The Anatomy Lesson (9 page)

I laughed, for I thought at first this was another one of his awkward jokes.

“Pickenoy included a full skeleton in his portrait of the Sebastiaen Egbertszoon guild,” Tulp made his case. He seemed to have anticipated my response. “The portrait is held in high regard.”

“Indeed it is.” Let me tell you, candidly, that I loathe Pickenoy. He is a very popular painter, but his pictures are comical in their falsity.
I understood he meant for me to be guided by Master Pickenoy. “But do you not think a skeleton is somehow less, well, upsetting than a flayed, severed human limb?”

Tulp gave this a moment of consideration. “Perhaps you have a point. I suspect there are many—and women in particular—who would find flesh more objectionable than bones. We are familiar with the skeleton, aren’t we?”

“And what would be the justification, in terms of narrative, for including just the arm?” I wondered aloud.

“Narratively?” He did not get my meaning. “So people will understand my adherence and respect for Vesalius, naturally.”

I tried to imagine this picture he wanted me to paint: more than half a dozen gentlemen in elegant cloaks and ruffs, looking very dignified, standing next to a dissecting table with a man’s flayed arm upon it.

“The difficult part, from your perspective, I should imagine, would be to make sure the anatomy is right.”

“I see. You’d like me to paint the inner workings of the arm, as it is depicted here.”

“Yes, precisely. Only better, hopefully. With greater anatomical accuracy. You see, Van Calcar was a fine artist, but there are certain mistakes.”

“Ah,” I said, considering this added dimension of the request. “But then I would need to be highly familiar with the anatomical structure of the forearm. As Titian and his pupils were when they illustrated the
Fabrica
.”

“Well, that is easily solved. You’ll attend tonight’s anatomical lesson. And there I will dissect the patient’s forearm and hand. If you observe with acuity, you should be able to depict the limb with far greater accuracy than Van Calcar did. It will not be so difficult.”

I didn’t argue with Tulp, for he seemed to have little understanding of how the work of painting is accomplished. Observing a dissection from a seat in the theater would not provide me with the necessary source material for capturing a dissected limb in oil paint no matter how much “acuity” I applied to my observation in chambers. I’d have to be able to study the arm, to return to it again and again. Flayed skin, stretched tendons, ligaments, and bone—not easily captured by eye or by brush. I found the assignment both thrilling and confounding.

I thought about the question of the flayed limb while I sketched him. We drained about three cups of that vile brew he had brought me before I sent him home to his wife for the rest of the afternoon. He left my studio in relative good cheer; my stomach was already grumbling over that tea.

He repeated that he would welcome me at the anatomy lesson that evening and suggested I arrive early, as he suspected it would be a particularly popular event. I promised that I would attend, and I said it would certainly be helpful to have a good view—so I could observe the dissected arm with “utmost acuity.”

Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I was trying to imagine how I could get a flayed arm in my possession so that I would be able to bring it to life on canvas, to satisfy this Tulp.

CONSERVATOR
’
S NOTES, TRANSCRIBED FROM DICTAPHONE

Painting diagnosis: Rembrandt’s
Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
, 1632

Initial observations: daylight glances off the surface. What’s immediately apparent with the naked eye is the textural variables in the lighter hues. Natural light pushes the darker hues into gloss, almost glare. Perhaps that is the result of the darkened varnish.

I will move closer with my scope. The clothing of the figures is worked up in subtle shades of grays, browns, blacks. I also see evidence of some purple in one cloak. It is clear that Tulp’s cloak was repainted, although the original paint layer is still partially present. It was fixed after heat damage from the fire in the Nieuwe Waag in 1732. We have notes here about its damaging the work, though not severely.

Claes calls it a dissection, but I prefer to think of it as an autopsia in the sense of the original Greek:
auto
(self)
opsis
(sight, vision). In this case we look within the body to discover the self. What did the artist intend to say about himself when he painted this? What did he want to reveal to the world through this body?

Rembrandt built up the body using his brushstrokes, through layers of paint. Later, he changed his mind and made certain alterations to the body, going back and adding pentimenti to alter the composition. I love that word—
pentimenti
—which comes from the Italian word for repentance. I repent with my brush and add dabs of paint to change the image. With the pentimenti, what we can see is real evidence of the painter before his easel. The painter, that is, thinking on the canvas. It is evidence of Rembrandt’s process—his mind at work—while he was crafting this.

We’ve noted in previous radiographs that Rembrandt has a great
density of pentimenti in the dissected left hand, evidence that he worked and reworked that hand, trying to get the composition right. The radiograph reveals a light area partially painted in white lead, which links up directly with the X-ray image of the dissected lower arm now visible. Of course, it’s only natural that Rembrandt would spend quite a bit of time reworking that left limb, since it must’ve been quite a challenge to figure out how to paint the inner anatomy of an arm with all its tendons, ligaments, and muscles and so on. He was not, after all, a doctor, nor had he any occasion to intimately examine the inside of an arm. He had to discern how to make a dissected limb based on what he could see. But where did he see it? What was he using as a model?

Previous researchers (De Vries et al., Schupbach, Heckscher) have posited that Rembrandt may have used anatomical textbooks—of which there were several circulating in Holland at the time—in particular Vesalius’s
De humani corporis fabrica
(On the Structure of the Human Body). It’s certainly very likely that Rembrandt had that at his disposal (I have proposed elsewhere that it is the folio volume lying at the corpse’s feet in the foreground of the painting). But isn’t it also possible that he used something more lifelike as a model?

Until now, it has been assumed that Rembrandt did not attend the anatomical lesson, but rather constructed a scene based on sittings with the individual medical “players.” This is supported by arguments (Wood Jones; Wolf-Heidegger) that the anatomy of the dissected left hand is inaccurate in a number of ways.

The new Groningen medical study, “A Comparison of Rembrandt’s
Anatomy Lesson
with a Dissected Left Forearm of a Dutch Male Cadaver,” published in the journal
History of Hand Surgery
, however, siding with Heckscher, suggests that Rembrandt in fact gave a strikingly accurate depiction of the superficial flexors
of the fingers. It concluded that the “details and realistic colorful appearance of the original painting suggests that Rembrandt used a real limb.…” This seems to indicate that Rembrandt was working from life. That is, that he not only saw the dissection but spent quite a bit of time with the arm of the corpse, both before and possibly after Tulp’s anatomical lesson, and used a real arm as his model. I think we must consider the implications of that discovery for a moment: Rembrandt used a real limb? Where would he have gotten a real limb for such an exercise? Off the gallows? From the anatomist himself?

What I intend to do now is to examine the rest of the body of the corpse to see if there might be any other evidence that Rembrandt saw this body in particular.

I’m looking closer now, with the scope.

The paint layer is relatively thin, especially compared with Rembrandt’s later paintings, and built up with great economy as though he is trying to save paint. The pigments, especially warmer hues, are applied more thickly in the foreground; the background details and the figures in the back have cooler, more subdued tonalities. The warmer tonalities are in the front. The brushstrokes are also applied more summarily in the back, more detailed in the foreground. This is the beginning of the emergence of Rembrandt’s technique: he draws your eye to where he wants it to go with lighter and thicker pigments. The figures of the doctors are relatively uniform in terms of hues and thickness of paint; however, the face of Colevelt at the extreme left has a more grayish tonality. He was painted later, but this has been discussed previously.

Now I am looking at the body of the corpse. There are some shadow areas in the head of the corpse that are overpainted. Perhaps he moved the head of the corpse a bit? The hues here are
grayer but also warmer, with a greater density of pigment. There is an inordinate amount of light pouring onto the corpse, as if from a single source above. Still, the hues tend to the grays, to indicate death.

Here’s something intriguing: it does appear that there is an uneasy transition between the corpse’s right hand and the wrist. Wrinkles of paint occur together with a few premature cracks. This is the right hand—the hand closest to the viewer, not the dissected hand. Also, there is a shift in coloration between the right wrist and the right hand. The hand is grayer, and there is a greater density of pigment. It is a very unusual hand, an unnecessarily elegant hand, it seems to me, for a thief. I have thought that before, just looking at it in the gallery. Very intriguing indeed.

Please note that I will need to request permission to take a sample from this passage. Very curious. Perhaps I should also take a look at the ’78 x-radiograph from De Vries and his team and figure out if this was there then. I will do that this morning.

January 31, 1632
Dear Mersenne,

I promised you that before the end of the year I would send you my new treatise that explains heaviness, lightness, hardness, and the speed of weights falling in a vacuum, and as is plainly evident by the date on this missive, I have failed to keep my promise once again.

I beg your continued patience with me, dear friend, as my reason for putting off sending it to you has been the hope of including some of my recent observations for “The World.” I wanted to respond to your thoughts on the corona of the candle flame and to advance my own positions on the question of the location of the soul in the body as well.

This morning, I bought a lamb from one of the butchers near my lodgings, and I have been examining it in my rooms. Having
scrutinized its organs closely, and attempting to jot down my observations of vital functions based on the lamb’s anatomy, I hope to learn about the digestion of food, the heartbeat, the distribution of nourishment, and the five senses. I cannot assume that these are corollary functions in a man, but they are a beginning.

Still, I’m afraid that I shall discover little in the lamb that I did not already observe in my vivisections with dogs and goats. The organs of animals are remarkably similar in shape and function; they are only different in size and sometimes in corporeal location. I searched this lamb for some evidence of its rational soul, but because it was already dead, I did not have much hope of discovering it. Animals are as complex in many ways as human bodies, yet I still do not find any explanation for the fact that they lack the powers of speech or reason.

Dear friend, my intention was to travel to Deventer this week to meet with Reneri and compare notes on these and other recent observations. However, it seems that I have been detained once again, both by the frigid weather, which makes many of the country canals and rivers impassable, and also by an event at which my presence is required this evening. I shall attend an anatomical demonstration and lecture of one Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the praelector of this town’s surgeons’ guild—in Holland every profession must have a guild, for men here do not care to be singular but rather more like epiphytes that grow where other plants of their ilk have already found a ready supply of moisture.

Did you know that here they are also allowed to perform anatomies on criminals straight from the hangman’s rope, in front of a vast public, which includes every merchant and shopkeep who owns a ruff? It is unlike anything I’ve heard about in Oxford or Padua. The Dutch cut round and lecture, discuss and debate, and
then they feast openly and with public approbation. The festive anatomy is quite a bit more pomp than substance, however, almost like a drama on the stage.

Have you heard of this city’s anatomical praelector who takes his name from this country’s most emblematic blossom? Tulpius, they call him, like something out of Rabelais. He is the one who has been known to say, “I’d rather err with Galen than circulate with Harvey,” as if betting on the ancients against modernity were some kind of hound race.