Rembrandt\'s Corpses

Religion and secularity in the post-Classical nude: Rembrandt's Corpses … and others
The paper considers two possible iconographical sources which have a bearing on Rembrandt's medical corpses, drawing attention to the possibility of the influence of Christian imagery. Parallels for this contamination are sought in contemporary Dutch art (especially in the tradition of 'slaughtered ox/pig' paintings). The paper then investigates possible influences on later art from both Rembrandt's medical corpses and his Slaughtered Ox
In the early stages of Christian art it seems likely that part of the mentality of the Christian use of the nude was an attempt on the part of a new ideology to neutralise the potency of pagan nudity. Christianity makes, a hostile takeover of the nude. The nude, now predominantly the male nude, takes over classical formats and poses and becomes a strong element in the iconographical tradition. With the early renaissance, there is increasing diversity and contamination between religious, mythological, and secular strands.
Rembrandt's anatomy class of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1631; Mitchell 1994; Reeves 2013: 321-2) has a firm background in more or less literal antecedants in the historical and medical traditions. Inter alia, there are: the Dissection of a Cadaver by Mondino de Luzzi, or de Liuzzi or de Lucci (c. 1270 – 1326), also known as Mundinus, an Italian physician, anatomist, and professor of surgery who worked in Bologna; an anonymous fifteenth century MS illustration of a dissection (Glasgow, MS Hunter 9 fol. 22r); a more widely disseminated printed book illustration of a dissection scene in Johannes de Ketham, fascicolo di medicina, published in Venice in 1493; the illustration of Mondino de Luzzi's anatomy lesson in the Anatomia corporis humani, 1493 (National Library of Medicine); the pseudo medical woodcut by Dürer of a toad in the breast of an unforgiving woman, used as an illustration to the Basel 1493 German translation of the popular and much translated and reprinted Book of the Knight of the Tower, a volume of moral advice for his daughters that was begun in 1371 by Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry; the Herodotean scenes in Gerard David's the Judgement of Cambyses and Flaying of Sisamnes (diptych) 1498, which was commissioned by the municipal authorities in Bruges in 1487/8 (later also painted by Dirck Vellert in 1542); Jacques de Gheyn II's anatomy lesson of Dr Pieter Pauw 1615). Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer by Michiel Jansz. van Miereveld 1617. There are many more such images in print and painting. Part of the impetus is dissemination of medical knowledge and practice, and part of it is the enshrining of a sense of civic professionalism as with the other kinds of Dutch group portrait. Later still (and after Rembrandt), the medical tradition carries on and diversifies. There are the wax and wooden nude anatomical models of, for example, Ercole Lelli (1702-1766), who also made a wax Adam and Eve, and whose anatomical models were used in demonstrations at the University of Bologna, and the reclining wax nudes with revealed entrails by Clemente Susini (1754-1814), hovering between art and science; these three dimensional representations follow the tradition of printed volumes like Vesalius' de humani corporis fabrica (1543) and Charles Estienne's de Dissectione partium corporis humani (1545). In much of this material the postural conventions of classicising art are clearly visible (Talvacchia).
However, as regards Rembrandt's anatomical painting, at a more profound level than this, it is a revision of the iconography exemplified in Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520-1522). Paintings and carvings of this representational form are very common over a long timespan. In painting, see for example, Jaume Hugeut (1412-1492), the lamentation of c.1490), Cornelis Engebrechts' crucifixion triptych, lower panel (c.1510), David Kindt (1580-1652) the lamentation of 1631, or Philippe de Champagne's (1602-1674) dead Christ which was engraved in 1654 by Nicolas de Plattemontagne. In sculpture, there is from the hospital foundation of Notre Dame de Fontenilles at Tonerre, Jean Michel and Georges de la Sonnette's Entombment (c.1453-4) with, in life-sized stone, the dead christ, loin-clothed, with his entombers; the Lamentations over the dead Christ in painted terracotta by Guido Mazzoni (1445-1518), in Modena, Naples (1492-4), and Busseto; the carved stone Entombment by Adrien Wincart (1495-6) in the parish church of St Martin, Malesherbes (loin-clothed body of Christ with robed mourners; Tolley 2007:133-4); a late sixteenth century polychrome stone Christ in the tomb (school of Germain Pilon); and a loin clothed dead Christ in Saint-Louis-en-l'Île Church (Paris) which was built between 1664 and 1675. A royal secular analogue is the semi-nude double tomb-portrait of Henri II and Catherine de Medicis, by Germain Pilon, 1563-70, Saint-Denis Basilica Similar religious examples survive in Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy (Nash 2008: 253), and there are also many stained glass parallels from c.1200 (cf. Niclaes Rombouts' stained glass entombment of Christ, 1480-4; Nash 2008; 95). Rembrandt never left the Netherlands, but he could still easily have seen a range of religious horizontal male corpses in a variety of media, and so could his viewers.
So, the corpse in Rembrandt's painting is an everyman, but may be a Christ too, who has given his body for us. The sociology of dissection suggests that the central figure in the painting, the corpse, had been poor, or outcast, or criminal, but that too has its own appropriateness. We, the viewers, are the beneficiaries of this 'Christ', whatever his shortcomings, through the agency of knowledge and medicine, the beneficiaries as corporeal rather than as spiritual entities – a deeply secular transformation which must make us think again about Rembrandt's religious art. Rembrandt's other anatomy lesson, the Anatomy lecture of Dr. Jan Deyman, 1656, is in a different orientation, but here too there is a Christ-antecedent, for Rembrandt has this corpse in the position of Christ in Mantegna's c.1480 Lamentation over the dead Christ.

Is there any context to back this religious intertextuality up? Rembrandt's Three Trees etching (1643) has been seen by some as alluding to the crucifixion and not others (Hinterling, Luijten, and Royalton Kisch 2001: 207-8), so we need more of an infrastructure to make the allusion catch.
We may not, perhaps answer the question by looking at Rembrandt's painting of the Slaughtered Ox (1655), but we may usefully open it out. Can we see in this painting a Crucifixion? Such an allusion seems to indicated in another dead animal painting, Hendrick ten Oever's Het geslachten varken (1670) where the carcass leans on a rack in a peopled street scene, and the rack has cruciform struts highlighted in the shadows. On the other hand, an allusion of this kind is not explicit in the related carcas in Martin van Cleve's Slaughtered Pig (1566; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), or in the slaughtered ox by David Teniers (1642), or the slaughtered pigs of 1642 and 1643 by Isaac van Ostade. I wonder about the supporting rack in the Barn interior (1646) by Egbert van der Poel, and perhaps a bit more in Isaac van Ostade's 1645 Cut Pig. We remain with possibilities not certainties. But let us suppose there is a crucifixion lying behind these slaughtered animals; what is the connection exactly? We see very clearly in them the butchered flesh and the redness of blood that we tend not to see in the pale-fleshed crucifixion tradition, a tradition which encompasses the many St Sebastians modelled on crucifixions, and also the flayed Marsyas which is itself intertwined with that of the crucifixion. In the animal paintings, the corporeality of violence is foregrounded and spirituality absent. The animal paintings say something about bodily existence that crucifixions, perhaps do not. The slaughtered animals will be eaten – there is a form of sacrifice going on, but rather than the self-willedness of Christ's crucifixion, the emphasis is on our need for the meat and blood of the sacrifice of others (here the animals). We are all implicated in these animal crucifixions, whereas it is all too easy to blame Christ's on the Romans or the Jews – someone else, anyway. Of course that is not a proof, but we may feel supported by a perhaps firmer instance of the blurring of boundaries between secular and Christian if we think of the similarities between Karel DuJardin's Calvary (1661) and the suspension of the de Witt brothers attributed to Jan de Baren (1672-5). Here the heroes of the new Republic have been killed by a mixture of popular misunderstanding and political skullduggery, and the visual impact of Christian and secular crucifixion is strikingly similar. The De Witt brothers are two, and neither one nor three, and they are upside down, but these are minor and contingent differences (and St Peter's upside down crucifixion eases the orientation of the De Witts).
So the Christian takeover of the mythological nude is itself subject to a secularising pull. And this goes on.

The visual concepts of art recur at apparently random intervals, and under very different conditions: much more recently, the Italian artist Joaquin Roca Rey (1923-2004) picked up the shape of Rembrandt's slaughtered ox in the wood and iron sculpture, Fusilamiento de un comunero (1957-61), where we see a roughly anthropomorphic figure presented as dehumanized but possibly transcending its dehumanization and becoming an anonymous and secular sacrificial hero. The slaughtered ox reappears yet again in Marc Mulders, Geslachte os nr V (1987), but here we seem to be looking at a more specific revision of Rembrandt than a Christian-secular border incident.
… at random intervals … A later, and quite traditional, derivation from the dead Christ tradition is the loin-clothed Jesus in the tomb by Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905). Marlene Dumas' relationship with the tradition is more uneasy. An allusion Holbein's Dead Christ in some recent paintings by Marlene Dumas is claimed in the essay in an exhibition catalogue by van den Boogerd (2003: 22-23). Likeness 1 and 2 (2002), and a 2003 sequence of works on paper, After Stone, After Photography, After Painting, After all (is said and done). Here the corpses seem to be aligned with Dumas' paintings of dead victims (and animals). There is another related Dumas, an earlier one, her 1988 Snow White and the broken arm has a Holbein-like female nude, supine, with a row of male heads appearing above a shelf or stage behind her; she is taking polaroid photographs (of herself in a mirror which is where the viewer is imagined) and has a bandage on her upper arm. Where does the bandage come from? Surely not from the Estonian artist Valdemar Väli's Nude with Bandaged arm (1946), since he is relatively little known; what about from Ingres' Valpinçon bather, a seated rather than horizontal figure, but nonetheless … privacy vs display; intimacy vs performance …
Manet's Olympia is commonly regarded as a reactionary contribution to the sleeping Venus mode, and has a much discussed relationship with Titian's 1538 Venus of Urbino. But what if she too is a dead Christ? Consider the skin colour and the sense of outline for a start. What would it mean if we chose to see intertextuality here?




[The public accessibility of dissections: one can go in order to see naked bodies – how different is this from a place where one goes to see live nudes?]
Rembrandt's etching of a sleeping (or dead) hog with a background of children playing may have moralising content, but the hog is certainly not Christlike.
there is a good deal of religious theming in nineteenth and twentieth century French art, music, and literature (St Sebastian is oddly frequent) in a range of perspectives – traditional, automated, iconoclastic and so on.
4