The Anatomical Theatre of Leiden University, Engraved in 1609
The Leiden anatomical theatre in a print of 1609, with skeletons of men and animals ranged around the dissection table and visitors walking among them. It was a lecture hall, a museum and a public spectacle at once — and outside the dissection season it was open to anyone who paid.
The Dutch Republic had no royal academy and no single capital of learning. What it had instead was a dense mesh of universities, botanical gardens, printers, instrument makers and correspondents, held together by letters and by the trade that paid for them. Leiden's theatre is a good emblem of it: a university facility that doubled as a public attraction, funded by admission money, stocked with curiosities sent home by company ships. See scientific societies and knowledge networks in the Dutch Golden Age.
CC0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
,_RP-P-1887-A-12041.jpg){kind=link}