ON 20TH MAY 1620, REMBRANDT’S FATHER TOOK HIS SON TO ENROL AS an arts student at the University of Leiden. This enrolment was customary once a boy had completed the tertia at the Latin school, cost fifteen stivers, and conferred certain benefits: Leiden students paid no tax on beer and wine, were subject to academic law and were exempt from service in the civic militia.
Until quite recently, it was assumed that Rembrandt had enrolled with a view to securing these advantages and that he did not actually attend lectures. He was the most famous student ever to have been “sent down” from Leiden University.
A discovery made in the university archives in the summer of 2019 sheds new light on the artist’s undergraduate days. Students were required to re-enrol each year, inscribing their names in registers or recensielijsten. The lists from the first half of the seventeenth century have not been preserved. Only the register of matriculations or volumen inscriptionum for 1622 has survived, but it seems not to have been carefully scrutinized before. It contains Rembrandt’s name.
In February 1622, the principal placed an asterisk beside the name of “Rembrandus, Hermanii, with his parents”, indicating that he had re-enrolled and paid the required five stivers. His age, “14”, is deleted and replaced with “15”. Evidently the principal asked his age once again—and Rembrandt’s reply indicates that his date of birth may indeed have been 15th July 1606.
Far more importantly, however, the entry shows that Rembrandt spent longer at university than we thought. It is highly likely that he also enrolled in the lost volumen inscriptionum of 1621. He may even have still been a registered student in 1623, but the list for that year has not survived.
How seriously he took his studies we shall never know for sure. But it is no longer possible to make light of the time that “Rembrandus” spent at Leiden University. He must have studied for at least two years. This helps to explain his spectacular development as a history painter as well as his knowledge and understanding of the Bible, which he would go on to apply with such ingenuity.
Rembrandt moved in academic circles. He lived in a city that challenged his intellect and fired his curiosity every day afresh.
Since 1575, Leiden had been a busy hub of learning. Less than four months after the Relief—William of Orange had rushed to ensure that Philip II, the lawful ruler, would be faced with a fait accompli if he were to conclude peace with Holland’s other cities—the new University of Leiden was commended to the grace of God at 7 a.m. on the bitterly cold morning of 8th February 1575. The Pieterskerk was jam-packed. After the service, an inaugural procession wound its way through the streets, devised and designed by Jan van der Does, who had been appointed principal of the new university. The locals would have lined the streets, gaping at the spectacle.
In the vanguard of the procession strode the men of the civic militia, beating their drums, brandishing their banners, and “with a great din and a marvellous hubbub of muskets, small arms, and pistols”, wrote Orlers. Then came a float with the Sacra Scriptura, the Holy Scriptures, represented by a woman clad in a virginal white robe. Flanking her on foot were the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Next was the mounted figure of Justitia, blindfold, holding her scales and sword. She was surrounded by Roman legal scholars.
Fokke, Procession Celebrating the Inauguration of the University of Leiden, 1575.
After Justitia came Medicina, with a twig of herbs in one hand and a urine bottle in the other. The men marching in her train represented celebrated physicians from history, such as Hippocrates and Theophrastus. Behind them came the patroness of the new university, Minerva, in a suit of armour made of starched cloth and a shield displaying the fearsome Medusa, shaking her serpent hair. Minerva was accompanied by Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Virgil.
The highlight of the procession was the “triumphant ship” that sailed along the water of Rapenburg, carrying a lyre-playing Apollo accompanied by the nine Muses. Neptune stood at the helm, as the god of the sea and winds who had raised the surge of water that had driven the Spanish troops from the city. The ship was a vision of a marvellous future in which art and science would represent the city’s quintessence.
In the years following the inaugural procession, the governors set about finding suitable premises in the city for the new academic institution. The university started off at St Barbara’s convent, which had been evacuated after the Iconoclasm, but the building soon proved inadequate. In 1581 it moved to the former convent of the Cistercians, farther down Rapenburg, where the university library too was set up, until the move, fourteen years later, to the opposite side of Rapenburg, in the old chapel of the Faliede Bagijnhof. That chapel, which the university shared with the English Reformed Church, also accommodated an anatomy theatre and a school of fencing.
During Rembrandt’s days at the Latin school, the university saw an entire generation of scholars come and go—or pass away. Leiden attracted scholars and students from all over Europe. By the time Rembrandt enrolled, he was joining an institution with some 2,500 students. They were welcomed as enthusiastically as the new cloth-workers. Indeed, the board of governors did its best to appoint the most famous scholars of the day as lecturers or professors. This headhunting operation was quite successful, certainly when you bear in mind that Leiden was still as poor as a church mouse and the young Dutch Republic was still in a state of war.
The great humanist and philologist Justus Lipsius, famous for his treatise De constantia, served four terms as chancellor of the university before returning to the Southern Netherlands to take up a position at his old alma mater, the Catholic University of Leuven. The man invited to replace him was a celebrity scholar. This was the French humanist Josephus Justus Scaliger, renowned for his incisive biblical exegesis, his editions of the classics and Oriental thinkers and his remarkable writings on horology.
On 26th August 1593, Scaliger arrived in Leiden and the city hosted a banquet in his honour at the inn called De Clock on Breestraat. The large company of diners included Jan van der Does, Jan van Hout, the burgomasters, the chancellor, Johannes Heurnius and Professors Junius and Beyma. The feast ended up costing 112 guilders and eight pennies, over half of which went on alcohol. The guests drank a total of 110.8 litres of wine.
Scaliger had been cajoled to Leiden by some uncommonly attractive terms of employment. He was exempt from teaching duties, received a far higher salary than the other professors and was entitled to free board and lodging. To emphasize his unique position, Scaliger was to lead every procession and was permitted to wear a scarlet gown rather than the standard black.
In his large house on Breestraat, immediately opposite the town hall steps, he wrote his Thesaurus temporum (“The Treasure-house of Time”), and held fireside meetings with students such as Hugo Grotius, Caspar Barlaeus, Petrus Scriverius and Daniël Heinsius. “There was that time,” wrote Heinsius in his funeral oration for Scaliger, “when the house of one man in this city was the Museum of the world: when distant Maronites and Arabs, Syrians and Ethiopians, Persians and some of the Indians had in this city the man to whom they could unfold their thoughts through the interpretation of language.”
Scaliger was a prickly character, prey to pugnacious outbursts. He engaged in polemics with the Jesuits on the interpretation of biblical passages, wrote withering comments on colleagues or rivals in the margins of his books, and carped at the poor living conditions in Leiden. A friend recalled the humanist scholar’s complaints about the lack of decorum he encountered in the city: “One may cause a nuisance to one’s neighbour with impunity. My neighbours are wont to shout loudly, and I cannot prevent them from doing so. During Lent they start drinking at a very early hour.”
French school, Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), sixteenth century.
Another pet hate was the weather. Scaliger railed at the cold and the damp, the foggy haze that hung over the canals on wintry days. He called Leiden “a swamp within a swamp”. Even the remedy against the cold, burning peat in the fireplace, did not escape his censure. “The peat emits sulphurous fumes. From the first moment I arrived here in Leiden, I noticed that others turned white by the fireside. I thought they were fainting, but I was told that it was caused by the bitumen in the peat and by the sulphur.”
Scaliger had the fright of his life when his landlord suddenly sold the house on Breestraat. The overheated conditions on the housing market had created havoc in Leiden and made it extremely hard for Scaliger to find a new place to live. When he finally did, he was aghast to discover that the roof of his new home was full of leaks, posing a threat to his large, precious library.
Scaliger developed a curious antipathy to the “Flemish and Walloon rabble”—immigrants like himself. In 1607 he scribbled the following satirical poem into his copy of Lipsius’s De militia Romana. The Latin lines of verse may be roughly rendered as follows:
Leiden! See your citizens supplanted by strangers, Belgian filth.
Partition threatens every house: from each one they make seven.
Growth has made this one-time village a town of easy wealth.
Blossom you may, yet soon you’ll be one overflowing tavern.
Besides expressing Scaliger’s aversion to the crowds, it also shows that, in getting so worked up about the changes, he had come to feel like a true local—to feel at home, after all, in the foggy swamp.
Upon his death in 1609, Scaliger left most of his library—208 Oriental books and manuscripts—to the university. In the university library, which he called a magna commoditas (“a great convenience”), these were kept in a separate bookcase displaying the inscription “legatum Josephi Scaliger” and his family coat of arms: a small ladder. The Scaligers hailed from Verona and their name was originally “Della Scala”—“Of the Steps”.
Rembrandt is unlikely to have spent much time in the library. Possibly he never went there at all. Only the librarians, professors and city councillors were given a key. But in 1605 it was decided to revoke all rights to the key (the ius clavium) and to close the library to the public because books were being stolen. The doors would not reopen for another twenty-five years.
Rembrandt was naturally familiar with the library’s appearance, for instance from the four prints by Willem van Swanenburg (son of Isaac), which also showed the fencing school, the botanical gardens and the anatomy theatre, and which had been published by Andreas Cloucq of Leiden in 1610. The prints were sold separately, but they were also reprinted in Orlers’s Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden as well as in Athenae Batavae, the richly illustrated history, prospectus and “Who’s Who” of the university for 1625, written by Johannes Meursius. Meursius was an erudite professor of history and linguistics whose arrogance was so off-putting that other scholars were loath to praise his work. Scaliger goaded Meursius by calling him in Latin ignorant—“a dunderhead”.
For his engraving of the “bibliotheca lugduno-batavae”, Willem van Swanenburg had based his composition on Jan Cornelis van ’t Woud’s drawings of the library when it was still in the central university building. He depicts gentlemen conversing against the background of Scaliger’s display cabinet and walking between the rows of open shelves, the books all ordered by subject matter. Two men are studying a globe while two others peruse books on a lectern that are attached by copper chains to the bookcase to prevent theft.
In 1595, the first public library catalogue in the world was made: the Nomenclator. Although theology was the university’s main discipline, followed by law, the subjects best represented in the catalogue were classical literature and linguistics. Through purchases made by successive librarians—in Rembrandt’s day that was Daniël Heinsius—but above all through donations and bequests from scholars who left their books to their alma mater, the library soon possessed a large collection of a high intellectual calibre.
William of Orange himself had donated the very first book at the university’s inauguration: it was a polyglot Bible containing the text of the Scriptures in parallel columns: in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian, Greek and Latin. The book was a triumph of typography from the printing house of Christophe Plantin in Antwerp. Ironically, the polyglot Bible was printed by order of Philip II. Since Leiden University had been officially founded in the name of the Habsburg ruler, the Prince of Orange was acting provocatively by presenting this Biblia Regia in the role of Philip’s faithful representative.
The “Praesidium Libertatis” or “Bastion of Liberty”, as the university styled itself, attracted dozens of publishers, printers and booksellers to the city. Without fear of persecution or censorship, they could print what they wanted—until 1619. Furthermore, they saw a perfect opportunity to market their books to a highbrow readership.
Christophe Plantin, Europe’s most celebrated printer, had come to Leiden in 1582 at the invitation of Lipsius. Since the Spanish Fury—the violent sacking of cities in the Low Countries by Spanish troops in the years 1572–79—Plantin had lived in fear that the Spanish would make it impossible for him to continue to work in Antwerp. He emigrated, taking his daughter Margaretha and his Calvinist sonin-law Franciscus Raphelengius with him, and together they moved into Huis Assendelft on Breestraat.
Plantin stayed for only two years, transferring the Leiden business to his sonin-law as soon as he dared to return to Antwerp. The firm, known as the “Officina Plantiniana apud Raphelengiis”, published work by Lipsius, Scaliger, Clusius, Vulcanius and Simon Stevin. The company’s specialism was printing in Oriental languages. Raphelengius cut the letters himself and kept four presses running constantly. The French Ambassador in The Hague described the business, which existed until 1619, as “la plus belle imprimerie de ces pays”—“the finest printing establishment in this country”.
Plantin’s trainee, Lodewijk Elsevier, who came from Leuven, stayed longer in Leiden. He set up in business next to the university as a bookseller, bookbinder and auctioneer, besides which he also served as university beadle, a largely ceremonial function. After his death, his son Bonaventura inherited the shop and took over the business. The Elsevier family continued to be successful entrepreneurs in the city for generations, buying several buildings on Rapenburg which were soon rented out to booksellers. Justus Lievens, who had attended the Latin school with Rembrandt, also opened a shop there.
Depicting books and paper was a special skill which Rembrandt had mastered at an early age. His Musical Company (1626) not only shows a woman singing from a score, but also displays books and folios scattered carelessly around the floor. With their weathered vellum binding and rumpled paper, the books appear to serve here as vanitas symbols, emphasizing the vanity and transience of earthly life. Elsewhere, however—in the hands of the hermit St Jerome or the prophetess Hannah—books are generally emblems of erudition and piety.
A market had sprung up in Leiden for paintings that encouraged contemplation and reflected scholarly pursuits. The academic ideals of “study, the active life and the contemplative life” came to characterize the work of Leiden’s painters. The painting that Rembrandt made in 1628 of a meditative St Paul, seated at his writing desk, is a miracle of light and serenity. The Apostle appears lost in thought, his head inclining forward. His outstretched left arm rests on the desk. Light streams in from above through a window, but there is additional illumination from a candle behind the book, the appearance of which is therefore reduced to dark contours. It is as if the book itself radiates light.
Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg, after Jan Cornelisz van ’t Woudt, Library of the University of Leiden, 1610.
Studying, writing and collecting were the core activities at the university. Daniël Heinsius called the library “an arsenal of wisdom”. But the university did not confine itself to collecting books, prints and paintings. In its botanical garden, the chief gardener gathered living and dead creatures as well as plants, seeds, naturalia and “curiosities” in order to demonstrate the astonishing wealth and diversity of God’s Creation.
To enter the botanical garden, Rembrandt had to pass through two stone archways. The first one, on Rapenburg, led to a courtyard. On the left was the door to the university, where students and professors walked in and out, clad in their jet-black gowns. On the right was the door to Elsevier’s bookshop and printing business. If Rembrandt walked straight on, he would come to the second archway, on the other side of which he would suddenly find himself in a green oasis.
In 1590, the university’s board of governors had decided to allocate the empty courtyard behind the main building for use as a “herb garden”. The board managed to secure the most famous botanist of his day, Carolus Clusius of Artois, whose real name was Charles de l’Écluse, to serve as the garden’s director or Horti praefectus.
Clusius was ageing and had suffered a bad fall, dislocating his hip, just before coming to Leiden. On 19th October 1593, the sixty-seven-year-old disabled botanist arrived on Rapenburg. He was incapable of carrying out any practical work in the garden. The problem was solved by appointing Dirk Ougaertszoon Cluyt, who went by the name of Clutius, as chief gardener. These gentlemen, C&C, turned out to be the perfect duo—one brain, the other hands.
Four quadrants were constructed in the botanical garden, with four times four rectangular flower boxes. This classic harmonic structure reflected Clusius’s classification of the plant kingdom. The gardening grandees energetically set about acquiring plants and seeds from all over the world and planting them in the boxes.
Clusius had built up an excellent network of botanists throughout Europe. Moreover, he sought out ships’ captains setting off on their eastern voyages and asked them to gather “seeds, fruit, bulbs, roots, herbs, flowers, gum, resins, creatures, items from the sea and suchlike, such as are found in those lands and are unfamiliar or unknown to us here”. And they obliged.
In this way, Clusius was able to introduce hyacinths, anemones and horse chestnuts to Holland. His most spectacular find was the tulip, a flower that he had once seen in Lisbon and to which he had given the name Draco arbor in his book about the flora of Spain. In 1593, a Flemish diplomat from his circle of friends sent him some tulip bulbs. An Antwerp merchant had acquired them along with a cargo of cotton cloth from Constantinople, but mistook them for onions. He munched a few, roasted with vinegar and oil.
“He picked up the rest,” wrote Clusius, “and tossed them into a pile of vegetable waste in his garden. A merchant from Mechelen named Georg Rye, who was very learned in the field of botany, happened by and saw them there. He salvaged them and planted them in his garden; and it was thanks to his actions that I was later able to see several new varieties.”
The Turkish tulips that Clusius cultivated were both praecoces and serotinae, meaning early-flowering and late-flowering varieties. On his sowing experiments, he noted: “Seeds from the same fruit, collected personally by myself and planted in the soil at the same time in the autumn, produced a number of plants the following spring, which after five to ten years (for some develop faster than others) yielded white, mottled white, yellow, mottled yellow, red, mottled red, purple and mottled purple tulips.”
The tulips would become a veritable rage. There was a frenzied rush to collect and trade the bulbs. In 1606, a visitor to the Leiden botanical garden saw a tulip that was valued at 150 guilders. Even a picture of that tulip went for sixteen guilders. It is hardly surprising that the botanical garden suffered several robberies targeting its tulips.
Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg, after Jan Cornelisz van ’t Woudt, Botanical Gardens of the University of Leiden, 1610.
On the frontispiece of Clusius’s Rariorum plantarum historia (1601), Jacques de Gheyn II engraved, beside a portrait of the author, encircled by fruit spilling from a cornucopia, both a vase with flowering tulips and another with tulips that were wilting—to symbolize the ephemeral quality of nature. Until his death eight years later, Clusius—who stayed lame but lived to the ripe old age of eighty-three, surviving the younger Clutius—carried on working on his scientific treatises in Leiden.
In Rembrandt’s day, his botanical garden had become a garden of miracles, attracting countless visitors from home and abroad. It had a tree that was so poisonous that anyone who chanced to sleep a night beneath it would never wake up. It had a parsley-like herb that prompted debate among scholars on whether to call it casta or impudica, modest or debauched. As soon as you touched it it would shrink and collapse, later to rear up again.
Rembrandt must have been enthralled by the garden, especially by its collection of curiosities. In 1600 work started on an ambulacrum—a covered gallery—on the south side of the botanical garden. The theology professor, Gomarus, an inveterate grouch, protested about the new structure. He grumbled that the gallery would block the light coming into his house.
The ambulacrum was built in spite of these objections, and was filled with the most wonderful things from the book of nature: not neatly arranged in bookcases, but placed associatively around the space. Besides dried plants, seeds, drawings, books such as Pliny’s Natural History, maps of the world and terrestrial globes, the items on display included animals—both living and stuffed. Stuffed crocodiles dangled from the ceiling—Crocodilus maior and Crocodilus minor—along with a whale’s jawbone and the bumpy shield of a giant tortoise. A Brazilian parrot perched on a stick. It was adamantly mute. An eagle with a black-and-white tail was kept in a cage. After it died, it too was stuffed and returned to its cage, with an inviting sign beside it that said: “Open my cage.”
It was a sublimely eclectic collection, including such items as “Indian bat, swordfish, rhinoceros rib, bill of a sea pig, bird from Brazil with horns on its wings and its head, elephant’s foot, bird of paradise, phoenix feather, Indian spider, teeth of a seahorse and a sperm whale, Fruit known as Pineapple, large snakeskins, the skin of a mermaid, wondrous creature in a hen’s egg, the tongue of an adder, a variety of shells and a ‘dragon’.”
The purpose of displaying all these curiosities and of investigating strange plants and animals was to gain a better understanding of the world and the cosmos and to show the beautiful, miraculous nature of Creation. The botanical garden gave a picture of the lost paradise, the Garden of Eden, while the ambulacrum highlighted some of the occupants of Noah’s Ark.
On Maarsmansteeg, right next to the town hall, was a pharmacy run by Christiaen Porrett, whose collection had a range that rivalled that of the ambulacrum. The pharmacist was an amateur scientist who performed chemical experiments, pulverized powders and prepared unguents from flowers and herbs gathered in his own garden beyond the city walls. Besides medicines, he also sold pigments to painters and dyes for use in textiles.
Porrett laboured in his shop with mortar and pestle, jars and scales amid a wealth of shells, conches and stuffed animals, precious glass items, an ivory globe, outlandish stones and crystals from remote regions, ancient coins, curiosities such as “a peculiar leg, of a revolting shape” and diverse paintings, most of them landscapes. On 28th March 1628, after Porrett’s death, the “Singular items or Curiosities and exquisite items that stimulate the senses” that he had collected throughout his life were sold at public auction in the inn De Drie Koningen.
One person who certainly attended that auction—about this there can be no doubt—was the young Rembrandt. He had developed a collector’s appetite as a boy and he would have rushed to see if there was anything he could buy. The best evidence for this passion is the inventory of the paintings, art on paper, furniture and household goods to be found in his mansion on Sint-Antonisbreestraat in Amsterdam that was drawn up on 25th July 1656, ten days after Rembrandt’s fiftieth birthday. The inventory was compiled at a tragic moment in the painter’s life. Rembrandt had signed a writ of cessio bonorum, relinquishing all rights to his goods in favour of his creditors. He was bankrupt.
Of the 363 items listed in this inventory, it is those contained in the Kunstkammer of Rembrandt’s house that most fire our imagination. That was where he kept not only his art books and folders with work by Lucas van Leyden, Raphael and Michelangelo, but a cabinet of curiosities including twee terrestrial globes, busts of Aristotle, Socrates and Homer, Nero and Caligula, a powder compact from the East Indies, a Japanese helmet, a pistol, a Turkish gunpowder flask, boxes of minerals, a large number of horns, forty-seven naturalia gathered from land and sea and “a drawer containing a bird of paradise and six fans”.
Rembrandt must have seen most of the naturalia in his own collection in the botanical garden as a boy. He collected partly for purposes of trade—in Sint-Anthonisbreestraat in Amsterdam he sold work by himself and his pupils as well as by other artists—but mainly in order to depict them. We encounter Aristotle and the bust of Homer in his painting of 1653. One of his etchings shows a marbled cone shell, the Conus marmoreus. We also find two studies of a bird of paradise, made with the pen and paintbrush.
Clusius described the Paradisea avis in his Exoticorum libri decem (“Ten Books of Exotic Life Forms”), published in 1605. Legend had it that this was a bird with a long, colourful tail and without legs, which was therefore condemned to spend its entire life in flight without ever alighting on land. In reality, local huntsmen on Ambon cut off the legs of birds of paradise prior to stuffing them, as a remedy to limit decomposition. Eventually, having believed in the myth for some time, Clusius found proof that the bird of paradise did in fact have legs.
In Rembrandt’s studies in pen and paintbrush, the birds do not have legs. His birds of paradise, even with folded wings, are doomed for ever to haunt the skies.
The collection in the ambulacrum supplemented the medical collection in the Bagijnhof chapel on the other side of Rapenburg. There too, young Rembrandt saw a multitude of marvels. In the one-time chapel of the Beguine nuns, since dispossessed, the university’s board of governors had ordered the building of the Dutch Republic’s first anatomy theatre in 1593. Dissections were extremely rare events. They could only be performed in winter, since the cold weather slowed decomposition, and the anatomical subjects would always be executed criminals—criminals hailing from another city, to prevent anyone recognizing them—about whose souls no one need fret, since they were already beyond redemption.
Study of a bird of paradise in pen and brush, c.1639.
The theatre consisted of a central rotating table surrounded on all sides by six tiers of seats that wound upward to a height of nine metres. In the first circle, the chancellor and the university senate, professors and other dignitaries took their seats. The second ring was for surgeons and students, while all the upper tiers were packed with buzzing crowds of excited locals, who had paid a few stivers to satisfy their “desire and eagerness to gaze upon and observe it”.
An anatomy lesson was a solemn spectacle, a voyage of discovery towards a better knowledge of God. Hundreds of candles were lit, and fragrant herbs and sprigs of rosemary scattered across the floor. The body on the turntable was covered by a thin white sheet and black Leiden cloth. When the chief anatomist or praelector cautiously lifted the edge of the shroud and folded it back, taking care not to reveal the body in any “unwarranted degree of nudity”, and made the first incision in the abdomen, exposing the glistening intestines, a deathly silence fell over the room.
Bartholomeus Willemsz Dolendo (possibly), after Jan Cornelisz van ’t Woudt, Anatomy Theatre of the University of Leiden, 1609.
A battery of skeletons was arrayed along the galleries: the bones of an adult woman, named as Schoon Janneken, who had been garrotted in Leiden in 1594 for her infamous crimes of theft, and those of “a fabulous bird whose excrement burned everything it touched”. On the skeleton of a horse sat that of a French nobleman who had raped and murdered his sister.
The prepared specimens in the theatre were equally lugubrious: the bladder of a man that had taken in eight full tankards of water, a shirt knitted from long strings of intestines, and a woman’s genitalia sporting excessively long hair. Also exhibited were a large Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus, the shoulder blade of a beached whale found near Katwijk in 1600, and a head constructed from the cranium of a black man who had been killed in the siege of Haarlem.
The room’s central displays were the skeletons of “Adam and Eve”. Adam held a spade, to enable him to work by the sweat of his brow after his expulsion from Paradise. Eve was shown plucking the apple from the Tree of Knowledge after her seduction by the serpent winding around its trunk. As if the message was not clear enough, the other skeletons held flags in their bony hands with admonitory messages like “HOMO BULLA” (“Man is a bubble”), “NOSCE TE IPSUM” (“Know thyself”) and “MEMENTO MORI” (“Remember that you will die”).
In the print that Bartholomeus Dolendo made of the anatomy theatre in 1609, we see Professor Pieter Pauw, the very first praelector. Pauw was succeeded in 1617 by Otto Heurnius, the son of the physician and chancellor of the university Johannes Heurnius. Otto took his responsibilities very seriously: when his father died a painful death, he opened up the dead body and cut seven large, ash-grey stones from the kidneys, “each one the size and shape of a flat walnut”. And displayed them in the anatomy theatre.
Rembrandt would undoubtedly have attended one of Heurnius’s anatomy lessons, either among the tiers of local spectators, as a student, or as an aspiring painter, for whom an ability to depict the human anatomy with great precision was part of the training. Like Leonardo before him, he would have been eager to learn how the body worked: indeed, the young Leonardo is known to have exhumed dead bodies to examine them.
In any case, Rembrandt knew how things worked in the anatomy theatre when the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild gave him the commission, in 1632, to paint The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. This “Dr Tulp” was Claes Pietersz, a Calvinist who had studied medicine in Leiden under Pieter Pauw in the years 1611–14. Pietersz was celebrated as a surgeon in Amsterdam and steadily built up a career as a local public administrator. He took the new surname of “Tulp” in 1622 following his appointment as a magistrate in Amsterdam. The name derived from the tulip on the front façade of his house—a reference to the flower that Carolus Clusius had cultivated in Leiden’s botanical garden.
In his painting of the anatomy lesson, Rembrandt completely omitted the theatre and audience. Of the surroundings we see only a few contours, so that all attention focuses on what is happening on the dissecting table. He made a sketch of the scene in the anatomy theatre, but the composition was created in his studio, where he had Dr Tulp and the six surgeons of the guild pose before depicting them. Much later, in the eighteenth century, their names were inscribed in the anatomy book that one of them is holding.
With his dynamic composition and the use of colour and light, Rembrandt infused his group portrait with depth, vitality and drama. Each of the surgeons surrounding Tulp is shown in a different pose and looks in a slightly different direction—even though all are totally absorbed in the lesson. No two gowns are precisely the same shade of black, no two collars the same shade of white. According to a theory that was current in the seventeenth century, the “thickness of the air” varied from one point to the next. Rembrandt conveyed these differences through variations of colour, thus heightening the effect of depth. Light shines bright on the cheeks and lustreless on the grey body. The dead opened arm glistens blood-red and ghastly white.
A real anatomy lesson always started with an incision in the abdominal wall because of the rapid decomposition of the intestines. In this painting, however, the abdomen is still intact. Rembrandt chose to highlight a different aspect altogether. In the seventeenth century, two specific parts of the body were seen as distinguishing humans from animals: the brain and the hands. He opted to focus on the latter.
There is something odd about the hands of the objectum anatomicum. X-ray photographs reveal that Rembrandt initially painted a stump instead of the right hand. Had the criminal’s hand been hacked off after an earlier conviction? Did Rembrandt decide, on second thought, that this image was unduly gruesome? Or did his clients insist on the change?
The left arm seems almost to have been painted separately. We know that a visitor to Rembrandt’s house on 2nd October 1669, two days before the painter’s death, came across “four flayed arms and legs dissected by Vesalius”. The sixteenth-century Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius, the very first pathologist—and the man who had taught Pieter Pauw—was famous for his prepared body parts. Was the left arm that Rembrandt painted in his anatomy lesson not that of the body, but one of Vesalius’s specimens?
There is an indirect allusion to Vesalius in Rembrandt’s portrait of Dr Tulp. In his 1543 book on the workings of the human body, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (“On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books”), Vesalius observes that the hand is the physician’s primary instrument—and the portrait of the author depicts him grasping the arm and hand of a cadaver.
With the scissors in his right hand, Dr Tulp lifts the superficial and deep groups of the flexor digitorum muscles and tendons in the open arm—those which control the fingers. With his own left hand, Tulp shows the effect of that control: the thumb and index finger come together.
The miracle of science reveals the hand of God.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632.