Calcar entered Titian's school in 1536 and was accepted to his faculty for his extraordinarily accurate copies of the works of that master.Calcar appears to have worked first at Dordrecht, but the greater part of his life was spent at Naples, and there, as Vasari tells us, "the fairest hopes had been conceived respecting his future progress".[1] Giorgio Vasari, Carel van Mander, and others credit Calcar with the eleven large woodcut illustrations of anatomical studies which accompanied Andreas Vesalius's work on anatomy.Calcar is also said to have drawn the portraits of the artists in the early edition of Vasari's Lives.Media related to Jan Stefan van Calcar at Wikimedia Commons
Iohann van Calcar
by Maximilian Franck
Jan van Calcar is assumed to have been the illustrator of Vesalius's
Fabrica
which contained many intricately detailed drawings of human dissections, often in allegorical poses.
