«The drawings reproduced in this album were created during a period of modernist boom, technical advances in medicine, and political and social transformation. But none of this appears to be reflected in this university work, which is almost all immersed in a tentative beauty and a melancholy tranquillity which is difficult to define.»

[From the text of Manuel Valente Alves]

«There is no doubt that Vilhena had a great affection for Artistic Anatomy and, between 1905 and 1933, collected more than two thousand of his students’ works that he considered to be of most interest and of the best quality. This book clearly shows the freedom he allowed his dis-ciples and how they found original forms of representation, which seemed to breathe life into the figures, regardless of the technique adopted.

Anatomy has been studied and cultivated by painters and sculptors through the centuries, and it has nobly fulfilled the same mission in a splendid celebration of the body that the theologians called the "imago Dei", or rather, the image of the Creator.»

[From the text of João Lobo Antunes]