The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Trevor Manuel, and Helen Zille. The African National Congress condemned the work as disrespectful to Mandela, racist, and culturally insensitive to African taboos on depiction of living people as dead. The 2012 painting "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Freeman" by Susan Dorothea White references the Rembrandt composition but renders each of the onlookers as an anatomical prosection and skeleton in a contemporary university laboratory; the enormous book is replaced by a computer screen and the background chart by a projection screen; the tendon orientation in the cadaver's left forearm is corrected. In "Asterix and the Soothsayer" (1972), Uderzo and Goscinny
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp referenced the painting at the bottom of page 10, where the characters observe the disembowelment of a fish. The 2011 video game "" references the painting in both in-game portraits that can be found on the wall and in a certain cinematic trailer, featuring the main protagonist Adam Jensen as the cadaver as Dr. Nicolaes and his students study his charred and ruined arms, which in the actual story become amputated and replaced with mechanical limbs. The painting is discussed by the narrator (a young man) and his mother during a visit to the Met in "The Goldfinch", a 2013