Rembrandt and learning

The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt, seems like a homage to academic learning? Yet not one of the learners is looking at the dissected arm, even the anatomist Dr Tulp. The top two are disinterested, eyeing you (the viewer) up, a couple are straining to look at the book and another staring off into space, lost in thought, only one is looking and listening to the teacher. What a wonderful study of learning in practice.

Sebald in his superb The Rings of Saturn, thought Descartes was in the room and that this was Rembrandt's rebuke to Cartesian philosophy that saw the body as a dispensable machine.

The body is that of a petty thief, recently hanged, and nobody seems to be looking at him or his dissected arm and hand. This is the cartesian dualist world of body and mind. Tulp is absorbed in his own world, not even looking at the corpse and tendon he has selected. Man is seen by all as a machine. There is a space around the poor chaps body and no one seems to cares that he was a person. One leans over him as if he were nothing. The corpse is a Chrit-like figure being sacrificed for the sake of bookish learning.

Instead they are absorbed in their own thoughts or the open book. Learning had become a bookish affair, separate from the realities of life. This is a critique of people who are lost in text, deanchored from the real world. 

I saw this painting years ago in the Mauritshuis in the Hague. An English school group arrived, pushing me to one side as Group and their guide started to unravel the secrets of the image. I looked around and sure enough, few were listening; some were lost in thought, others talking to their friends, some looking at others in the group and gallery, one trying to work his camera and so on. Rembrandt was showing us how inefficient the lecture was 350 years ago!