WHO would have thought that famed Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn also dabbled in solving murders?
According to Brit filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s fascinating documentary “Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” the artist’s most famous work, “The Night Watch,” is more than a group portrait of the Amsterdam militia in 1642.
Greenaway claims that it contains a not-too-subtle (for the time) series of clues about the assassination of one of the painting’s most prominent figures — the gentleman in the foreground in black with a white collar.
Greenaway, best known to moviegoers for getting Helen Mirren to bare all in “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” (1989), minutely examines what he calls the painting’s 31 clues, which include a transvestite dwarf, child prostitutes and a Hitchcockian cameo by Rembrandt himself.
The artist apparently was right on target, says Greenaway, because the murder conspirators — his own patrons — saw to it that the painter’s career went to pot afterward.
Viewers of “Rembrandt’s J’Accuse” might not necessarily buy into Greenaway’s conspiracy theory, but at the least they’ll receive a unique lesson in European art, from Michelangelo to Rembrandt.