HOME | DD

Description

Acrylic on hardboard, 18" x 24"

They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. Then the king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. (Daniel 5:4-6 ESV)

Hopefully this isn’t too confusing for those of us who mostly read left to right but Aramaic is written right to left and the inscription is still in progress here. One of the less convincing elements of Rembrandt’s depiction of this story is that Belshazzar and other guests are captured in the exact moment they notice the disembodied hand, which has just finished writing the full text of the inscription. That seems a bit late to me as a sight like that would likely grab your attention right away.

In this piece I don’t strive to capture the moment they first notice the hand and it isn’t finished writing yet. If you read the lettering you can see he’s only gotten as far as the letter “resh” (transliterated “R”) in PARSIN. The reason it looks like one unbroken series of letters is that words weren’t spaced apart in antiquity the way they are today, which may be one of the reasons the inscription was so difficult to interpret.

Description

Acrylic on hardboard, 18" x 24"

They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. Then the king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. (Daniel 5:4-6 ESV)

Hopefully this isn’t too confusing for those of us who mostly read left to right but Aramaic is written right to left and the inscription is still in progress here. One of the less convincing elements of Rembrandt’s depiction of this story is that Belshazzar and other guests are captured in the exact moment they notice the disembodied hand, which has just finished writing the full text of the inscription. That seems a bit late to me as a sight like that would likely grab your attention right away.

In this piece I don’t strive to capture the moment they first notice the hand and it isn’t finished writing yet. If you read the lettering you can see he’s only gotten as far as the letter “resh” (transliterated “R”) in PARSIN. The reason it looks like one unbroken series of letters is that words weren’t spaced apart in antiquity the way they are today, which may be one of the reasons the inscription was so difficult to interpret.