adding color to the flesh so that it was pristine. I added some lead white to my palette and painted on. What if I were to illuminate Adriaen, to bring him into the light? If he were not sliced open and degraded but instead elevated and lit? What if I did not show the power of the men over him but his own power over them?Īs I continued to dab my paintbrush into the Kassel earth and bone black, I recognized what was possible through this portrait. I brought my lantern closer to the easel again. I guess it’s no surprise that the scenes where Rembrandt was actually planning and executing the painting were my favorites. Siegal did a beautiful job of explaining how Rembrandt used highlights to create the mood and focal point of the scene, and why he didn’t display the body cut wide open during the autopsy. The success with The Anatomy Lesson did indeed launch his career. It is the first portrait where he is starting to look like a successful painter. Rembrandt made dozens of self-portraits throughout his career, but this one was made the same year he painted The Anatomy Lesson. 1632, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland. When Rembrandt meets Flora and learns more about Aris’s story, Rembrandt is inspired to go far beyond the intent of the original commission – which was to make a portrait of the town’s elite Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild – and to create a masterpiece that would honor Aris’s short tragic life. Each character adds interest and depth to the portrait, but it is the sympathetic love story between Aris and Flora that brings it to life. Nicholaes Tulp, the French philosopher René Descartes, the dead man, a coat thief named Aris Kindt, as well as Aris’s sweetheart Flora. The story is told from alternating points of view including Rembrandt, Dr.

There were conflicting stories about the people behind the painting, which left Siegal a great deal of creative freedom to plan her own narrative. Siegal was drawn into reading nonfiction accounts of Rembrandt’s life as well as the people and the cadaver pictured in The Anatomy Lesson. She grew up with a reproduction of this painting in her father’s study and has been intrigued with it all of her life. But Siegal was meant to write this story. The story behind a public autopsy in Amsterdam in the 1600s seems like a difficult subject for a novel, certainly less approachable than writing about Vermeer’s pretty girl with a pearl earring. Nicholaes Van Tulp (1632), The Hague, Mauritshuis

The anatomy lesson by nina siegal