Пир Валтасара

Rembrandt painted this in Amsterdam in the mid-1630s, when he was in his late twenties and living on the edge of the city's Jewish quarter. That neighbourhood shows up in the picture. The moment is the biblical feast where a Babylonian king throws a banquet using sacred temple vessels, and a hand appears to scrawl a warning on the wall. Rembrandt wanted the Hebrew letters right, so he got them from a book by his learned neighbour, the rabbi and printer Menasseh ben Israel, who had a theory that the words were stacked in columns from the top down rather than read across, which is why the king's wise men couldn't decode them. Rembrandt followed that column layout exactly. Catch Belshazzar at the centre, turning mid-feast with his eyes bulging and his hand knocking a golden goblet so the wine spills into the dark.