The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 group portrait, not a record of a science class. Rembrandt painted seven Amsterdam surgeons around Dr Tulp, who is opening the left forearm of Aris Kindt, an executed thief. It shows doctors who wanted to be seen understanding the body.
Rembrandt was still in his twenties and had just arrived in Amsterdam. Public dissections of his day were held in the Waag, the city's weighing house, and the surgeons in the picture helped pay for it. The painting was a success at once, and commissions followed.
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The understanding is the part that does not hold up.
Tulp lifts the tendons of the forearm with a pair of forceps, and the whole picture is built around that gesture. In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald's narrator points out that the exposed tendons ought to be those of a left palm, given the position of the thumb, but are in fact those of the back of a right hand. None of the surgeons seems to notice.
I don't think the paying sitters were checking the tendons. They were checking their own faces.
Who was the man on the table?
A thief from Leiden, hanged in Amsterdam in January 1632. The Universiteit Leiden describes Aris Kindt as a criminal who coincidentally came from Leiden and had been hanged for theft in Amsterdam. The Rembrandthuis spells his name Adriaen het Kint.
His body was the city's to use. Public dissections took place once a year, in winter, and the Rembrandthuis notes the season was chosen because the stench of a corpse would have been unbearable at any other time. The body was almost always that of a criminal. The Mauritshuis adds that the public, students and laypeople alike, could watch for a fee.
So the man in the picture was both a punishment and a ticket. The surgeons looked at his arm. Spectators paid to look at them looking.
That still leaves a puzzle about the arm itself, because it was not where a lesson usually started.
What You'll Discover
Why Tulp started with the arm.
What doctors found on a real cadaver.
Who paid to be painted.
What his second lesson cut open.