Rembrandt van Rijn, seventeenth Century painter and etcher, is revered today as one of the greatest painters of all time, and is often most well-known for his self-portraits or The Night Watch. Born in 1606 in Leiden, Netherlands as Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, he attended Latin school, but it is unknown as to whether he completed his schooling as he is said to have been sent to study as a painter at his own request. From 1620 to roughly 1625 he studied as a painter under two separate masters, honing his skills.

Perhaps one of the most famous qualities of the works of Rembrandt van Rijn is his experimentation and interest with the use of light in his paintings. He began creating spots of light and pockets of deep darkness in his paintings and this changed his style drastically. By around 1628 he began to take students under his wing and today he is considered one of the most famous painters of the Dutch Baroque.

The oil on canvas painting titled The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp gets less credit than The Night Watch. It hangs in the Maritshuis Museum in The Hague and was completed in 1632 during the Baroque Dutch Golden Age because upon closer inspection it is actually quite complicated, more than a simple painting of an anatomy lesson.

Dr. Nicolaes, a professor of the Amsterdam Anatomy Guild, is giving a lesson showing the musculature of the forearm of a cadaver, Adriaen Adriaenszoon, a recently executed thief. At first glance that is all that is going on in this painting, but if you look closer each of Tulp’s colleagues are looking in different directions with distinctly different facial expressions that are both personal and psychologically different than the others, but they are still depicted as a unified group.

With the help of Rembrandt’s play on light, some of the men’s gazes are directed to the foot of the table which the cadavers lays where there is a very large book sitting propped up and open. As we know, an artist does not include items on accident or without purpose; perhaps the depiction of the book draws the connection to Rembrandt’s own study of the anatomy of the human musculature in the forearm for the purpose of this painting, as one would have to be familiar with the subject before one was to paint it. The book has been identified as a copy of Andreas Versalius’ De humani corporis fabrica from 1543.

So Rembrandt could be simply making the statement of the importance of books or written works as well as hands on training when it comes to science, but then why does he depict some of the men present not paying attention to the anatomy lesson? Tulp himself is not even looking down at the cadaver he was dissecting, and two of the men are looking directly at the viewer, maybe Rembrandt himself? There has been some debate that, while the title indicates this is a painting of Dr. Tulp’s anatomy lesson that Rembrandt did not truly paint the actual event as it was when it took place

Not a single figure in this painting is looking directly at the sickly discolored cadaver beneath them, they either stare straight past to the book at the foot of the table or out at the audience. From a psychological stand point this shows the gruesome truth of new science at the time; the man they are dissecting was executed either that day or the day before and all members seem to be very unprepared for this anatomy lesson. All of the men are dressed in their best clothes instead of the usual dress for doctors observing a surgery and once again they all look away from the body lying cold beneath them and even Rembrandt’s depiction of the arm’s muscles is drawn straight from the previously mentioned book as if he did not look directly at the body either.

Could it have physically bothered these men to look at such a sight? Rembrandt seems to be telling us that this is the case.