Prof. G. Currie Martin draws this suggestive picture:
In the gallery at The Hague there hangs a wonderful picture by
Rembrandt. When the visitor first looks at it the horror that
it inspires seems too great to be borne, for there, in the very
forefront of the canvas, so that the spectator imagines he could
touch it, is the grim and ghastly form of a corpse lying livid
and rigid upon the dissecting-table. To add still further to the
sense of shrinking it evokes, the scalpel of the surgeon has
been thrust into the flesh, and he is laying bare the muscles of
the arm. But if the visitor has only patience and courage for a
moment to overcome the first sense of repulsion, he will find
that he goes away from an examination of the picture thinking
no longer of death and its terror, but of life and its power.
For the skill of the artist is shown in so presenting the great
and eternal contrast between death and life that the latter
triumphs. Above the figure of the corpse are grouped the faces
of the great scientists and physicians who, as they listen
to the words of the lecturer, are drinking in the new-found
knowledge that is to make them the conquerors of disease, and
those portraits are so wonderfully painted that the spectator
finds himself ever afterward thinking of the power of life that
they manifest and of the greatness of human knowledge that has
wrested the secrets from death itself which make life more
powerful and safe. (Text.)
(1800)
=Life-line, A=--See INGENUITY.