Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a group portrait of Amsterdam surgeons presenting themselves as men of learning. The setting is a public dissection in January 1632. The meaning lies in the arm that Dr. Tulp, the guild's anatomist, chooses to open, and in the seven colleagues who paid to stand beside him.
Rembrandt was in his mid-twenties, a painter from Leiden who had only recently moved to Amsterdam. The surgeons' guild gave him the commission, and the canvas shows Tulp at work on the body of a hanged thief.
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In the picture, the belly is intact and Tulp has opened the left forearm, where he lifts the muscles with a pair of forceps.
That is out of order. Anyone who watched a dissection in Rembrandt's day knew it began with the belly, because the bowels rotted fastest. A lesson ran for several days, in winter, to keep the smell down, and the head and limbs came last.
Starting with the arm was Tulp's own choice. It was made for the men in the room and for everyone who would later look at them. Even the sheet of paper that names those men was not left the way Rembrandt painted it.
The thief on the table
The court record called the thief Aris Kindt. He was born Adriaen Adriaensz in Leiden, the same town as Rembrandt, and was arrested for stealing a winter coat and sentenced to death. He was hanged on January 31, 1632, and his body went straight to the guild. The crime is also recorded as an armed robbery, so the record is not quite settled.
Dutch law gave the Amsterdam surgeons only one public dissection a year, and only the body of an executed criminal could be used. Kindt was what the law supplied that winter.
Kindt lies at the center of the canvas, yet the picture is built around the man standing over him with the forceps, and around a book that explains why he stood where he did.
What You'll Discover
Which book the arm points to.
Who paid to be in the picture.
Whether Rembrandt got the arm wrong.
What happened to his second anatomy lesson.