A hand emerges from a cloud to write on the wall, and the Babylonian king Belshazzar turns in terror, his jewelled turban glinting, as wine spills from vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. It is the young Rembrandt's bid to make his name with large, theatrical history painting, and its palette is unusually rich for him.
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The Hebrew letters run in vertical columns rather than right-to-left rows, perhaps why Babylon's wise men could not read them. Rembrandt took them from his friend Menasseh ben Israel.
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