Nieuwmarkt

This guide to Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam traces the Waag from its start in 1488 as Amsterdam's city gate through its second life as a weighhouse once the old walls came down. It settles on one January afternoon in 1632, when a hanged man named Aris Kindt was carried inside for the surgeons' guild's single annual dissection, watched by a crowd and by a twenty-five-year-old painter newly arrived from Leiden. Look up at the turreted building's upper floor, where the guild's anatomy theater once stood.