In Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson all is dark — the lecturer, the onlookers who look too old to be students, who are in fact doctors who've paid to be in the painting, the cadaver over which Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is carrying out an explanation of the musc- ulature of the human arm. One public dissection permitted each year, held in a theater as if it were a play, with a paying audience, the body to be that of a convicted criminal who has been execurted. In Magritte's painting, it is the ab- sence of dark that marks its pre- sence. A war is being fought; but rather than depict that, the painter channels Renoir to let bright light enter. A landscape in a vase, trees in flower, color. An attitudinal turn- around, the visible made invisible.
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