Abstract

This article analyzes the painterly formation of pictorial subjects of embodiment and disembodiment since the early modern period. Starting with Gerhard Richter, Quattrocento painters, and Titian, it focuses on Rembrandt and his late group portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (1656). The subject of this picture is a dissection of a man’s brain – and hence the surgeons’ search for the seat of the human soul and the motion of life. In the motif of the corpse, Rembrandt performs a radical operation with paint layers that historical sources described with the terms “doodverwe” and “lyffverwe” (“dead color” and “body color”). Rembrandt’s pictorial formation is a distinctly complex answer to the soulless, lifeless corpse’s state of being, which has been reduced to no more than an image. At the same time, the dead body is the place in which Rembrandt reflects the act of painting as a way of working with the tension of embodiment and disembodiment, of giving and taking life, with color.

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