The Anatomy Lesson Page 7

  Previous researchers (De Vries et al., Schupbach, Heckscher) have posited that Rembrandt may have used anatomical textbooks—of which there were several circulating in Holland at the time—in particular Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body). It’s certainly very likely that Rembrandt had that at his disposal (I have proposed elsewhere that it is the folio volume lying at the corpse’s feet in the foreground of the painting). But isn’t it also possible that he used something more lifelike as a model?

  Until now, it has been assumed that Rembrandt did not attend the anatomical lesson, but rather constructed a scene based on sittings with the individual medical “players.” This is supported by arguments (Wood Jones; Wolf-Heidegger) that the anatomy of the dissected left hand is inaccurate in a number of ways.

  The new Groningen medical study, “A Comparison of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson with a Dissected Left Forearm of a Dutch Male Cadaver,” published in the journal History of Hand Surgery, however, siding with Heckscher, suggests that Rembrandt in fact gave a strikingly accurate depiction of the superficial flexors of the fingers. It concluded that the “details and realistic colorful appearance of the original painting suggests that Rembrandt used a real limb.…” This seems to indicate that Rembrandt was working from life. That is, that he not only saw the dissection but spent quite a bit of time with the arm of the corpse, both before and possibly after Tulp’s anatomical lesson, and used a real arm as his model. I think we must consider the implications of that discovery for a moment: Rembrandt used a real limb? Where would he have gotten a real limb for such an exercise? Off the gallows? From the anatomist himself?

  What I intend to do now is to examine the rest of the body of the corpse to see if there might be any other evidence that Rembrandt saw this body in particular.

  I’m looking closer now, with the scope.

  The paint layer is relatively thin, especially compared with Rembrandt’s later paintings, and built up with great economy as though he is trying to save paint. The pigments, especially warmer hues, are applied more thickly in the foreground; the background details and the figures in the back have cooler, more subdued tonalities. The warmer tonalities are in the front. The brushstrokes are also applied more summarily in the back, more detailed in the foreground. This is the beginning of the emergence of Rembrandt’s technique: he draws your eye to where he wants it to go with lighter and thicker pigments. The figures of the doctors are relatively uniform in terms of hues and thickness of paint; however, the face of Colevelt at the extreme left has a more grayish tonality. He was painted later, but this has been discussed previously.

  Now I am looking at the body of the corpse. There are some shadow areas in the head of the corpse that are overpainted. Perhaps he moved the head of the corpse a bit? The hues here are grayer but also warmer, with a greater density of pigment. There is an inordinate amount of light pouring onto the corpse, as if from a single source above. Still, the hues tend to the grays, to indicate death.

  Here’s something intriguing: it does appear that there is an uneasy transition between the corpse’s right hand and the wrist. Wrinkles of paint occur together with a few premature cracks. This is the right hand—the hand closest to the viewer, not the dissected hand. Also, there is a shift in coloration between the right wrist and the right hand. The hand is grayer, and there is a greater density of pigment. It is a very unusual hand, an unnecessarily elegant hand, it seems to me, for a thief. I have thought that before, just looking at it in the gallery. Very intriguing indeed.

  Please note that I will need to request permission to take a sample from this passage. Very curious. Perhaps I should also take a look at the ’78 x-radiograph from De Vries and his team and figure out if this was there then. I will do that this morning.

  January 31, 1632

  Dear Mersenne,

  I promised you that before the end of the year I would send you my new treatise that explains heaviness, lightness, hardness, and the speed of weights falling in a vacuum, and as is plainly evident by the date on this missive, I have failed to keep my promise once again.

  I beg your continued patience with me, dear friend, as my reason for putting off sending it to you has been the hope of including some of my recent observations for “The World.” I wanted to respond to your thoughts on the corona of the candle flame and to advance my own positions on the question of the location of the soul in the body as well.

  This morning, I bought a lamb from one of the butchers near my lodgings, and I have been examining it in my rooms. Having scrutinized its organs closely, and attempting to jot down my observations of vital functions based on the lamb’s anatomy, I hope to learn about the digestion of food, the heartbeat, the distribution of nourishment, and the five senses. I cannot assume that these are corollary functions in a man, but they are a beginning.

  Still, I’m afraid that I shall discover little in the lamb that I did not already observe in my vivisections with dogs and goats. The organs of animals are remarkably similar in shape and function; they are only different in size and sometimes in corporeal location. I searched this lamb for some evidence of its rational soul, but because it was already dead, I did not have much hope of discovering it. Animals are as complex in many ways as human bodies, yet I still do not find any explanation for the fact that they lack the powers of speech or reason.

  Dear friend, my intention was to travel to Deventer this week to meet with Reneri and compare notes on these and other recent observations. However, it seems that I have been detained once again, both by the frigid weather, which makes many of the country canals and rivers impassable, and also by an event at which my presence is required this evening. I shall attend an anatomical demonstration and lecture of one Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the praelector of this town’s surgeons’ guild—in Holland every profession must have a guild, for men here do not care to be singular but rather more like epiphytes that grow where other plants of their ilk have already found a ready supply of moisture.

  Did you know that here they are also allowed to perform anatomies on criminals straight from the hangman’s rope, in front of a vast public, which includes every merchant and shopkeep who owns a ruff? It is unlike anything I’ve heard about in Oxford or Padua. The Dutch cut round and lecture, discuss and debate, and then they feast openly and with public approbation. The festive anatomy is quite a bit more pomp than substance, however, almost like a drama on the stage.

  Have you heard of this city’s anatomical praelector who takes his name from this country’s most emblematic blossom? Tulpius, they call him, like something out of Rabelais. He is the one who has been known to say, “I’d rather err with Galen than circulate with Harvey,” as if betting on the ancients against modernity were some kind of hound race.

  Tulp objects, I understand, not to the specific theory William Harvey presents on the pumping of blood through the heart but to the very notion of exploring the heart’s precise function. I do not quite understand the logic of this. There are those, of course, who still consider the heart to be the locus of either the mortal or immortal soul, and perhaps his objection to Harvey’s work stems from the fear that we would disturb that image of such a sacred organ. It seems to me quite clear that the heart has a mechanical function within the body, and one that relates in some way to the revitalizing of the blood. When blood leaves the heart it does not have the same qualities as it did when it entered. It is hotter, more rarefied, and more agitated. Are medical men afraid that the heart could no longer be the seat of the soul if it had a mechanical function?

  I have my concerns about Harvey’s conclusions, because his observations on the heart’s movements differ substantially from the evidence I have accumulated during vivisections of live dogs. Yet Harvey deserves the highest possible praise for making such a valuable discovery about the pumping of this organ.

  I may have something to learn from this Tulpius—and to discover our differences so that I might articulate my opposing position more
forcefully—and at the moment some firsthand observation of a human anatomy may yield greater insights than my own amateur animal anatomies.

  By the by, have I mentioned that they sell the bull’s full hindquarters here, so it is possible to trace the veins and arteries directly from the feet all the way to the intestines? I find myself thrilled to discover it, and cannot wait until I have cleared a place in my lodgings to move ahead with my studies.

  Many times I have sung the praises of Amsterdam as the perfect urban retreat, and how preferable it is to Paris or Rome, because everyone here is so engaged in trade that they ignore you quite entirely. It was not even a year ago that I boasted to Jean-Louis de Balzac that I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by a soul. However, time has worn out my anonymity and I have begun to be noticed … indeed, I have begun to have certain social obligations from which I cannot seem to extricate myself.

  So, there it is: I will have to postpone my Deventer excursion once again. I remain here in my lodgings at the Oud Prins and I will share with you some new chapters from my “World” as soon as I have them.

  Your true and loving friend,

  René Descartes

  I never knew there were so much empty space out there between Leiden and other parts. I always figured one town ended and another began just across a dike or dam.

  Mother talked sometimes about the lonesome stretches she’d walk when she went studding her bull, but they must’ve been lonelier than I ever imagined because there were nothing out there but fields and sky and crows. At least, that’s all you could see from the barge that took us across the Haarlemmermeer to Amsterdam.

  That breeze on the boat were something, though. When it rushed across my face, I thought, There’s more in the world, more than cruelty and meanness. Adriaen told me once that he’d been on a galley. He were to row for eight years with other convicts for the admiralty of Rotterdam. That sounded important, but he said the admiralty were no better than them slave traders and it were his job to row them. I never knew how he got off that ship, but I thought about where it would have taken him. I thought, maybe, even on a boat like that, there were that breeze. If he felt that, I bet he smiled. That made me feel better, so I held my belly and thought on how Carel should get to feel that breeze someday.

  The boy the father sent with me were a frail, ash-colored thing. He said his name were Guus. He reminded me of Adriaen when he were young: stringy and loose limbed. He might have been one of them boys throwing stones in the morning, though. When he came to me, he looked like he were sent to meet a ghost or a hobgoblin. Maybe he’d heard what they all cried. Maybe he had ideas about me.

  I took his hand and I held it between my two hands and closed my eyes. I said, “Thank you, young man, for not being fearful. You are a good boy. We’ll take care of each other.”

  He smiled weakly.

  When we were close to land, the barge were drawn along the edge of the canal with a horse on land to pull it. But soon as we go out into the open water, they let the horses loose and the barge went to sailing. They hauled up the sheets and the wind flapped up against them, and you could see the strength of it, hard and fast, tipping our boat sometimes till it scared me. A ghostly power, that breeze. Nothing you could touch, but the force of it were something.

  When the boat were out there in the meer, every once in a while the boy would look up and ask a question: “How long you lived in Leiden?” “How’d you meet that convict?” “Do you know how to read?” “What’s it feel like to have a baby inside you?”

  I took his hand and put it to my belly. We waited until the babe kicked. The boy jumped back when Carel moved. Then he laughed. We both did. Funny, how you can laugh at any time, any place, even through the worst of it.

  “Did you get a baby from a spell?” he asked me then.

  “No, I got it from a man,” I told him.

  “That man we’re going for in Amsterdam?”

  “Yes.”

  Guus took a step away from me. “They said he murdered someone.”

  “He didn’t murder anyone. He only tried to steal a man’s coat.”

  He looked confused. “But didn’t he have his own coat?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, to be honest. “Sometimes he had a cloak. Sometimes he were just in his jerkin. He had things sometimes and then he lost them. He weren’t good with keeping things.”

  Guus thought about this. “He can have my coat,” he said. “I’m never cold.”

  “That would be very nice of you.”

  He looked proud to have said it.

  After that, he were less afraid of me. He called me “ma’am.”

  The night before the stones came, I had a dream that we were climbing a tree with our newborn. Me and Adriaen. The babe in one of my hands. I were to make an apple tart for springtime and we were going all together to pick the apples from the tree in the yard. When I climbed, Adriaen lifted the babe into the branches, because he said the babe would only be safe up top. I were trying to grab an apple off one limb and trying to reach for the babe at the same time, and I got unsteady because of my reaching and I broke the limbs off below. Adriaen were on his way up and instead he fell forward, so we fell together and we fell far, we fell for a long time. In the dream I were calm about it, not screaming, but afraid for the babe.

  Finally we hit a branch and landed in a giant nest, but it were thick with thorns and we were both cut and bruised and crying. The babe weren’t with us anymore. He floated up to the top of the tree when we started falling, and as we went lower, he went higher, and finally we saw him up there, settled on a perch as calm as a lamb. Adriaen and I stayed in our nest and he held me and we watched our babe up in the high branches of the tree above us. I saw Adriaen’s belly and felt where he’d been branded, and it weren’t any of the shapes I knew. It were a bird this time, with wild many-colored feathers. I traced my name in that brand and my finger were a flame.

  I thought about what I could say to the magistrate to make him grant a pardon. I did not know what my words would be to a magistrate. I’m just a poor woman with a broken mill and I’m tireder now than ever with the babe’s heaviness.

  I did not know if Father van Thijn’s note would help. Except that they were calling him murderer and I knew that weren’t Adriaen. The father knew it, too, even if he didn’t say it. Adriaen were not soft or gentlehearted, but he didn’t have that meanness. I knew all he stole and how he stole it. He were not shy to talk about his ways of thieving. He were proud of his way. He said he were always kind to men even when he were thieving from them. And if he were caught, he said he always showed respect to his jailors. He didn’t mind what they did to him, no matter how much they did to him, he seemed to think it were coming to him. That were the way it all worked for Adriaen. He did his misdeeds because it were how he lived; they gave him his whips and brands because it were his comeuppance. But hanging? For murder? No, no. That weren’t him.

  Maybe I would’ve said this to the magistrate: Adriaen loved people. He talked to everyone like he never met a stranger. What were his were theirs; what were theirs, his; and if he liked something, he didn’t mind to take it. But he never kept much very long and never had much from thieving. A gully knife for eating and a set of leatherworking tools his father gave him. That’s all I ever know he had. He loved his vagabond life, too. He liked to warm his hands by a crackling canal-side fire with the other mendicants. He thought the wind were a song in his ear.

  I knew him as a boy and I knew him as a man. We grew up in houses side by side on the Rhine. He were a sweet, spindly-legged boy. He looked after me when my father went drunk to the hayloft. I looked after him when his father went wild with his fists. He left Leiden when they lost the shop and spent years wandering.

  When he came back to Leiden after all them years traveling, he were the tiredest man I ever saw, my Adriaen. It weren’t just in his eyes but everywhere, like he’d been a sail on a high seas trading ship, where pirates climbed
aboard and slashed. That were how he were when he came back to me after all them years wandering. He went out and got himself tired.

  His body weren’t beautiful no more, neither. But each of them flogging scars and brandings were evidence of the life he’d lived, and when we were in bed I used to touch them and trace my finger from one to the next like they were a map of his travels. That back of his were like the sloping hills of our marshland, and each long scar a canal, a passageway to his salvation. He let me touch them, though the skin were sensitive there, and I don’t think he let anyone else do that, ever.

  I listened and I heard about where he’d been. It weren’t nice what he said, sometimes, but them words were a deep lake you walk into and stay in the bottom muck, your feet held in its murky sink, somehow just swaying. What I mean is, it weren’t ugly down there inside Adriaen, just dark and different. I could stay there in that place for a long time without feeling any ways bad about anything.

  Once we got through the meer, they hitched the barge back up to horses, and they pulled us along the bank up the Overtoom. When we got close to the city gates, they started to buck and whinny. There were too many mares in the sluice. Word spread through the barge that they had shut the city gates at the Leidse Port. They said there were too many outsiders trying to get to Justice Day. They had to keep back the crowds.