Nicolaes Tulp depicted in the painting can be dated to 16 January 1632; the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, of which Tulp was official City Anatomist, permitted only one public dissection a year and the body would have to be that of an executed criminal. The criminal is identified as the robber Aris Kindt. Rembrandt would later make a painting of Tulp's successor in 1656 "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Jan Deijman". Since the painting of Tulp's predecessor in 1619, "The Osteology Lesson of Dr Sebastiaen Egbertsz" was a group portrait around a skeleton, it is clear that the subject of a dead
The Anatomy Lesson (Roth novel) of writing autobiographical novels," adding, "no modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally." In "The New Yorker", John Updike was more complimentary finding, "The postmodernist writer's bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway...Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention, "The Anatomy Lesson" seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent." The first and second books in the Zuckerman trilogy are 1979's "The Ghost Writer" and 1981's "Zuckerman Unbound". The