Rembrandt, born Rembrant (with no -d-) Harmenszoon on July 15, 1606 in Leiden, the Netherlands, died October 4, 1669 in Amsterdam. He is considered one of the most compassionate storytellers in the history of art. In 1631 the ambitious young painter left Leiden, then in decline, for thriving Amsterdam. His first major public commission upon arrival there, untitled in his lifetime, is now called The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Fig. 1). It records Tulp’s anatomy lecture with the seven observers who paid to be included in the painting and was witnessed by an unseen paying audience. Hanging in the dark background a document signed ‘Rembrandt f[ecit (made it)]v: 1632’ certifies this as the City of Amsterdam’s official anatomy lesson for the year 1632.
The first compound microscope appeared in the Netherlands in the late 1500s while the earliest known working telescopes appeared there in 1608. Among the three Dutchmen associated with the invention of the telescope is the instrument maker and lens grinder Jacob Adriaenszoon, usually known simply as Jacob Metius. Rembrandt lived and worked in Holland when the first conceptual effects of the microscope and telescope view began coming into focus there. One effect, for example, was the realization that the body’s unaided senses no longer made direct contact with the material world’s largest and smallest things.
None of the participants in Dr. Tulp’s anatomy lesson look at the cadaver set out before them. The observer holding the paper with the (recently recovered) Rembrandt drawing of an arm looks out to his viewers, and three in the assembly appear to study the open book at the painting’s lower right corner. The book they study is likely Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 anatomical engravings, which contain at least eight well-known studies of the arm’s functional structures. This last detail suggests that Rembrandt could be puzzling over how abstraction—the indirect view—might affect our view of the material world, and possibly even undermine the seemingly unshakable authority of direct observation.
By coincidence, the dead man’s name is the same as that of the geometer and astronomer Adriaen Adriaenszoon. The astronomer is also the brother of Jacob Metius, the Dutch lens grinder and instrument maker who helped develop the telescope (both Jacob and his brother, Adriaen, were usually addressed simply as Metius). Rembrandt’s reverential treatment of the hanged thief’s body—atop the stump at the end of his right arm (the result of an earlier punishment) Rembrandt has painted a right hand that seems to mirror the refined delicacy of Dr. Tulp’s left hand gesture—suggests, among other things, both the painter’s compassionate nature and the intriguing idea that he may also have been aware of the coincidence of the names of the dead man and the astronomer. Is this an indirect metaphor commenting on how the telescope changed the body’s relationship to the sky and to the material world?
I submit these ideas as the result of artistic, not scientific, inquiry. Classically trained visual artists view the making of pictures as another way to think, and habitually read the work of other artists in the light of this visual commonality.
