From the wonders of nature is the nearest intelligence and passage towards the wonders of art: for it is no more but by following and as it were hounding Nature in her wanderings, to be able to lead her afterwards to the same place again.
Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human1
The boy watches the proceedings with great attentiveness. Unlike the other figures in the painting he is not dressed in black, but in a brown jacket with green trimmings, a chestnut waistcoat and a lace collar, which is slightly stained. He holds a cap under his left arm. His right hand is placed lightly but protectively around a delicate, wooden pedestal. Mounted on this is a small skeleton frozen in a gesture that seems half dance, half blessing. The boy’s auburn curls are in stark contrast to the tiny skull, its fontanelle still unclosed. To the boy’s right, around a table, stands a dignified group of burghers, doctors all, in the black clothes of Calvinist piety, a corona of heads with flowing hair and white lace collars. One of them is bending forwards, almost tenderly, over the bundle on the table: the corpse of a newborn child.
It is the hands that make this picture; by no means unconventional in their elegant and unnatural delicacy, as we know them from innumerable portraits, pointing to whatever is deemed significant of the sitter: an open book perhaps for a scholar, a map for a geographer, a bible for a pious merchant, an instrument for a musician, or a skull for everyone wishing to acknowledge publicly the transitoriness of his good fortune, thus adding modesty and contemplation to his already considerable attributes. The hands in this painting are themselves allegorical. The boy, his gaze fixed on the adults, points to the little skeleton in front of him, while one surgeon extends a graceful hand towards the dissected infant and another points out the placenta lying next to it. Only one figure shows both of his hands: the man next to the boy, dressed in plain, almost clerical, clothes, and wearing a hat. Poised between the thumb and index finger of his left hand is the dead infant’s umbilical cord, while the right is directed palm upwards towards the bystanders. This is Dr Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), the great embalmer and anatomist, founder of one of the most extraordinary collections Europe has seen. The boy by his side is his own son, Hendrik, who was already twenty years old at the time of the painting, but was depicted as an embodiment of innocence, a poignant link between the infant corpse and the adult physicians, a beautiful child personifying his father’s abiding preoccupations with youthful grace, with purity and with vanitas.
Anatomy lessons were favoured genre pieces made to order for surgeons’ guilds eager to dignify a profession in the process of emerging from the shadows, the backrooms of barbers’ shops, into the radiance of science and of the Academy, and, with this canvas, the Amsterdam guild honoured a master of great renown. When it was painted, in 1683, Ruysch was a famous man, Praelector of Anatomy at the Surgeons’ Guild of Amsterdam and Professor of Botany at the Leiden hortus botanicus.
Anatomists and others daring to make the human body not only subject but also object of the collecting passion have staged some of the most dramatic productions in the theatre of memories. While collectors in Italy dramatized nature and art, and while Rudolf II acted out his own inclination towards melancholy as a cosmic drama, the men pictured in this group portrait and those who shared their passion went further than anybody else by putting on stage the last frontier of an increasingly secular world: mortality. By collecting and investigating parts of human bodies in the name of science they dropped, reluctantly at times, the last mediation between the human condition and the material world by focusing on the fact that bodies could themselves be objects, dead matter. Always in part a striving for eternity, for memory, and for transcending death, collecting was put before the public here more naked than at any other time. Public dissections of criminals were seen as a recognized form of entertainment and as part of the sentence spoken over them, a posthumous punishment, part grizzly spectacle, part moral drama, part revelation, and were performed throughout Europe.
The dissections they were based on often were dramatically and highly staged occasions held in a theatrum anatomicum, hence the modern term ‘operating theatre’. On an early seventeenth-century engraving we see a dissection at Leiden University. The circular theatre is lit by scented candles, and members of the expectant public are jostling for space in the galleries while in the first row ambassadors and members of the nobility are protecting themselves from the smells with their fine handkerchiefs. A young nobleman in the foreground looks on, his dog seemingly waiting for whatever may come his way. Herbs are scattered on the ground to mask unpleasant odours. On a table in the centre of the room is the body of a criminal, just cut from the gallows. The anatomist points into his already emptied ribcage. Three skulls arranged around the base of the table set the moral tone, which is taken up by a skeleton presiding over the proceedings.
The anatomists of Calvinist Holland had happily accommodated themselves with their Church; dissections were seen as a valuable moral lesson, and executed criminals and paupers who had drowned in the canals (a common occurrence in a city without street lights) provided ample material for the practice of their art. Most universities and major cities throughout Europe had public dissections of their own – though medical men (famously in Edinburgh) often had to rely on body-snatchers for a steady supply of specimens.
The anatomical demonstrations were supplemented by experiments with microscopes and by debates on medical and moral questions, all of which could be attended by the paying public. The revenues from all this edifying activity paid for a banquet for the surgeons. Ruysch was the most important anatomist of his time and by his death at the age of ninety-three he had conducted more than thirty public dissections.
The inevitability of decay limited these occasions to the cold season. In summer, no cadaver could be left lying open for any length of time without nauseating the public with its stench. During the summer months the anatomy theatre was therefore transformed into a cabinet of rarities. The Leiden theatrum anatomicum was supplemented by an ambulacrum (pleasure walkway) or hortus botanicus, a physic garden featuring a large number of exotic animals shivering in the inclement Dutch climate and lending some oriental splendour to their sober surroundings of canals and brick façades. The cabinet of rarities of the anatomy theatre constituted a Calvinist parable on existence in this vale of tears, a Museum of Mortality for the edification of students and burghers alike. Six human skeletons, taken from executed criminals, stood on the visitors’ galleries, holding placards admonishing the visitors: Memento mori; Homo bulla; Pulvis et umbra sumus (‘Remember you must die’; ‘Man is a soap bubble’; ‘We are but dust and shadow’). Today this theatre stands reconstructed in the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, the very place where it used to be, and the visitor can gauge the sense of foreboding and of drama standing amid the steeply rising rows of spectators, which are almost overwhelmed by the skeletal messengers on its crown: a rider of the Apocalypse mounted on a horse, other figures seemingly dancing around the imaginary assembly of dignitaries, grinning mockingly at their stubborn adherence to life and its accoutrements of status, wealth and faith. There were other exhibits around the theatre in its heyday. The label appended to one of the criminals’ skeletons thus allowed to play a constructive role in God’s world, at least posthumously, read The skeleton of an English pirate whose body was dissected in 1615 when the dissector was the Honourable Doctor Sebastian Egberts.
Then, as now, an entire skeletal Garden of Eden is spread before the eyes of the reluctant public: a cow, a rat, a ram and a swan, an eagle with gilt talons, and, in the middle of it all, Adam and Eve standing beside a tree. The theatre also displayed the rearticulated bones of a sheep-stealer from Haarlem, a woman strangled for theft, and, with dramatic flourish, The Sceleton of an Asse upon which sits a Woman that Killed her Daughter near to The sceleton of a man, sitting upon an ox executed for Stealing Cattle. After 1620, this three-dimensional vanitas tableau was expanded into a true cabinet of curiosities, featuring, apart from the preaching skeletons, a Japanese teapot, Chinese scrolls and African plants, as well as engravings of historical, scientific and philosophical subjects. With the rise of archaeology, Roman sacophargi and Egyptian mummies also went on display. The exhibits were situated throughout the building, and in no particular order. The entrance hall, for instance, featured an elephant’s head and, according to the English version of the catalogue, which was published first in 1669, ‘a pair of stilts or skates with which the Norwegians, Laplanders and Finlanders run down high snowy mountaines, with almost an incredible swift pace’ – a pair of skis.
The theatrum anatomicum and the art of the anatomical artist flourished at a time when people were constantly confronted with mortality and were only just discovering the wondrous workings of the human body. In art at least, mortality was imbued with grace and moral purpose and the all-pervading power of Universal Reason was revealed.
Medical knowledge and the art of the still life convene in illustrations of anatomical atlases of the time: skeletons are holding hourglasses and have one foot, literally, in the grave, écorchés (‘flayed bodies’) hold their own skin as a reminder of mortality or assume the heroic poses of classical antiquity, while others muse over their own internal secrets, holding open with graceful fingertips their abdominal walls or the skin covering the muscles of their back. In one of them, Cowper’s Anatomy, we find an early piece of medical humour: a vignette of putti at play occurring throughout the text. Only a closer look reveals that the chubby little ones are engaged in the vivisection of a dog struggling to get free.
As with all art, the history of anatomy shows not only what is depicted, but also how it was seen. Anatomical prints from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are vivid illustrations not just of the workings of the human body; they also show the mentality of an age in which science was still supposed to reveal the mysteries of divine creation and to demonstrate the beauty and wonderment inherent in all creatures. They also have to be read as still lives, as allegories. A celebrated plate by Albinus shows a skeleton in front of a ruin amid lush foliage. Behind the body standing there in classical contra-post and eloquent pose is a rhinoceros, peacefully grazing from the shrubs.
The inclusion of such an animal into an anatomical atlas makes little sense without the knowledge that medieval bestiaries had associated the rhino with melancholia, rendering this plate another meditation on the transience of human life. Like a dissection an anatomical atlas was a lesson in morals, theology, aesthetics – and medicine.
The life’s work of Dr Frederik Ruysch was very much in the spirit of the anatomico-theological exhibits in the museum at Leiden, his home town. He was best known not for his knowledge and adroit public demonstrations, but for his almost superhuman skill in the preservation and presentation of human beauty after death. According to a secret method of embalming, developed over many years, he could transform any corpse into a state of timeless peacefulness. He applied this method not to adults, though, but to the bodies of small children, which he would procure from local midwives and, in his capacity as Physician to the Court, from babies drowned in Amsterdam’s harbour.
These corpses of the unfortunate and the sick would be turned by Ruysch into objects of aesthetic marvel: an infant hand, exquisitely clad in a lace sleeve made by the good doctor’s daughter, Rachel (who would later become a famous painter), holding the tissue of an eye socket in elegant repose, encased in a glass jar and filled with alcohol, little faces in quiet repose or with open, glass eyes, both preserved in jars or embalmed and laid out in little beds, sophisticated arrangements of brains and genitalia, all surrounded by fine needlework that served to hide the anatomist’s incisions, stitches and gashes, which would have destroyed the illusion of eternal peace.
There were pathological preparations, too, as in every medical collection, but Ruysch’s true passion was what he called his konst, his ‘art’, the union between medicine and sculpture, embalming and allegory, science and beauty. He proudly displayed his collection to colleagues and to other visitors. A German doctor was greatly impressed by the ‘mummy’ of an eight-year-old boy, and in 1715 a Hungarian student of theology was given the tour of the collection and heard of a Russian prince who had been so touched by the sight of an embalmed twelve-year-old boy that he had kissed the dead body. Another embalmed child stood upright with its eyes open as if it was still living, and despite his stay of three hours the student decided that he would have had to stay three whole days in order to admire all of Ruysch’s works in detail.
Ruysch’s programme was more ambitious than a mere play with the rare and the exotic. His chefs-d’œuvre were much more elaborate arrangements, which eloquently bespoke his intentions and beliefs. The poignancy of death and rebirth, of excess and vanitas are all embodied here.
The Dutch historian of medicine, Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout, analysed one of these tableaux and gives a vivid sense of their composition and their purpose:
With eye sockets turned heavenward the central skeleton – a fœtus of about four months – chants a lament on the misery of life. ‘Ah Fate, ah bitter Fate!’ it sings, accompanying itself on a violin, made of an osteomyelitic sequester with a dried artery for a bow. At its right, a tiny skeleton conducts the music with a baton, set with minute kidney stones. In the right foreground a stiff little skeleton girdles its hips with injected sheep intestines, its right hand grasping a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult man, grimly conveying the message that its first hour was also its last. On the left, behind a handsome vase made of the inflated tunica albuginae of the testis, poses an elegant little skeleton with a feather on its skull and a stone coughed up from the lungs hanging from its hand. In all likelihood the feather is intended to draw attention to the ossification of the cranium. For the little horizontal skeleton in the foreground with the familiar mayfly on its delicate hand, Ruysch chose a quotation from the Roman poet Plautus, one of the favourite authors of this period, to the effect that its lifespan had been as brief as that of young grass felled by the scythe so soon after sprouting.2
All of these tableaux were proclaiming the message of the transience of life, and of the dangers of sin lurking behind every corner.
Ruysch had taken a proud tradition to its logical conclusion: sculptors followed the intricate shapes of their material by using corals and constructing allegorical tableaux, and the famous G. G. Zumbo, the same eighteenth-century wax sculptor who made exquisitely beautiful models for the instruction of medical students in Florence and Vienna, also created allegorical tableaux of tiny wax bodies contemplating human mortality in all its forms, with sarcophagi and elaborate baroque tombs, skulls and chubby infants prematurely taken by the reaper, with titles such as Funeral, The Plague and The Triumph of Time.
Few of the works of Frederik Ruysch survive today, and almost none in Leiden. The reason for this anomaly is the visit of the ‘Russian prince’ who had come to see the collection and was so moved by it that he kissed the embalmed body of a boy. The prince had arrived in the Netherlands for the first time as one Pjotr Mikhailov, a simple carpenter seeking work and instruction in the shipyards of Amsterdam. He was intent on keeping a low profile, but this was made difficult by his sheer height, for he stood six foot seven in his heavy boots and towered over the other carpenters like a man-o’-war over a posse of Dutch barges. He was, of course, Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), who had come to western Europe with his ‘Great Embassy’ in 1697–8. When his imposing presence rendered his incognito useless, he became less concerned about preserving his anonymity.
Peter was a voracious collector not only of tools and objects of natural history, but also of natural oddities and freaks. In his Kunstkamera in St Petersburg he kept a live exhibit, Foma the Dwarf, who had only two digits on his claw-like hands and feet. Another such attraction, a hermaphrodite, who had been paid an annual stipend of twenty rubles, finally ran away from the impertinently gawking onlookers and from the company of less lively exhibits such as the skeleton of Peter’s personal footman, Nicholas Bourgeois, who had been a giant of seven foot and, after his death, was to grace his master’s collection as an anatomical specimen.
The first great collector in Russian history, Peter had inherited the former Russian cabinet of curiosities, a small assembly of the usual narwhale’s horn, a reliquary plundered from a German town by Ivan the Terrible, and ‘a few animals and some Lapp sleighs’.3 Within a few years he had turned this modest array of objects into a private museum capable, according to the curator, of filling thirty rooms with just the items kept in storage alone, including exotic animals, monstrosities, arms, tools, ethnographic items and gifts from foreign ambassadors. Later, in 1715 and 1716, it was to be swelled further by two gifts of Scythian gold treasures found in Siberia. Peter, with his relentless modernizing drive, famously the nemesis of Bojar beards, however, was not content to keep these riches enclosed and unseen by all: they were to be an instruction to everyone, and so the collection was opened to the public in 1714 with orders to keep out the rabble, but to serve the better class of visitor, aristocrats and foreigners, with vodka and other refreshments.
In establishing his collection, Peter had, true to his motto, sought instruction from the best, and it was the German philosopher Leibnitz who advised the monarch about what to buy and how to compose his possessions:
Concerning the Museum and the cabinets and Kunstkammern pertaining to it, it is absolutely essential that they should be such as to serve not only as objects of general curiosity, but also a means to the perfection of the arts and sciences … Such a cabinet should contain all significant things and rarities created by nature and man. Particularly needed are stones, metals, minerals, wild plants, and their artificial copies, animals both stuffed and preserved … Foreign works to be acquired should include diverse books, instruments, curiosities and rarities … In short, all that could enlighten and please the eye.4
In accordance with this injunction, agents had been sent out all over Europe to search for worthwhile objects and ‘to visit the museums of learned men, both public and private, and there to observe how Your Majesty’s museum differs from theirs; and if there is anything lacking in Your Majesty’s museum, to strive to fill this gap’.5
Peter’s collecting was only one facet in the life of this manic monarch, whose inexhaustible energy pulled the newly shaven court in Moscow and St Petersburg into the present by its few remaining hairs. The tsar was seemingly incapable of standing still. He was merciless against his enemies, both in his twenty-year war with Sweden and in putting down various rebellions with iron fist. When his own son, Alexis, fled from his overbearing father to Austria and attempted there to gain support against him, Peter had him lured back, put on trial and, according to which version one is inclined to believe, had him flogged to death or strangled him himself. Courtiers implicated in the episode were impaled, broken on the wheel or flogged and banished.
The tsar’s peacetime efforts were equally uncompromising and exhausting, and he was reputed to be just as hard on his friends as he was on his enemies. Not that he spared himself. He was actively involved in the planning of the new city of St Petersburg, reforming taxes, travelling throughout Europe, visiting other monarchs and working incognito (more or less) as a carpenter on shipyards, carousing regularly with the Drunken Assembly, a mock court devoted to drinking vast quantities of alcohol in which he took on the role of Archdeacon Peter, while modernizing, leading wars, legislating, and collecting what he thought would benefit the culture of his country almost as an afterthought.
His celebrations were always on a large scale, and were affairs not for the faint-hearted. Foreign ambassadors were summarily ordered to attend and enjoy themselves and Russian noblemen unwilling to expose their health to the sheer amounts of vodka consumed during the revels found that the tsar’s wrath was as formidable as the generosity he inflicted upon them. One of them was whipped because he had chosen not to be present at a feast despite appearing on the guest list. While wearing out practically all of those he blessed with his hospitality Peter himself seemed quite indestructible. A Hanoverian minister recounts waking up with a hangover in Peterhof in 1715, unable to remember what happened the previous evening, only to find the tsar cutting trees to sober up. Then, the unhappy German wrote, ‘we received such another Dose of Liquor, as sent us senseless to Bed’. Peter’s drinking habits were notorious among aristocrats and diplomats. The Dane Just Joel was marched back to a ‘life-threatening’ party from which he had attempted to withdraw in his nightshirt. ‘For the foreign envoy,’ he lamented, ‘these drinking sessions are a dreadful ordeal: he either participates in them and ruins his health or misses them and earns the Tsar’s disfavour.’
In his rare quiet moments Peter would devote himself to craftsmanship, especially turning in wood, bone and ivory, a skill of which he was inordinately proud. Several works by his hand were part of his collection. Some of the passions in which the ruler of all Russians indulged excited bemused comments by visitors. ‘His dominant passion is to see houses burn, which is a very common occurrence in Moscow since no one bothers to put one out unless there are 400 or 500 alight,’ reported a French observer in 1689.6 The tsar would insist on directing the fire-fighting himself, always standing at the most dangerous spots. His love of dwarfs and other freaks occasionally found expression in lavish and (to our eyes, at least) cruel festivities, such as the marriage of the Royal Dwarf, Iakim Volkov, for which the tsar ordered dwarfs to be rounded up in Moscow and sent to St Petersburg, where they were shut up like cattle for several days and then received especially tailored clothes in which they had to celebrate Volkov’s wedding as one large assembly of Liliputians, while normal-sized onlookers who were standing at the sides did little to stifle their laughter as the unfortunate revellers grew increasingly drunk and found their short legs refusing service. When Volkov died in 1724, all dwarfs resident in St Petersburg were summoned to follow the coffin, and the procession was arranged in pairs according to the mourners’ height, with the smallest at the front, and the tallest, the tsar himself among them, following.
Peter had a strong fascination for anatomy, illness and death, and believed himself to be an excellent surgeon. Part of his collection was made up of teeth that he himself had drawn, not always because they needed to come out. Many unsuspecting passers-by had to relinquish molars before their ruler’s lust for surgery was satisfied. The teeth in the collection are recorded in the contemporary catalogue as: ‘teeth extracted by Emperor Peter from various persons’, among them a singer, a person who made tablecloths, a bishop of Rostov, and a fast-walking messenger (‘not fast enough’, as Stephen Jay Gould remarks).
Peter’s interest in anatomical preparations was especially great. When visiting Libau he had written in great excitement to Andrei Vinius, the Royal Apothecary: ‘Here I have seen a great marvel which at home they used to say was a lie: a man here has in his apothecary’s shop in a jar of spirits a salamander which I took out and held in my own hands: this is word for word exactly as has been written.’7 On his second European visit in 1716–17, this time officially as monarch, the tsar made a special point of visiting great collections wherever he went, be it the Tower of London, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, private cabinets of curiosities, the famed Kunstkammer of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden and, of course, the theatrum anatomicum in Leiden and the museum of Dr Ruysch. His enthusiasm for the Dutch embalmer’s morbid aestheticism knew no bounds. He bought the entire collection for the enormous sum of 30,000 rubles and had it transported to St Petersburg, where some of the pieces still survive in the Kunstkamera. After Peter, collecting was as firmly established among the Russian aristocracy as it was in western Europe. Catherine the Great followed his example in buying up entire collections to fill her winter palace, the Hermitage.
