The Anatomy Lesson (28 page)

There’s intelligence to the way he brings your focus into what matters: those old lady’s hands literally trying to absorb through her fingertips the significance of that text.

But to return to this question of Aris Kindt’s hands. What’s interesting is that this evidence suggests that Rembrandt saw the dead man in person, and that he may have originally painted the hand as he saw it, as a stump. That is, he planned to include the suffering of the thief, to show his punishment as well as his dissection. At some point, though, Rembrandt changed his mind and invented a hand for Adriaen. Restored to the thief the hand that
was taken from him. And not only that. He seems to have restored the flesh elsewhere, too. Kindt would have been covered with scars from all his punishments. Brandings. Whipping scars.

So was this some bold act of compassion on Rembrandt’s part to restore the man? Or did he do it to protect Tulp from infamy? Or what could be the reason that he went back and “fixed” Aris. Why would he have done that?

I want to put into the record the final words from the
justitieboek
on Aris Kindt’s final conviction in Amsterdam:

These evil facts and their serious consequences are not to be tolerated in a town of justice and honesty but to be punished by law and by this be an example to others. It is therefore that the lords of justice, having heard the sentence, demanded and the resolution of the bailiff, also the confession of this prisoner, have sentenced him as they sentence him by now—to be led to the scaffold in front of the town hall of this town in order to be executed by the hangman to the rope till death [follows]. Accordingly, the corpse to be buried in the earth and they declare all his goods, if there are such, be confiscated to the disposal of the lords. Actum 27 January 1632 … and to be executed on the last day of January
.

A final note about the signature. Rembrandt himself must have considered this work to be a significant leap forward from his previous work. Before this painting, he always signed his canvasses with the initials “RHL” for Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Leiden. Rembrandt, son of Harmen of Leiden. This is the first painting he signed simply “Rembrandt.”

When I got back to the studio, the workday had already come to a close. All the pupils and apprentices had gone home. Lit only by my single lantern, the room was the color of cobalt, the shadows layered and rich. The silence was silken. I carried my lantern into the center of the studio and stood for a moment, watching.

The room had seen the arrivals and departures of multitudes. Everywhere I could see the results of a productive academy that had managed to keep running smoothly in my absence. Tomas had gotten further with his copy of my
Jesus at Emmaus
. In the etching studio, Isaac had completed the run of the prints I’d asked for. There were about fifty of them strung from lines crisscrossing the ceiling and another batch already dried and stacked on the table. He’d left the copper plate in the press, cleaned and readied for another round of printing.

I plucked one of the prints off the drying line and held it in my hands. It was the image I’d requested: my mother at home at Weddesteeg
in her mourning attire, the week of Gerrit’s death. I hadn’t drawn her; I’d etched the plate from memory.

The paper from Isaac’s etching was still damp, the ink tacky. There was a lot of black in the print, but cross-hatching seemed to have worked. It made the textures distinct: the fur trim of her shawl, the gloss of her black mittens, and the rough cushions of the chair that props her up.

My mother won’t like this portrait. I’ve captured her in the depth of her grief, her eyes unfocused, her mind distant, her whole body slumped under the weight of her sadness. She had loved Gerrit more than the rest of us, I think. Maybe not before the accident but certainly after his hand was crushed.

After I went back to my apprenticeship in The Hague, and later opened my studio with Jan Lievens back in Leiden, she no longer worried about me. I would be self-sufficient, while her oldest son would need a mother’s focused care.

At the funeral, though, my mother had held me so tightly it felt as if she were trying to bind me to her through her grip. She never met my eyes when I tried to touch her pale skin, her translucent cheeks, so worn with time’s passing. Her eyes darted away from my gaze.

Maybe she didn’t want to share this grief with me. Maybe she was trying to protect me from the power of her love, but I did not think of that at the time; during the funeral, all I could think was that she was angry with me for continuing to live and thrive after her favored son had perished. One should not believe that a parent is able to love all sons equally. Some sons are easier to love than others.

I reached up and pinned the print back on the drying line. I took a deep breath and let the smell of the etching acid fill my nostrils, stinging just a little bit.

Taking the lantern with me, I returned to the painting studio. The snow had made the sky brighter and I could hear some of the revelers from the festival already in the streets.

I went to Tomas’s copy of
Emmaus
on the floor, and lifted it to eye level. The apprentice was nearly finished with the painting now, and it would be his first completed work. Tomas had managed to give Cleopas a strong expression of fear, even if the gaping mouth he’d rendered veered a little bit toward the comical.

The problem was the way Tomas had handled the light. In my study, I had placed Christ in deep shadow, the revelation casting Cleopas into light. Tomas had given an equal amount of light to the disciple and Christ. He’d managed to bring clarity to Jesus’s features, but that wasn’t the point. It was the choice of light that was most important—instead of bringing the viewer’s eye to Christ, I wanted to call attention to those who witnessed Christ’s resurrection. It was the witnesses who mattered in this particular story. This was their story, not Christ’s. His return wasn’t about his form or his face or how he looked as a man. It was about Cleopas recognizing God in this stranger. The emphasis had to be on Cleopas, the disciple, and his experience of discovery. His sudden recognition that the stranger was in fact Christ—that was the miracle.

I let the painting rest again against the wall. Maybe Tomas knew already it wasn’t working. Maybe that’s why he’d taken it down from the easel.

It was time, at last, to sit down and paint. I knew that I had been finding ways to put it off all day and now the moment had come to sit down and truly begin. I had to demand true concentration of myself—real discipline. No more distractions. Only the painting at hand.

I drew up a chair and positioned myself in front of that massive
stretch of linen. I saw the lines and shapes I had brushed onto the canvas that morning. They looked aimless and weak. Even the consistency of the paint seemed noncommittal. The brushstrokes had no authority, no direction. Only a set of shapes. The work of an amateur.

Things had changed in me since I’d made my first attempt that morning. Now I at least had an idea for the overall composition and a strong concept for the image. I was sure of what I would try to do, and I wasn’t sure if I would achieve it. Including the dead man in the portrait would be a risk, but it was a risk worth taking because it would add so much more drama and tension to the piece. It would create a narrative, where no narrative existed.

I found myself a wider paintbrush and picked up my palette again. I dabbed my paintbrush in the Kassel earth, and I started again. I moved the composition of guild members higher so that I could place the corpse at the base of the canvas. I started to paint an outline of the thief front and center, at the bottom of my pyramid. I outlined his overall shape, a large ovoid containing head, torso, legs, feet. I moved the figure of Van Loenen to the top of the pyramid and put Dr. Tulp to the side on the right. But I gave him a great deal of space, so that he had pride of place and room to move his hands.

I looked at the figure of the thief. I considered turning him forward like Mantegna’s Christ, but looking at it within my pyramid, it didn’t seem right. I decided on a compromise. I should turn him diagonally within the frame, so that his feet would be a bit foregrounded and his head higher in the perspectival plane. As I outlined, though, I saw that this would require me to make him somewhat foreshortened, to make the proportions unusual between his torso and legs.

I outlined a general shape of Dr. Tulp, standing over the body,
making his cuts. That was my idea—to show Tulp standing over the open cavity of the dead man’s body, searching for the soul. All the other surgeons and apprentices would be standing alongside him, gaping into the body cavity, observing Tulp’s dissection. Adriaen would be wide open at the center, a kind of plundered landscape, with the doctors mining his organs.

It seemed like the right kind of image to make a point. The tearing down of the temple to chase after the thief within. It would be a modern allegory of scientia. The marks on the thief’s body would tell the story of his crimes; the stump would illustrate his punishment. The repose of the body would speak of his unearthly suffering.

I liked it as a concept, and my hand moved swiftly across the canvas with the brush. I worked in the detail of the body. I outlined both arms. The anatomized arm and the stump. The specifics of the muscles and tendons and veins of the anatomized arm would have to wait for later, until I could get that arm from Fetchet. But I could work on the other arm based on my morning’s sketches. I went to my cloak and found my notepad.

I brought it to the easel and tried to work from the sketches. Now, though, I had to consider the stump. The partial arm, hand missing at the wrist. How realistic should I try to make it? And what was I conveying with that shape?

I found, however, that all this thought was becoming hard for me. It was too technical, too dry. And with each brushstroke, I found myself becoming more and more upset. It pained me to think about that hand. The thief’s hand. Adriaen’s hand. Because I also thought of Gerrit’s hand. My mother’s kiss. I remembered Adriaen’s hand holding the wine goblet that Lievens had given him. How he’d brought that glass to his lips with that hand and had waved goodbye that night after he’d supped.

Each stroke made me ask myself: Was it further cruelty what I was doing? Making a man’s great loss, great suffering, so manifest? Would it tell the story I wanted it to tell? Or was it too literal minded, too directly on the mark?

My own hand slowed. I pushed myself away from the easel. I crossed my arms and took in what I’d done. This, I thought, was a portrait of human cruelty. It told of how men ravage one another in search of truth. How they carve each other up in the name of justice, and how they fail to see their own brutality.

I put down my brush. I had a choice now, and it was an important one. Would I use my gift to echo this brutality? Would I be no better than the executioner to put the man’s sufferings on display as spectacle? When she’d kissed my hands, had my mother blessed them for this?

I sat there for a long time in front of the canvas in the dark. I stood, walked away from the easel, and thought. I walked back to the easel, walked around it, and then found my seat in front of it again.

I got up from the easel and walked to the windows, looking out over the city and toward the IJ. Down in the streets below there were a few passersby already lighting their torches for the midnight parade. A group of revelers stood below my window, pouring out their cups of ale from a tankard, singing a drinking song. The women raised their skirts, kicking their feet in the air and laughing. All the way up Sint Antoniesbreestraat I could see crowds lining up for the parade. Already some men were shooting off Chinese sparks from nearby rooftops.

What a strange evening. Out there, it was festival time. I stood and watched the figures walking, dancing, skipping toward the Waag, but I did not feel as cynical about all this as you might imagine.
I thought about the cycles of life and death and how celebrating execution and dissection was one way of acknowledging life. Who feels more alive, after all, than a man who has recently witnessed a death?

When I heard the rap at the door I was not surprised. Something in me knew that I should be expecting what happened next.

“Enter,” I said.

“Master, you are here then.” It was only Femke. “I thought I heard you return earlier, but I was not sure if you’d gone to bed.”

“No, I’m working. It’s the only moment when I get a bit of silence.”

She stepped farther into the room and I could see that there was another figure behind her in the doorway.

“Please forgive me, master,” she continued, leaning forward to whisper. “I told her it was an unusual hour for callers, but she would not be sent away. I thought you would see her. The others stayed below.”

“She?”

“She has come from Leiden, she says …” Femke said, unable to continue. She drew her apron to her face and dabbed her eyes. I saw that she had been crying.