THE BOOK OF MONSTERS

S.Raven

Fig. 1 Rembrandt, Dr. Tulp’s Anatomy lesson, 1632, oil on canvas, 169, 

5 x 216, 5 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague. 

An opportunity for a dissection arose on 16 January, 1632. The date can be pinpointed very accurately: the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons would allow only one public dissection a year; the body to be dissected had to be that of an executed criminal. The winter months were a useful time, since the bodies would keep better during the demonstrations that usually went on for several days. A man called Aris Kindt had been hanged for armed robbery. Immediately after the execution, his

 body was taken to the Anatomy Theatre of the Guild of Surgeons.

I travel to see 'Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson', without knowing it, in winter. I am in Den Haag for an exhibition, staying in a squatted house with some friends, and a very fine black and white cat, called 'Case' - who has become blind some six months prior, and who paws his way, claws first, through the living room,

 occasionally following a voice to clamber, exquisitely painfully, up a leg & onto a knee, to be stroked. My host Joost (who looks very like Charlie Chaplin) and who is gallery director at Walden Affairs (named after the book by Thoreau) kindly suggests the evening before, over several too many bottles of a delicious, sickly dark stout (filtered through oyster shells) that I must visit the Mauritshuis Museum, and on the way try eating a local delicacy of Herring, caught, salted and aged a few days, from a stand outside the Parliament building, which leads to the former Palace; t

he Mauritshuis Museum. This I do. The Herring is served with its head removed, on a paper napkin. It's colour is greenish white. I lift it by the tail, as instructed, it is very slippery, and eat. The texture is indescribably soft, a feeling of flesh in the

 mouth which is almost repellant, but for its warmth and delicacy, then overwhelmingly pungent, refreshing taste. 

With this aroma lingering, I walk through to the museum. At first sight, the

 Maurithaus appears as a model. It is set in a lake, a perfect cube, with black shuttered windows - a pure facade. Entrance is to the side. I wander through oak panelled rooms of still lives and 17th Century landscapes, including the sublime 'View of Delft' by Vermeer, until I find myself in a small room filled with Rembrandts, including the infamous 'Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson'. 

It is rare to be awe struck - bought to tears in the instant of seeing an image or

 object. The last few times I have felt so moved have been in meeting an ex, and on standing in the choir of Lincoln Cathedral. It is a portrait of an unknown man which holds the greatest fascination for me. The feeling is one of being punched in the guts - while having your heart fondled. Time stops, triggers the depths - that sense which disposes in an instant of all that is painful, which leads to a sense of

 spiritual rebirth. I believe that it is the comedic return to Earth from such a moment that is so strangely depicted in 'Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson'.

Nicolaas Tulp, anatomist, four times mayor of Amsterdam, first physician to convey himself through the city in a one horse carriage (on house calls) discoverer of the ileo-cecal valve (Tulp's valve - at the junction of the small and large intestines) also had an interest in the placebo effect, and is rumoured to have cured young Rembrandt (26 when he painted 'The Anatomy Lesson') by suggestion, of an

 anxiety that he thought his bones were turning to jelly. This liquid ghoul might appear similar to the one depicted by Manet in an oil sketch of the 'Anatomy Lesson' (coincidentally also made for his doctor, Siredey, who treated the artist during the lengthy illness which led to his death) 

In Manet's oil sketch, the body of Aris Kindt (the executed armed robber, who's arm is being dissected) is transmuted into a pool of flesh - a swamped, mummified thing. The head of a cartoon beast appears through the paint and gloom, in the negative space between Tulp and the figure to his right - a blooded, grey eyed, grinning, skeletal horse, with lipstick - perhaps cut from the same cloth as the horse depicted in Fuseli's 'Nightmare', and the dancing shadow donkey's in the background of Goya's painting, 'The Forcibly Bewitched':

Above: 'The Nightmare', by Heinrich Fuseli.

'The Forcibly Bewitched'

The subject of Goya's painting is taken from a comedy by the playwright, Antonio de Zamora. The timorous Don Claudio, the main protagonist, has been led to believe that his life depends upon keeping a lamp alight. The inscription in the bottom right contains the first part of two words 'lampara descomunal' (monstrous lamp). These are the words Don Claudio cries aloud while replenishing the lamp with oil. The composition may have been suggested to Goya by a stage presentation. The picture is one of six scenes of witchcraft painted for the Duke of Osuna and paid for in 1798.

A friend who trained as a nurse before studying to be an artist told me an interesting story about dissection. After death, a shockingly crude autopsy is performed on a majority of contemporary bodies. The guts are opened and inspected, then the head is opened, the brain removed, chopped up, then, because this process reduces the thinking organ to mush, it is stuffed into the belly with the intestines, which are then sewn up. The empty brain cavity is filled with balls of newspaper - tabloid tits, football results, celebrity meltdowns (many in the West are buried as in life) In my friend's sculptural version, an oval table top has been inlaid with used, indented chopping boards, and a ball of newspaper sits in the centre.

Below: 'Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson' - a 'lurid sublime' version. 

                                                                                                              Above: Still from a Frankenstein Movie.

Through his depiction of Kindt, Rembrandt might be seen to predict the schizophrenia of Van Gogh (1853-1890), and to prepare the imaginative ground from which Mary Shelley, at just 18 years old, will grow her novel 'Frankenstein' (first published 1818) A physical resemblance suggests the connection to Van Gogh. The presence of a large open book in the right foreground hints at the latter, an impression of Kindt's body as being shown to, prepared for, or consumed by, a book; its pages exposed.  

In 1641, Tulp wrote and published 'Observationes Medicae', also known as 'The Book of Monsters', because in it were presented drawings of dissected animals, previously unseen in Holland, bought back on the Dutch East India ships. 

A Page from Tulp's 'Book of Monsters'.

 Tulp's picture of the orang-outang, or the so-called Tulp's satyr, is said to be the first illustration in a book of an ape imported to Europe. In fact it was a chimpanzee presented as a gift to the Prince of Orange.... Among the illustrations in the book are a two-headed monster with three arms and three legs, kindney stones, a tape-worm, a nwarwhal and that famous picture of an' orang -outang'. illustration" BMN I: 184. Willems 980. Waller 9715. Heirs later edition. Provenance. C. Ch E(c)kman Otto Fr. Eckman ( 19th century handwirting on blank and endpapers). Ex Libris. Docteur R. Rickaert 

Kindt the monster is dissected by Rembrandt, topped and tailed, by light. A furred shadow, the shape of an eye mask, occludes his sleeping head, curiously raised into view, as on a pillow. His neck must have been shattered from the hanging, which might explain an unusual proximity of head & shoulder. I believe Rembrandt cradled Kindt's head into view, and placed his eye at the centre of the image - it is the only resting place in a composition so expertly constructed that Van Gogh felt moved to write in one of his letters 'It's only fault lies in the fact that it has no fault'. As in the diamond constellation of conspiring heads, the lens through which we are immersed in this picture is both faultless and generous.

The dead are painted differently to the living. Through paint, the form of life can be expressed. The dead cannot be painted - but they can be given life, through the tender act. The dead are animated; Kindt is a ghost, a fusion of Rembrandt's creative spirit and the grit teethed armed robber who hours earlier swung from a rope, snapped from life. No psyche can tolerate identification with the dead, so the depicted dead body becomes imbued with a trace of what's missing, and a map of a performed act. The dead or anatomised body is witness. Kindt's body, and the swirls of loin cloth about his waist, are painted with a simplicity that is drained of the certainty of touch by which life's blood and colour details the 'living' in the same picture. Kindt is a monster, born from paint into film and literature. His ear is clipped to an impish point, his top row of teeth are bared fangs. The visualisation of Frankenstein's monster, formed from the re-animation of dead flesh, provides a poetic double for the act of film making, similar to the way Rembrandt holds a mirror to the act of painting. James Whale, director of the 1931 Universal 'Frankenstein' movie, brilliantly fed The Monster's dream by instructing Karloff to act blind - robbing the dead of sight, borrowing it for camera. This is why Karloff stumbles, arms outstretched, fumbling his way through the film, and opens another aperture, his mouth - through which to tongue the air:

As at the birthroom midnight window

The dead make hopeless mouths.

TED HUGHES - The New World (pg 276, collected poems)

This explains the dream quality of early Universal Horror films. Kindt's feet, as with the upper half of his head, are held in the dark. He is placed in brackets. Through the black, his toes resemble bulbs - tulips fit to burst: cosmic/comic things, at odds with the finessed limbs expressed elsewhere; in Tulp's hand gesture, and the focus of his eye. Perhaps for the same reason that the only kind of body allowed for dissection in 1632 was one 'outside of the Church', so too a reduction in painterly care may have been tactful, not to invest the dead criminal with too much pathos. Perhaps the choice of a dissected arm (as opposed to the usual dissection, which would begin in the gut) is a subtle reflection of the criminal act Kindt was hung for (armed robbery) Tulp's hand gesture is the exact posture of a painter holding a brush. 

Many have speculated about the curious, twisted anatomy of the hand and arm exposed in 'The Anatomy Lesson'. W.G.Sebald suggests in his book 'The Rings Around Saturn' that the hand/arm is pure montage - that, by necessity, the 'disarticulated' hand, removed from time, must also issue from another space. A site of grieving perhaps. It has been claimed that Tulp is shown in the process of moving a ligament, and in so doing levering the index finger of the dead man, to puppet a beckoning from beyond, proof of the mechanics of the body, a summoning of Descartes 'Man Machine'. This fits with an art historical view that links the emergence of Decartes' philosophy with Newton's ideas, and a focus on movement as a theme in art. More compelling though (given Tulp's interest in the anatomy of valve structures) is the claim that a process of blood circulation is being depicted - a discovery contemporary with the painting of 'The Anatomy Lesson', and no less fascinating (though perhaps less obvious) an example of movement as artistic subject matter.

Kindt's enigma even haunts contemporary film. In James Cameron's 1984 science fiction movie 'Terminator', a robot, which appears human (flesh and blood over a robotic skeleton) is sent back in time to murder the mother of a man destined to lead an army in a battle against 'the machines'. The image of a stripped arm, and the animation of the hand via ligature rather than a mind/computer, is replayed when the relentless 'Terminator' repairs to a motel room after a gunfight, to perform surgery on its own arm. The largely silent monster mimics the depiction of Kindt, its eyes hidden behind dark glasses. 

The 'Terminator' is also a descriptive term for the line which divides night and day on the moon. Which returns us to the image of Kindt, and the shadow across his pale winking eye.