Flemish School 17th ct. 54 x 83 cm The Feast of Belshazzar. Oil/cradled panel. Private collection, Aachen, assembled between the 1950s and 1970s. The biblical book of Daniel (chap. 5, verses 1-25) describes how the Babylonian king Belshazzar desecrated the liturgical vessels stolen from the Jerusalem temple treasure during a banquet. Thereupon a hand wrote the proverbial, doom-threatening "Menetekel" on the wall. The painting is characterized by its richness of figures and details as well as the magical, festively accented, strictly composed scenery in an almost dark room. While the theme of the banquet of Belshazzar rarely appears in medieval art, it was increasingly taken up with the appearance of the Counter-Reformation. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, in Flanders numerous variants of this subject can be found, among others by the Antwerp painter family Francken.