The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp

Dr Nicolaes Tulp, praelector of the Amsterdam surgeons' guild, lifts the flexor tendons of a dissected forearm as seven colleagues crane forward around the pale corpse of an executed thief. Rembrandt was twenty-five when he painted the guild commission in 1632, his first great success after arriving in Amsterdam, and he broke the convention of the static row of faces by organizing every head around a single dramatic action. The foreshortened corpse and wedge of rapt onlookers became a template for the group portrait; it hangs in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.