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Authors: John Connolly
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He adds his voice to hers, but the walls are thick, and the cellar deep. There is no one to hear.
A figure advances, and the lamp catches the sharp blade, and the grim work begins.
VIII
So: this is our version of the truth, our answer to the question of attribution. I, Nicolaes Deyman, did kill my apprentice Mantegna. I anatomized him in my cellar, slowly taking him apart as though, like the physicians of old, I might be able to find some as yet unsuspected fifth humor within him, some black and malignant thing responsible for his betrayal. I did force my wife, my beloved Judith, to watch as I removed skin from flesh and flesh from bone. When her lover was dead, I strangled her with a rope, and I wept as I did so.
I accept the justice and wisdom of the courtâs verdict: that my name should be struck from all titles and records and never uttered again; that I should be taken from this place and hanged in secret and then, while still breathing, that I should be handed over to the anatomists and carried to their great temple of learning, there to be taken apart while my heart beats so that the slow manner of my dying might contribute to the greater sum of human knowledge and thereby make some recompense for my crimes.
I ask only this: that an artist, a man of some small talent, might be permitted to observe and record all that transpires so the painting called
The Anatomization of an Unknown Man
might at last come into existence. After all, I have begun the work for him. I have imagined it. I have described it. I have given him his subject and willed it into being.
For I, too, am an artist, in my way.
A figure advances, and the lamp catches the sharp blade, and the grim work begins.
VIII
So: this is our version of the truth, our answer to the question of attribution. I, Nicolaes Deyman, did kill my apprentice Mantegna. I anatomized him in my cellar, slowly taking him apart as though, like the physicians of old, I might be able to find some as yet unsuspected fifth humor within him, some black and malignant thing responsible for his betrayal. I did force my wife, my beloved Judith, to watch as I removed skin from flesh and flesh from bone. When her lover was dead, I strangled her with a rope, and I wept as I did so.
I accept the justice and wisdom of the courtâs verdict: that my name should be struck from all titles and records and never uttered again; that I should be taken from this place and hanged in secret and then, while still breathing, that I should be handed over to the anatomists and carried to their great temple of learning, there to be taken apart while my heart beats so that the slow manner of my dying might contribute to the greater sum of human knowledge and thereby make some recompense for my crimes.
I ask only this: that an artist, a man of some small talent, might be permitted to observe and record all that transpires so the painting called
The Anatomization of an Unknown Man
might at last come into existence. After all, I have begun the work for him. I have imagined it. I have described it. I have given him his subject and willed it into being.
For I, too, am an artist, in my way.
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