Hyman Bloom admired works by artists such as Soutine ("Carcass of Beef", 1924) and Rembrandt ("Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", 1632; "The Slaughtered Ox", 1655) that explored similar themes. He called the colors of a decaying corpse he had seen in a morgue "harrowing" and yet "beautiful...iridescent and pearly." Many of Bloom's paintings feature rabbis, usually holding the Torah. According to Bloom, his intentions were more artistic than religious. He began questioning his Jewish faith early in life, and painted rabbis, he claimed, because that was what he knew. Over the course of his career he produced dozens of paintings of
The Anatomy Lesson (Roth novel) three were collected and republished in 1985 as "Zuckerman Bound". Republication moved some critics to reassess this third entry; again in "The New Yorker", John Updike wrote, "In toto, "Zuckerman Bound" shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated, the topic of authorship clearly being, to this author, a noble one." In "The New York Times Book Review", critic Harold Bloom said of the three collected Zuckerman novels, ""Zuckerman Bound" merits something reasonably close to the highest level of esthetic praise for tragicomedy." The Anatomy Lesson (Roth novel) The Anatomy Lesson is a