Die Anatomie des Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

In 1632 Rembrandt was 26 and new to Amsterdam, and the city's surgeons' guild handed him a plum commission. Public dissections were rare events, held in winter so the body kept, and legally they could only use the corpse of an executed criminal. The man on the table here was a thief hanged that same year. Doctor Nicolaes Tulp, the city's leading anatomist, demonstrates the muscles of the left forearm to a paying audience of colleagues. Instead of lining the men up in a neat row, which is how these group portraits were usually done, Rembrandt clustered them, leaning in, caught at the moment Tulp lifts the tendons with his forceps. Look at the open book at the corpse's feet, the anatomy atlas they are checking the body against.