El festín de Baltasar

When John Martin showed this picture in London early in 1821, it drew such crowds that a railing had to be put up to hold them back, and it won him a prize of £200. This was the age of the panorama and the public spectacle, when Londoners paid to stand inside vast painted views of cities and battles, and Martin gave them the Bible as a light show. The scene is the feast where a mysterious hand writes on the wall that Belshazzar's Babylon is finished, the whole hall of columns and hanging gardens flung open under a broken, moonlit sky. Critics complained the tiny figures were badly drawn. The public did not care, and cheap engravings after the painting sold for years.