/stretches by idividual body part (in relation to the others at rest) which follow the range of movement of a muscle. What I liked about these images, were that they were more focus than others I've seen...the images alone are why I bought the book...I deducted a star for only depicting male models, though many art books have a bias toward males.....

This is a MUST HAVE book for anatomy, and I have taken 2 anatomy classes in art college where this is the only required reading. Yes, the previous reviewer is correct in that labels are incorrect(though only a few) and that it is bewildering why the text and drawings are separated into two parts.

However, this book is nothing less than a classic, and any modern art anatomy book references Richer in one way or other -- just look at the bibliography of any anatomy book. The drawings at the end of the book are especially invaluable. Where else can you find 16 side by side drawings of the rotations of the arm? This alone is priceless in understanding how muscles ACTUALLY WORK rather than simply displaying front and profile pictures.

I would also recommend "Human Antomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger. It is obviously largely based on Richer's work, but deeply expanded in that it covers every single muscle in detail along with photographs of models. However, you need both books, since Goldfinger does not have the case studies that Richer does (Goldfinger shows the muscles clinically and not in actual application) and is not the master illustrator that Richer was.