The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp is among the most reproduced images of the seventeenth century. The corpse at its centre was a real man, and the painting records a real event.
The Horror
The dead man was Aris Kindt, an alias of Adriaen Adriaenszoon, a thief and repeat offender. He was hanged in Amsterdam on January 31, 1632. Another date, January 16, appears in some sources, but the 31st is better supported by the primary documents. Accounts of his crime differ: armed robbery, the mugging of a gentleman for his cloak, and the theft of a coat are all reported.
Amsterdam’s Guild of Surgeons was allowed one public dissection a year, and the body had to be that of an executed criminal. Nicolaes Tulp, the guild’s anatomist, performed the lesson. The guild commissioned a group portrait from Rembrandt, who was twenty-five, had moved to Amsterdam the year before, and had not painted one before. It was signed “Rembrant. f. 1632”.
The dissection shown starts with the left forearm, not the body cavity. In 2006 Dutch researchers recreated the scene with a cadaver and found several discrepancies between the painted forearm and a real one. A later study argued that a white cord along the wrist is most likely an anatomical variant rather than an artist’s mistake. Kindt’s painted face probably does not resemble him.
What is not known
The fate of the body after the lesson is not documented in the sources used here. One source says Dutch practice required a Christian burial afterwards, and that dissection was not used as an added punishment. A claim that Rembrandt painted the navel as the letter R is argued by one scholar and is unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
The surgeons met in the Waag on Nieuwmarkt, a former city gate turned weigh house, with “Theatrum Anatomicum” above their entrance. The ground floor is now a restaurant. When the guild’s widows’ fund planned to sell the painting in 1828, a royal decree stopped the sale and the state bought it for 32,000 guilders. It hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Rembrandt painted another anatomy lesson in 1656.
