Rembrant's painting analysis

I see the painting as a metaphor of the film, the theme, the setting and all the characters.
There are victims as the dead body, the authorities as the doctor, the authorities supporters as guys following the doctor's direction, they study the altas like the political doctrine, examine the body like the strip/cavity search of the victims. Both Barbara and Andre claim the painting clinically wrong, just like the film claims the oppression and victimization in the East Germany are wrongdoings.

It's a right hand on a left arm. Rembrandt may have made a mistake by painting bit by bit, at seperate times (Cadaver first, figures behind second, their faces individually, the hand later)?

Perhaps in Barbara the 'atlas' is meant to represent Marx's manifesto. The right hand on the left arm (right/left East/West communism/fascism), the distance between Marx's intention and how it manifested.

Forgive me for the audacity to resist a doctor's opinion for I am not a doctor (although I put one through medical school a few lifetimes ago), but the biggest challenge I can see to your defiant certainty about the accuracy of Rembrandt's painting (conceivably an intentional inaccuracy, as Dr. Reiser suggests in the film) is that the controversy among doctors and within anatomical science has been so persistent apparently for decades or centuries that in 2006 an investigation comparing the painting to an actual dissected left forearm was undertaken in the Netherlands and published in The Journal of Hand Surgery. This is the abstract:

Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) is considered a masterpiece and is a group portrait of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons in the form of an anatomy lesson. Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Doctor of Medicine and Praelector Anatomiae to the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, showed an anatomic dissection of a forearm on the corpse of an executed criminal. The anatomic accuracy in Rembrandt’s famous painting has been discussed in the literature for decades without any general consensus. In 2006, on the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, a forearm dissection of a cadaver and a comparison with the anatomy in the painting are presented to analyze the anatomic accuracy of Rembrandt’s famous painting.

While I don't have access to reading the entire article, only this abstract, its findings are summarized in wikipedia as revealing that there are "several discrepancies" that were found by this 2006 study. It's enough to suggest that being dismissive of any controversy about the painting's depiction seems unwarranted.

bluesdoctor, thanks so much for explaining penzold's error (which i'm guessing was intentional because he needed a painting to illustrate andre's explanation about focusing on the victim and not the authorities, and this painting almost fit the bill.little did Penzold know that his fictional conceit would cause such an uproar amongst detail-fixated film viewers!!) whew! now i can move on to other issues! thx again.







The way to have what we want
Is to share what we have.

p.s. doc, what appears to fool so many of us into thinking that the dissected hand is not the palm of the left hand- is the absence of any tissue that looks like a palm. is that because the palm tissue doesn't show when you peel back the skin to expose the ligaments etc? when you peel back the thin layer of skin that covers the palm, there's no tissue there that would cover some of those ligaments? or is it that anatomical drawings never show tissue ?thx for the help.
i found this anatomical drawing that shows, again, the palm side of the hand:

http://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/palmar-interossei-hand#3/1






The way to have what we want
Is to share what we have.

This may shed light on this question.

Jennifer Xu, "The Body Vanished," Hektoen International, Volume 8, Issue 1 - Winter 2016 ISSN 2155-3017

http://www.hektoeninternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1258:the-body-vanished-sebald-s-view-of-dissection-in-rembrandt-s-the-anatomy-lesson-of-dr-nicolaes-tulp&catid=93&Itemid=435

I submit that Christian Petzold, the best of contemporary German filmmakers, is referencing W.G. Sebald, the best of contemporary German writers.