The Anatomy Lesson

by Nina Siegal

  “I’d be very curious to have this curiosity,” he’d written. “Should it be what you claim it is, I’ll pay you a guilder.” A guilder was good enough, I thought, and if the bird was truly beautiful, perhaps he could be persuaded to pay more.

  I calculated that I had just enough time to get to the wharves to fetch the bird and still make it to the execution at noon to collect my body. Off I went in search of my paradise.

  Let me be candid in my opinion of these guild portraits. I’ve never seen one that is in the least bit interesting. You’ve got a bunch of men standing in a line, or in a couple of lines, facing the viewer. It’s obvious they’ve all come to sit for the painter separately and he’s placed them on the canvas together.

  Sometimes the portraitist has some fun by depicting the guild members while they point their fingers in different directions. With the doctors’ guild they tend to use some obvious memento mori symbol, like a wilting flower or a candle that’s just been blown out. I wanted to do something that wouldn’t feel so damn stilted. Something that would breathe a little life into the subject matter. The question was: How?

  I enjoy the preliminary work of conceptualizing a painting. Van Swanenburgh taught me to think in terms of architectural spaces and simple geometry. Lastman trained me in certain Italian perspectival techniques. These things I learned, though it’s true that I never went to Italy—and they love to criticize me for it, especially now.

  Since there were so many men to include in this picture I decided to start with a pyramidal shape, as I have done with my new composition of Christ’s descent from the cross, the one I’m working on for the stadtholder.

  There is a beautiful cohesion that comes from a pyramidal structure. If you’ve got the geometry right, every point in the painting seems to relate to every other point. As the viewer, your eye is encouraged to move back and forth between the elements before settling directly into a single focus.

  You see different characters and give each of them your visual attention for as long as they interest you, and then your eye moves along to the next character, knowing that each one plays a role in the unfolding drama.

  Eventually, your eye is compelled to the focus of the painting—which is somewhere at the center of the pyramid or else at the pyramid’s base. The eye actually aids in the drama of the visual image, because it is drawn elsewhere first, building up suspense. I can’t tell you why it works that way, but the masters have proved it again and again. Giotto, Raphael, and Leonardo—they all teach us that aesthetics are built on a foundation of hard mathematical principles.

  If you get the basics of the equation right, you have a sturdy structure on which to construct a beautiful house. If your math is faulty, the pillars are weak and the house will totter and topple. So you want to think out the structural principles first, especially with a canvas this large with so many figures.

  As a mathematician, I expect that you’ll appreciate this perspective, even if it sounds somewhat naive coming out of the mouth of a painter. The aesthetic mathematics, if achieved, should quickly disappear into the background so that the viewer doesn’t think about them at all. It should feel as if you walked into a grand mansion, confident in the knowledge that the architects have done their work, and you need not worry that the roof will fall.

  I’d thought perhaps I would place Tulp at the top of the pyramid, since he was meant to be the primary figure and he would pay the most for the privilege. I’d put another guild member at each of the corners, perhaps two apprentices, gazing up at him with professional reverence. The other figures would all be positioned within smaller triangles inside this pyramid. I sketched all this out in my notebook and felt satisfied that it might work.

  By the time I was ready to try it on canvas, the pupils were done with the preparations. All the minerals I’d instructed Joris to crush were now arrayed in tiny ceramic bowls on the table, like a detachment of civic guards. Those that he’d mixed with linseed oil were in small glass jars, plugged with muslin and corked.

  The linen had been stretched and the ground applied. The canvas was a gray hue with a little yellow ocher and umber mixed in and enough chalk to give it texture. That was it: a blank canvas already primed but not yet touched. The pot of ground was at the foot of the easel, the Italian recipe laid under its base and my priming knife set by.

  I placed a small amount of Kassel earth on the grinding stone with the palette knife. The apprentice had already mixed in the linseed oil, but I wanted it to be very thin, so I added turpentine to dilute it further. I ground it with the pestle until it was a very thin consistency, and then I placed a dab onto my palette. This part of the painting process is more like sketching for me. I try to put very little paint on the canvas at first.

  I drew a wet paintbrush out of the pincelier and dabbed it into Kassel earth, deciding to add a touch of bone black, too. In this way, I could begin to outline the figures with general, open strokes. I wasn’t going for details yet, just trying to find the overall shapes and composition—where the guild members would stand, how the bodies would relate to one another in space.

  After a while, I became bored with it. All those identical-looking men on a single massive canvas? And for what? A waste of sailcloth, if you ask me. They should rather use it for an East India Company ship to sail off to Jayakarta. Then at least they can bring back something fascinating from across the seas.

  My thoughts drifted beyond my studio, out of the academy, and out into the streets of Amsterdam, where I could hear the sounds of the crowds making their way to Dam Square for the executions. I’ve never had any interest in watching the hangings, though I do go to the gibbets at the Volewijk sometimes to sketch. I feel the city begin to boil with this kind of carnal energy and it makes me want to stay away from the mob.

  Generally, I rarely escape the studio, but I envy those who exist within the swirl and tumult of real life out there, on the filthy, chaotic byways. Sometimes I pluck them off the streets and bring them indoors to sketch them. Once or twice, I have gotten to know them more intimately. But I am already, at twenty-six, a sad man who works too much, gets far too little sunlight, and stands beside the window, watching people pass by as if it were life itself at my window. I stood for some time at the window and watched people pass.

  Then Femke came to tell me that Dr. Tulp had arrived for his sitting. I asked her to bring him into the studio, and while she was out I set up a place for the doctor to sit. I found my sketch pad and a piece of brown charcoal.

  Tulp entered the studio, stepping into the room as though on tiptoes so as not to soil his shoes. You’ve seen him so you know: Will you agree with me that there’s something overly preened about the doctor, every element of his attire tidy to immaculate, his shoes at a high polish, his silk collar straightened, his hose seams aligned? It is unusual for a city physic to be quite so, I don’t know, unsullied.

  He seemed ill at ease from the first. If he saw the nude behind the curtain, he did not acknowledge her. No, it was something else. And when we were alone in my painting studio, he handed me a package wrapped in dried leaves, tied up with twine.

  “You must drink it to ward off the grippe,” he instructed, “in this especially cold season. My wife suggested I bring it.”

  I took the package and turned it over in my hands.

  “You brew it,” he went on. “The taste is not terrible. It is not medicine. It prevents illness. Shortly you can read about it in my pharmacopoeia.”

  It seemed like he wanted me to inquire about his pharmacopoeia, so I obliged. “And what is that?”

  “I have enlisted the city’s best physics and barbers to work with me to assemble a book of reliable medicinal treatments.” He paused, perhaps realizing that this all sounded a bit too prepared. “I am on a crusade to wipe out quackery.”

  It was an awkward kind of moment, because I got the sense he’d been coached in cordialities—perhaps by his wife.

  I handed the package to Femke, and Tulp instruct
ed her with many specifics: to boil some water, fill the pot only halfway, then brew the leaves for a good ten minutes, and then fill the rest of the pot.

  “I’ll drink some as well. So you’ll trust it won’t poison you,” he added. This was obviously intended as a joke, so I laughed to please him.

  I offered him the seat near my easel. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

  He sat, but he didn’t look comfortable in the least. “I understand you have had several guild members to the studio already for their sittings?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, pulling up a chair as well. “I have seen four of your members so far. Will the final number be seven or eight?”

  “Jacob Colevelt has yet to make up his mind,” Tulp said. “He feels a hundred guilders is a bit steep, as this is only his first year as an apprentice in the guild.”

  “From the painter’s perspective, a face is a face,” I said. “I should not end up leaving off his nose or forgetting to add an eye, simply because he has not yet finished his training.”

  That managed to cudgel a smile out of him. “Let’s hope you do not leave off any elements of my face,” he said, finally removing his hat and gloves. “Let’s leave it to Colevelt to decide, and instead discuss the look of the painting.”

  “Very well. You had a particular idea for the image, then?”

  “Indeed, I do. I have put a great deal of thought into the matter, since I know you will want firm instructions on how to lay it all out.”

  I had not expected him to direct me in the painting’s composition, but I didn’t see why I should inform him of this until I’d heard him out.

  “Naturally, the painting should depict the current members of the guild who want to participate, but I feel strongly that it should also, in some way, represent the most current anatomical information. Since you are from Leiden, can I venture that you may have attended the lectures of Petrus Pauw there?”

  “Indeed, I have.”

  “Ah, good. Then, is it also safe to assume you are familiar with Vesalius and his complete anatomical atlas, the Fabrica?”

  I told him I was not only familiar with the book but that I was a great admirer of the illustrations and that my own library contained a first edition.

  “Then you are more than just a tradesman painter!” Tulp said. “Not all artists own books.”

  “I have a small collection,” I said. “The pupils can use them as references as well.”

  “You are, no doubt, familiar then with the frontispiece to the text—the image of Vesalius himself? The image representing the great anatomist standing with an arm that he has dissected.”

  “Let us take a look,” I said, and called Tomas over and asked him to fetch the book.

  Tulp went on casually, “You see a little bit of the torso, but it’s mostly the arm. Vesalius often focused on arms and hands in his lectures. Unlike Galen, he believed that the structure of the arm and hand is what separates humans from all other species. He was the first to fully dissect the human arm. Indeed, the human arm is evidence of God’s manifest wisdom. He gave us this limb so that we, above all other creatures, would be able to handle tools. Vesalius was very wise to point this out. To know the body is to know God’s purpose, I always say. Well, I don’t mean to play the pedagogue.”

  Of course, he did. I refrained from sharing my thoughts on the matter for the moment—and it seemed he did not require them. He went on talking about the wonders of the human hand, the ingenuity of the flexor tendons, the grace of the small bones in the fingers, the incredible dexterity that is allowed by the radius and ulna.… Tomas arrived with the book and we opened it on the large drafting table.

  The woodcut of Vesalius is one of those by Jan van Calcar—perhaps you’re familiar with him?—the student of Titian. The anatomist is posed, as Tulp had said, in front of a cadaver, but all you see is the dissected arm, like a kind of trophy. It’s an unusual choice for a portrait, but as Tulp clearly hoped to convey, it was a choice guided by his moral philosophy.

  “I like his expression in this portrait,” said Tulp. “I think he looks both wise and approachable. That is how I’d like to be portrayed.”

  It was funny, looking at that portrait with the doctor standing next to me, because I saw very clearly that Tulp had fashioned his own appearance in the mold of Vesalius. Tulp had trimmed his facial hair into a similar cut. But there was more than that. They seem to have similarly round faces and a certain analogous seriousness. The more we looked at the picture, the more I could see it.

  “So, you would like me to try for this type of expression? Enhance your natural likeness to Vesalius.”

  “Well, I don’t think I look like him … not really. He was Flemish. I am of pure Batavian stock. But, yes, I think it would be useful to include a part of the anatomy, perhaps a dissected limb. I’d prefer an arm, if you wouldn’t mind, in homage.”

  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?