(piano music)
- [Voiceover] We're in the Mauritshuis Museum
in the Hague, and we're looking at one
of Rembrandt's most famous paintings.
This is the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.
- [Voiceover] This is a typical group portrait,
an important type of painting
in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century.
This happens to be the Guild of Surgeons,
and regularly they would commission
a group portrait to hang in the public space
where their guild would meet.
- [Voiceover] Once a year, there would be
a public dissection where some element
of the body would be explicated,
and that's what we're seeing here.
Now this is not true to life.
In reality, this would have been
a much more public event.
It's very likely that the chief surgeon,
in this case Dr. Tulp, would not have been
performing the actual dissection,
but would have had an assistant do this.
But what's so remarkable here is that Rembrandt
is reinventing the group portrait.
Now it's important to remember that Holland,
in the 17th century, was largely a Protestant nation.
The church was no longer a major patron.
So artists looked to the professional
and middle classes for patronage,
and that's what we have here.
- [Voiceover] And the professional
and middle classes and merchant classes
looked to artists to create a new kind
of art that would meet their needs,
and in this case, the need to show
off the profession of these men,
and specifically in this case,
the brilliance of Dr. Tulp.
- [Voiceover] I think it's hard to imagine
that for so much of history prior to this painting,
that as a culture we had so little understanding
of the human body.
We begin to reinvestigate it during
the Renaissance, and then here in the Baroque era,
we begin to impose a scientific investigation
on the human body and understand it again.
- [Voiceover] Leonardo and Michelangelo
dissected bodies pretty much in secret
so they could understand how the body worked
and represent it in their paintings,
but up in the north, in the Dutch Republic,
doctors and artists were able
to do this more openly.
That book at the feet of the cadaver
is a reminder of this renewed interest
in human anatomy.
They're dissecting a man who had just been hanged.
He's a criminal.
- [Voiceover] Look at the way that Rembrandt
has taken what was a genre of painting
where men's faces were often simply aligned,
very much like a contemporary class portrait,
which was meant to be a documentation,
and he's created out of that,
not only a sense of individuality,
but a sense of a shared moment.
- [Voiceover] A narrative story that unfolds,
each of these figures doing something
slightly different, paying attention
to slightly different things.
Then you have this wonderful varied light
with the most light falling on the cadaver
and on Dr. Tulp.
- [Voiceover] He's lifting up the tendons
and exposing, not only the forearm,
but the hand as well.
It's a remarkable thing because you have,
not only the exposed mechanics of the human hand,
but the intact hand of the doctor
manipulating that exposed hand,
and although we don't see it directly,
the hand of the artist who's able to produce
this painting with his own hand,
which is here visible through his brush work.
- [Voiceover] Through the paint.
I've always understood what Tulp
was doing with his left hand as showing
how those tendons would move the arm.
- [Voiceover] Rembrandt has placed these figures
in a pyramid, that is, they're almost stacked
on top of each other so the no face
is hidden in part and each figure is given
a kind of prominence.
- [Voiceover] But that pyramid is off to the left,
and so there's a real asymmetry,
and Tulp stands alone on the right.
That foreshortened cadaver coming into our space,
it's a horrifying painting for us to look at.
Although these may have been
public events in the 17th century,
these aren't things that we're used to seeing.
- [Voiceover] I'm interested in the fact
that when we see dead bodies painted
in the history of western art,
it is generally a representation of Christ.
There are even examples where Christ
is represented in this kind of foreshortened pose.
You might think, for instance,
of Dead Christ by Mantegna.
But here, science has replaced the spiritual,
and it is really a reminder
that the 17th century is a point
where science really does come to the fore
and begins to lay the foundation
for the modern world.
- [Voiceover] We see Rembrandt bringing drama,
and bringing narrative, and bringing storytelling
to the group portrait.
We saw this, for example, in The Night Watch,
this amazing kind of animation
and naturalism removing the stiffness
and uniformity of light that had been there
in earlier group portraits.
- [Voiceover] And like the later Night Watch,
Rembrandt focuses our attention
in very specific places.
Look, for example, at the way which
the entire lower left corner is virtually invisible.
We can just make out the elbows,
the drapes of the figures.
We can just make out the chair,
but we're not meant to focus there.
Our eye is not meant to rest there,
but our eye is drawn to the center.
Of course, the most attention is given
to the faces and then the attributes
of the success of these figures,
and that comes across very clearly
in the starched white collars,
which are painted with such meticulous skill
and were a signal of the wealth of the sitters.
Think about the effort that went into keeping
those snow-white, and then ironing them
and starching them so that they were just perfect.
It's so clearly a Baroque painting.
Look at the proximity of that body,
the way in which we are part of the circle
surrounding this body.
There's an intimacy and directness
that you'd never see in the Renaissance.
- [Voiceover] And that reality of that dead body too.
We don't have that tendency to idealize
that we see in Renaissance painting,
but that interest in reality
and the mundane, in day to day life
that's part of, especially, Dutch Baroque paintings.
Now Rembrandt is 25 when he paints this,
which is just astounding.
At an age when most people would still be students,
Rembrandt appears to be an accomplished artist.
He had just recently moved to Amsterdam,
and this painting launches his career
as the most sought after portrait painter
in Amsterdam for a couple of decades to come.
(piano music)