The Brooklyn Rail

“Cuts of flesh, though dead, for that very reason forbid us to die.”
— Caspar Barlaeus, 1639

During the weeks following a video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) in early 2024, which involved tiny cameras and surgical tools piercing through an inch-long aperture between two ribs, I obsessively read up on the medical procedure, for its elegant precision (now further augmented by AI and 3D modeling) and minimization of pain seem to ever drift towards the realm of sorcery, rather than science. To art-historically sensitive eyes, an unexpectedly rewarding aspect of this rabbit-hole journey lies in the medical imaging and documentation of procedures that are mesmerizingly novel yet familiar. A particularly arresting example, which captured my surgeon demonstrating a breakthrough technique in coloring a target region by manipulating blood supply, insistently brought to mind Rembrandt’s 1632 masterpiece The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp: both are portrayals of fellowship, swarm intelligence, spectatorship, performance of knowledge, and itinerary of attention—a feature so notable that it found perfect meme expression when teaching assumed Zoom form at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp projects mostly outward, though not necessarily at the viewer; the Chinese doctors are magnetized towards the screen(s). Mirror images, almost.

In both, anatomical dissection occupies the sensational center, and that centrality is evident in the commissioning of a surgeon’s guild portrait as much as in the uniformly raised cameras of the medical crew. In Rembrandt’s Eyes, Simon Schama observes the “double display” that the artist choreographed for Dr. Tulp: “with his right hand he is lifting and separating the flexor muscles (both carpal and digital), while with his left hand he is actually demonstrating precisely the action enabled by the relevant muscles and tendons… Dexterity, then, is divinity.”¹ Yet despite the striking realism in rendering faces and anatomical details, Rembrandt’s painting, as Schama points out, is far removed from a faithful record of such public dissections, where the cadavers would typically arrive damaged, with open abdominal cavities and missing teeth. The serene and complete figure of a man hanged for petty theft registers less like a lifeless corpse than a Christ-like figure “among us,” serving as a reminder of both mortality and redemption. These Christian sensibilities would permeate a 1656 Rembrandt painting of a similar subject, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman, in which the open-bellied cadaver borrows from the famously foreshortened Christ figure by Andrea Mantegna (c. 1480), and the surgeon separating the cerebral hemispheres appears as if “performing a benediction”.² More subtly, Dr. Tulp engages neither the gaze of his colleagues or that of the spectators (including us) but appears rather to be suspended in a moment of pious rapture.

The suspension feels just as palpable in the 2023 view of a technologically advanced surgical room, yet the body has all but disappeared: covered under sterile cloth and completely detached from corporeal integrity. Enlarged views of lung tissues, glowing from artificial light and injected pigmentation, appear stranger than an alien terrain.

What kind of images, aesthetically or spiritually, are these live closeups of our vital, inner materials? And what of the boundaries and alliances between machine vision and human perception? These appear to be the lines of inquiry in artist Yuri Ancarani’s 2012 video installation Da Vinci, which weaves together highly coordinated surgical maneuvers—involving both surgeons and the da Vinci robot (named after the Renaissance polymath) with magnified, endoscopic views of body interiors, cool and otherworldly through the film’s sapphiric hue. Ancarani’s cinematography luxuriates in the details of anatomy and technology. Gestures of divinity may be gleaned, if not from the general compassion of medical research, then in the moments when the surgeons’ hands rest in front of their chest as if in prayer, although this position is implemented to contain the hands in the surgical gown’s sterile area.

Perhaps Rembrandt eschewed depicting the entrails—so viscerally present on the high-res screens of modern-day surgeries—because they reveal our bestial, earthly biology. Over the past few months, the war dead—spilled guts and deformed bodies, too frequently of children—have occupied social media feeds and been imprinted on my retina. Images of grotesque dehumanization, they speak to our basest humanity, precisely in their utter impossibility for transcendence.

1. Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, (1st ed., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 352.
2. Ibid., 604.