Something has appeared in a scholar's window: a blazing disc of light, and beside it a ghostly hand pointing toward a mirror. Rembrandt etched this small, uncanny scene in Amsterdam around 1652, and ever since, people have been trying to read what's written on that disc.
The innermost letters are INRI, the inscription placed over Christ's cross. Around them runs a ring of words that looks like Latin and isn't: ADAM TE DAGERAM AMRTET ALGAR ALGASTNA. Scholars have tried to decode it as a kabbalistic formula, an anagram, a protective charm, or a scrambled prayer, and some have noted its resemblance to the magical amulets and seals that circulated in 17th-century Amsterdam, a city of printers, Jewish scholars, freethinkers and religious dissenters. No one has cracked it. That may be the point. The words look powerful precisely because we can't read them.
The title Faust isn't Rembrandt's. It was attached in the 18th century, and it stuck because the scene looks so much like the legend of Doctor Faustus summoning spirits in his study. Other titles have been proposed over the years, including a practicing alchemist, a scholar receiving a divine revelation, and a portrait of a specific learned man, but none has displaced the doctor who sold his soul.
The pointing hand and the mirror are the most unsettling part. Mirrors had a long occult history as tools for scrying, looking into reflective surfaces to receive visions. Here the vision seems to be telling the scholar to look into the glass. Whether that means self-knowledge, divine revelation or a trap, Rembrandt leaves hanging.
That refusal to explain is why the print has fascinated people for nearly four centuries. It captures the exact instant when study turns into something else: the moment the seeker gets an answer from beyond the page and has to decide what to do with it.
Rembrandt's Faust appears on our: