The Anatomy Lesson

by Nina Siegal

  “There it is,” I said. “But what do I look like? I don’t know. Every self-portrait is a different man. I see my subjects and their features surely, but my job is not to depict these precise features or any accumulation of parts, only to depict the man himself. That requires going beyond the qualities of his edifice and gazing, somehow, more acutely into his soul.”

  “Aha,” said Tulp. “Then you think a soul can be viewed from outside?”

  “This is what puzzles me, because I believe I do,” I said. “What is it that can make manifest the stuff of a man’s soul? As you point out, the courts would have us view a man’s body as a map of his misdeeds. The thief’s brands tell us where he has sinned. His whipping scars tell us how egregiously. Then we cut open his body and examine his internal organs to discover what corruption lies within. But as a painter of portraits, I must follow the advice of Leonardo, who instructs us to seek the soul through the external elements. I must see the man as a man first, and guess at the soul within.”

  Tulp spent a moment considering this. “You are very learned,” he said.

  “For an artist …” I finished his thought a little wickedly.

  “I had not expected it. But I am glad for it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We anatomists believe that a man is redeemed through our dissection because his body becomes useful for human inquiry. Do you find any truth in that?” he asked me.

  “That suggests a soul can be redeemed. I hope that is the case.”

  “A politic answer. You impress me, Master van Rijn. I am glad you came to speak with me.”

  I swallowed the last of the tea he had poured me. The taste was still bitter but I could see how it might yet work wonders in me. “Surely, you didn’t invite me here merely for a discourse on the soul?”

  “No,” he said. “I wanted to discuss a practical matter, about the portrait.”

  “Of course.”

  “We had discussed using the arm in the portrait,” he began, “like the Vesalius woodcut.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is maybe a petty concern, but it is important to me. In the Vesalius portrait the arm depicted is the patient’s right arm. This patient, as you saw, had no right hand. It was taken by some other executioner. For my dissection I had to use the left arm.”

  “Yes, I noticed.”

  “It is important to me—though I understand that it complicates matters for your portrait. But I would like you to paint the right arm, rather than the left arm. I would like it to look like Vesalius’s arm. Is that possible?”

  My mind was already full of so many other thoughts about the painting that I could think of no reasonable reply except to agree. I did not tell him then that I was considering portraying the whole man. I knew it would upset him if I did. “I will do my best to faithfully represent the right arm,” I told him, “although my model is missing the right hand.”

  “Excellent,” he said, taking my cup and his own and putting them both on a silver tray. “Do you have any other questions?”

  I stood, recognizing this signal that our session had come to a close. “I have only one. Can you tell me who that woman was who entered the chamber during the dissection? Was she his wife?”

  He stood as well. “A very sad case it was. She is not his wife but a woman who carries his child. She has left now, though. I think she has gone home.”

  CONSERVATOR’S NOTES, TRANSCRIBED FROM DICTAPHONE

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

  I believe I now have corroborative evidence to support a rather important discovery in the painting: I have examined two very small paint samples from the right hand of the corpse, in the underpainting and in the overpainted section. Looking at it under the microscope, it is clear to me that the overpainted section seems to have a significantly higher density of lead white than the pigment below it.

  Even more important, perhaps, the uppermost layer of paint appears to have been applied with much greater density. Rembrandt appears to be trying to fix a problem, to be eradicating an earlier choice as he paints a fully formed, elegant hand over a stump. Meantime, I asked my studio assistant to check through the justitieboek that informs our present inquiry. This was written four days before Aris Kindt was hanged in Dam Square. That’s 27 January 1632. He apparently gave his confession after being “hauled up with two hundred pound weights.” Here’s the actual wording:

  Adriaen Adriaenszoon from Leiden, alias Aris Kindt or Arend Kint placed by aldermen in the hands of my Lord Schout in order, through being put to the rack, to speak the truth on that of what he has been accused of. Two hundred pounds of weight were bound his legs, as he was unwilling to confess to have helped the cloak thief …

  Another entry:

  He has committed many thefts, purse snatchings, housebreakings, and other evil acts, for which he in this town as in other towns has been frequently arrested, then released and discharged from jail, under the expectation he would mend his ways. He was several times severely punished, thus persisting in denying and lying lie upon lie, he is by the Lords Aldermen placed in the hands of Lord Schout. Says to have been flogged with the others in Den Helder and Alkmaar, after he had been branded in Leiden four to five days before. Therefore the Lord Schout of Leiden, having learned of the misdeeds of this cloak thief, has decreed that he should have his right hand sawed off at the wrist.…

  This is the fifth Rembrandt painting I have had the privilege of examining and restoring. I worked on two in the Metropolitan, one at the Hermitage, and another at the Rijksmuseum. They were all painted at different stages in Rembrandt’s career, and I have been able to see, through very close scrutiny, how the master applied his pigments to achieve his illusionism.

  In Rembrandt’s later work especially, there’s always a very strong sense of focus in the fragments. That is, you don’t have to think very much about where to look, because Rembrandt is very deliberate in showing you. Rembrandt understood that the eye is drawn to texture, and so he builds up his paint in the key passages. And when he wants to correct something, he goes back in and uses pentimento. I will be giving special attention to his pentimenti—those layered dabs of paint—to try to make sense of his intention.

  Actually, it’s not just the thickness of the paint that directs the viewer’s attention. It’s a perfect combination of texture and light: it’s the lighter colors to draw your attention to a single point of focus. The drama of the painting—that famous spotlight effect.

  I was able to explore this more deeply with his later paintings, in particular the Prophetess Hannah, when I was working for the Rijksmuseum. The one that some scholars believe is Rembrandt’s mother. In that one she’s holding a very large book, the Bible most likely, and she is using her hands to touch the place in the book where she’s trying to read a passage. It’s clearly an important passage. It seems her eyesight is not good. The old lady’s hands on the book are both cast in light and finely detailed. You see every wrinkle in her hands, every minute fold of skin. Nothing is left to the imagination: you can almost count how many washes she did in the river, how many garments she sewed back to life by the light of a single candle. You can sense what it would be like to take that hand into your own, the way the skin would softly slide away under your touch.

  Everything else in that portrait fades away as you look at the hands. There is simply less pigment and less light in other parts of the painting. You see her face, but the eyes are mere dots, the nose is a simple slant, the tilt of the head is her only expression. As you move back from the picture, away from those hands, the paint is looser, more general, even kind of slapdash at the edges, as if Rembrandt couldn’t care less at that point about line, about shape.

  There’s intelligence to the way he brings your focus into what matters: those old lady’s hands literally trying to absorb through her fingertips the significance of that text.

  But to return to this question of Aris Kindt’s hands. What’
s interesting is that this evidence suggests that Rembrandt saw the dead man in person, and that he may have originally painted the hand as he saw it, as a stump. That is, he planned to include the suffering of the thief, to show his punishment as well as his dissection. At some point, though, Rembrandt changed his mind and invented a hand for Adriaen. Restored to the thief the hand that was taken from him. And not only that. He seems to have restored the flesh elsewhere, too. Kindt would have been covered with scars from all his punishments. Brandings. Whipping scars.

  So was this some bold act of compassion on Rembrandt’s part to restore the man? Or did he do it to protect Tulp from infamy? Or what could be the reason that he went back and “fixed” Aris. Why would he have done that?

  I want to put into the record the final words from the justitieboek on Aris Kindt’s final conviction in Amsterdam:

  These evil facts and their serious consequences are not to be tolerated in a town of justice and honesty but to be punished by law and by this be an example to others. It is therefore that the lords of justice, having heard the sentence, demanded and the resolution of the bailiff, also the confession of this prisoner, have sentenced him as they sentence him by now—to be led to the scaffold in front of the town hall of this town in order to be executed by the hangman to the rope till death [follows]. Accordingly, the corpse to be buried in the earth and they declare all his goods, if there are such, be confiscated to the disposal of the lords. Actum 27 January 1632 … and to be executed on the last day of January.

  A final note about the signature. Rembrandt himself must have considered this work to be a significant leap forward from his previous work. Before this painting, he always signed his canvasses with the initials “RHL” for Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Leiden. Rembrandt, son of Harmen of Leiden. This is the first painting he signed simply “Rembrandt.”

  When I got back to the studio, the workday had already come to a close. All the pupils and apprentices had gone home. Lit only by my single lantern, the room was the color of cobalt, the shadows layered and rich. The silence was silken. I carried my lantern into the center of the studio and stood for a moment, watching.

  The room had seen the arrivals and departures of multitudes. Everywhere I could see the results of a productive academy that had managed to keep running smoothly in my absence. Tomas had gotten further with his copy of my Jesus at Emmaus. In the etching studio, Isaac had completed the run of the prints I’d asked for. There were about fifty of them strung from lines crisscrossing the ceiling and another batch already dried and stacked on the table. He’d left the copper plate in the press, cleaned and readied for another round of printing.

  I plucked one of the prints off the drying line and held it in my hands. It was the image I’d requested: my mother at home at Weddesteeg in her mourning attire, the week of Gerrit’s death. I hadn’t drawn her; I’d etched the plate from memory.

  The paper from Isaac’s etching was still damp, the ink tacky. There was a lot of black in the print, but cross-hatching seemed to have worked. It made the textures distinct: the fur trim of her shawl, the gloss of her black mittens, and the rough cushions of the chair that props her up.

  My mother won’t like this portrait. I’ve captured her in the depth of her grief, her eyes unfocused, her mind distant, her whole body slumped under the weight of her sadness. She had loved Gerrit more than the rest of us, I think. Maybe not before the accident but certainly after his hand was crushed.

  After I went back to my apprenticeship in The Hague, and later opened my studio with Jan Lievens back in Leiden, she no longer worried about me. I would be self-sufficient, while her oldest son would need a mother’s focused care.

  At the funeral, though, my mother had held me so tightly it felt as if she were trying to bind me to her through her grip. She never met my eyes when I tried to touch her pale skin, her translucent cheeks, so worn with time’s passing. Her eyes darted away from my gaze.

  Maybe she didn’t want to share this grief with me. Maybe she was trying to protect me from the power of her love, but I did not think of that at the time; during the funeral, all I could think was that she was angry with me for continuing to live and thrive after her favored son had perished. One should not believe that a parent is able to love all sons equally. Some sons are easier to love than others.

  I reached up and pinned the print back on the drying line. I took a deep breath and let the smell of the etching acid fill my nostrils, stinging just a little bit.

  Taking the lantern with me, I returned to the painting studio. The snow had made the sky brighter and I could hear some of the revelers from the festival already in the streets.

  I went to Tomas’s copy of Emmaus on the floor, and lifted it to eye level. The apprentice was nearly finished with the painting now, and it would be his first completed work. Tomas had managed to give Cleopas a strong expression of fear, even if the gaping mouth he’d rendered veered a little bit toward the comical.

  The problem was the way Tomas had handled the light. In my study, I had placed Christ in deep shadow, the revelation casting Cleopas into light. Tomas had given an equal amount of light to the disciple and Christ. He’d managed to bring clarity to Jesus’s features, but that wasn’t the point. It was the choice of light that was most important—instead of bringing the viewer’s eye to Christ, I wanted to call attention to those who witnessed Christ’s resurrection. It was the witnesses who mattered in this particular story. This was their story, not Christ’s. His return wasn’t about his form or his face or how he looked as a man. It was about Cleopas recognizing God in this stranger. The emphasis had to be on Cleopas, the disciple, and his experience of discovery. His sudden recognition that the stranger was in fact Christ—that was the miracle.

  I let the painting rest again against the wall. Maybe Tomas knew already it wasn’t working. Maybe that’s why he’d taken it down from the easel.

  It was time, at last, to sit down and paint. I knew that I had been finding ways to put it off all day and now the moment had come to sit down and truly begin. I had to demand true concentration of myself—real discipline. No more distractions. Only the painting at hand.

  I drew up a chair and positioned myself in front of that massive stretch of linen. I saw the lines and shapes I had brushed onto the canvas that morning. They looked aimless and weak. Even the consistency of the paint seemed noncommittal. The brushstrokes had no authority, no direction. Only a set of shapes. The work of an amateur.

  Things had changed in me since I’d made my first attempt that morning. Now I at least had an idea for the overall composition and a strong concept for the image. I was sure of what I would try to do, and I wasn’t sure if I would achieve it. Including the dead man in the portrait would be a risk, but it was a risk worth taking because it would add so much more drama and tension to the piece. It would create a narrative, where no narrative existed.

  I found myself a wider paintbrush and picked up my palette again. I dabbed my paintbrush in the Kassel earth, and I started again. I moved the composition of guild members higher so that I could place the corpse at the base of the canvas. I started to paint an outline of the thief front and center, at the bottom of my pyramid. I outlined his overall shape, a large ovoid containing head, torso, legs, feet. I moved the figure of Van Loenen to the top of the pyramid and put Dr. Tulp to the side on the right. But I gave him a great deal of space, so that he had pride of place and room to move his hands.

  I looked at the figure of the thief. I considered turning him forward like Mantegna’s Christ, but looking at it within my pyramid, it didn’t seem right. I decided on a compromise. I should turn him diagonally within the frame, so that his feet would be a bit foregrounded and his head higher in the perspectival plane. As I outlined, though, I saw that this would require me to make him somewhat foreshortened, to make the proportions unusual between his torso and legs.

  I outlined a general shape of Dr. Tulp, standing over the body, making his cuts. That was my idea—to show
Tulp standing over the open cavity of the dead man’s body, searching for the soul. All the other surgeons and apprentices would be standing alongside him, gaping into the body cavity, observing Tulp’s dissection. Adriaen would be wide open at the center, a kind of plundered landscape, with the doctors mining his organs.

  It seemed like the right kind of image to make a point. The tearing down of the temple to chase after the thief within. It would be a modern allegory of scientia. The marks on the thief’s body would tell the story of his crimes; the stump would illustrate his punishment. The repose of the body would speak of his unearthly suffering.

  I liked it as a concept, and my hand moved swiftly across the canvas with the brush. I worked in the detail of the body. I outlined both arms. The anatomized arm and the stump. The specifics of the muscles and tendons and veins of the anatomized arm would have to wait for later, until I could get that arm from Fetchet. But I could work on the other arm based on my morning’s sketches. I went to my cloak and found my notepad.

  I brought it to the easel and tried to work from the sketches. Now, though, I had to consider the stump. The partial arm, hand missing at the wrist. How realistic should I try to make it? And what was I conveying with that shape?

  I found, however, that all this thought was becoming hard for me. It was too technical, too dry. And with each brushstroke, I found myself becoming more and more upset. It pained me to think about that hand. The thief’s hand. Adriaen’s hand. Because I also thought of Gerrit’s hand. My mother’s kiss. I remembered Adriaen’s hand holding the wine goblet that Lievens had given him. How he’d brought that glass to his lips with that hand and had waved goodbye that night after he’d supped.

  Each stroke made me ask myself: Was it further cruelty what I was doing? Making a man’s great loss, great suffering, so manifest? Would it tell the story I wanted it to tell? Or was it too literal minded, too directly on the mark?