A Brill Calendar: October 11

"The Anatomical Lesson of Professor Tulp"

Few 17th century medical doctors would be recognized readily in this first decade of the third millennium.

Especially if they should rise out of their grave in ‘proper attire’: namely, black cloth and velvet, a collar of white lace, breeches and a wide-brimmed hat.

But Nicolaas Tulp would be among them. Born in Amsterdam on October 11 1593, he studied medical science in Leyden and took his doctor’s title in 1614. ‘Nicolaas’ – who started life as ‘Claes Pieterszoon’ – soon returned to his native city. His family affairs needed constant attention; Dutch cities - and the city of Amsterdam was no exception - were governed and dominated by a select body of patrician, well-to-do families like his. During his long life, surpassing eighty years, Doctor Tulp was elected as a Burgomaster four times, next to his position as a ‘Prelector’ to the Guild of Surgeons in Amsterdam and his practice as a medical doctor; a true local celebrity.

Still his face and person would have been largely forgotten if Rembrandt van Rijn (Leyden, 1606) wouldn’t have painted his famous picture, ‘The anatomical lesson of Professor Tulp’ early in his dazzlingly successful period in the wealthiest city of Holland; (and of Europe, for that matter). The portrait of this famous follower of Hipocrates - now at Museum Boerhaave, Leyden - matches in verisimilitude and likeness Rembrandt’s virtuoso demonstration of genius as a painter to Amsterdam’s elite.

It is seldom that Leyden’s all-pervasive presence in the culture and civilization of Holland during the Golden Age of the Revolutionary Republic of seven – loosely – United Provinces is more gruesomely depicted than in young Rembrandt’s show-piece. The dead body on the demonstration table subject to dissection is all that remained from Adriaen Adriaenszoon, like the painter also born within the city-walls of Leyden, but with a short, brutish and criminal life, ending at the gallows.