The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman is an oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt van Rijn, made in 1656 and held in the Amsterdam Museum. It documents a brain dissection performed by the surgeon Jan Deijman on the body of the executed criminal Joris Fonteijn, with Deijman's assistant Gijsbert Calkoen shown at left holding the dead man's skull. Much of the original canvas was destroyed in a fire in 1723 and the surviving fragment, measuring 100 by 134 centimeters, was cut down from a larger composition; a preparatory sketch survives showing the full original scene. Rembrandt used exaggerated foreshortening of the corpse, a device he knew from prints after Mantegna's Lamentation of Christ, to draw the viewer directly into the dissection. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/