The Surgeon, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, by Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c 1500-1566)

The Surgeon, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness is one of the most striking representations of neurosurgery in art. The focus of the painting is occupied by a surgeon who, with a concentrated gaze and wry smile, attempts to remove a stone from the forehead of an anguished young man who is tied to a chair, crying in agony. The artist of this dramatic work is the relatively obscure Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c 1500-1566). Hemessen lived in a time of artistic ferment in the Netherlands as conservative local traditions gave way to new ideas imported from Italy, which marked the beginning of the Romanism period. Romanists were aspiring young Netherlandish artists who traveled to Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice to study the works of High Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. With these lessons in mind, they combined the typical features of early Netherlandish painting-a high degree of realism, the use of symbolic iconography, and a focus on genre painting and still life-with the dramatic gestures, heroic postures, chiaroscuro, space and volume, and grand humanistic themes of the Italian Renaissance. Hemessen's interpretation of the allegory of the stone of madness reveals these Italian influences while also retaining the early Netherlandish tradition of realism and iconography, in which the objective world represents a realm of symbolic implication carrying allegorical moralistic messages. The predominant interpretation of The Surgeon, or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness is as a metaphor for stupidity and gullibility, a common theme in Netherlandish art of this time. As such, Hemessen's painting symbolizes the limits of the medical profession and underscores the persistent hope for neurosurgery to treat psychiatric disease in the future.