The Anatomy Lesson (27 page)

They held it in the grand hall of the medical guild at a long wood table made, I was told, from a single giant oak that had been shipped all the way from the New World. That was only the first of many extravagances prepared for this particular feast. Silver trays of Gouda and Edam cheeses, lamb, goat, pig, fish, beef, and lobster were delivered to the table, and it seemed as if the autopsy was quickly forgotten.

I didn’t have much of an appetite upon leaving the dissection chamber, and my head was swimming with memories of my brother and the boy from Leiden. I was thinking, too, of that woman who rushed into the anatomy theater during the dissection, and how she
had the force of the crowd behind her. How they had pressed their way into that room so that she could see him one last time. But like that … to see him like that …

No one else seemed the least bit interested in this or anything having to do with the anatomy lesson. Once they delivered the casks of Rhenish wine, the conversation quickly turned bawdy. Some gruesome jokes about innards were made at the dead man’s expense, and the men stabbed their knives into their meats with far more dexterity than Tulp had used his blade. It was about the time when the banqueters began singing and crashing their tankards against the table that I was tapped on the shoulder to see Dr. Tulp in his private chambers upstairs. This was a great relief to me by that point.

Tulp received me warmly when I entered his office.

“They’re toasting you at the banquet,” I said, sitting down across from him. He was behind a large wood desk on a chair that seemed more like a throne. “Don’t you want to join the festivities?”

“I dislike liquor and abhor tobacco,” he said with a gentle smile. “I am an antisumptuary but I don’t seem to be able to prevent the guild members from partaking. I pay for the banquet out of the guild’s purse. I simply choose to remain apart.”

“I am honored to be invited to your private chambers. Let me express my heartfelt apologies that I was so tardy tonight. If it could have been prevented, it would have.”

He offered me some more of his herbal brew and I accepted it.

“I wondered what had become of you,” he conceded without scolding. “But I was pleased that you arrived when you did. You did not miss the most important part. That part you’ll need for the portrait.”

“Your dissection of the hand was masterfully done,” I said. “All
the guild members are saying so. I should think Professor Pauw would be very proud of his star pupil.”

Tulp bowed his head, I think, to blush. “That is a generous compliment, indeed.” He looked up at me again. “I think he should be disappointed with me; I was not able to locate the source of the criminal’s corruption in his soul.”

“Where did you suspect it would reside?”

“I should have thought to find it in his heart or at least his liver.”

“And not in his hand?”

The doctor shook his head. “Moral philosophy and criminal justice diverge dramatically when it comes to offending organs. Judges and magistrates punish the hand because it is the most effective way to prevent the repetition of the criminal act. But there is no medical evidence that the hand itself contains the source of the thief’s soul corruption any more than the tongue is to blame for the liar’s prevarications. Our moral philosophy teaches that all soul corruption resides in one of the vital organs of the thorax.”

“And could there be no other medical explanation?”

“All men of scientia must come up with new theories, or else we should never have any lively debates in our profession and no new published works. Some men believe that new knowledge is always the best knowledge. I prefer to stick with the ancients. The mortal soul is clearly to be found in the thorax. Now there is a debate, of course, between Plato and Aristotle about whether there is further division and that the immortal soul can be found in the neck and head. Yet, for a thief I think one must focus on the mortal soul to discover the source of corruption. It would be in the thorax. I must have overlooked something during this dissection. I am just not sure yet what.”

He was momentarily distracted, jotting down a note for himself.
I began to move slowly around the room, taking in all that he had on display. It was a formal study and everything had its place. The shelves were lined with mustard- and rust-colored leather-bound tomes. In the cabinets were a handful of anatomical preservations in glass jars: small samplings of animal and human tissue in pale liquid, labeled with their precise contents. The colors of the specimens were fleshy reds and pinks. There was a small slice of what appeared to be a human lung latticed with holes like a fisherman’s net. Another jar held a lobe of a brain, its contours gray and brown with age. The cabinet also contained smaller jars of what seemed to be medicines and ointments, items from his developing pharmacopeia, I guessed.

On another wall was an anatomical drawing of an ape. The lines of the drawing were weak and thin, the shapes that made the body too round and inexact to be a credible likeness. The ape looked more human than he should, yet not at all natural. To one side of his cabinet there was a wall marked in the shapes of his medical tools—forceps, scalpels, retractors—some of which lay on the shelf below.

He finished writing and returned his focus to me.

“It is an important question,” he said. “Where the soul resides. You must have an opinion of your own on the matter.”

“I have been told often that my portraits do not accurately depict my patrons. And many of my subjects do not see in themselves what I put on the canvas. When I view a man, I do not study so much the color of his eyes or the precise folds of the particular wrinkles about his mouth. Their noses are too wide, or their eyebrows too large; they say my skills in creating likenesses is sometimes wanting.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “As a portrait painter, it is my job to try and capture not only a man’s likeness but also a man’s soul. Men of learning, like you, search for the soul that lies within. The artist is trained to view what is without and to reflect it as faithfully
as possible. But how many of us are able to use what we see on the outside as a way to glimpse what is within?”

Tulp smiled wryly. “And yet your self-portraits do depict you faithfully.”

“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.