Nicolaes Tulp attended by prominent learned men, who exchanged ideas about anatomy and the chemical processes of the human body. As befits a new praelector, the Guild commissioned a new group portrait of the prominent councilmen and guildmasters. Rembrandt, himself a young man of 26 and new to the city, won this commission and made a famous painting of him: "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp". This painting, which now hangs in the Mauritshuis museum of the Hague, depicts Tulp dissecting such a criminal's forearm. There has been much speculation as to why the dissection began on the forearm. Rembrandt's event
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