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The hand rests on Homer, who was blind and poor and left only words. The light picks out the stone forehead.

Aristotle spent three years as tutor to the teenage son of Philip of Macedon, and the pupil turned into Alexander. The relationship stayed useful in both directions: Alexander sent back biological specimens from Asia, and Aristotle's nephew Callisthenes travelled with the expedition as its official historian until he objected to the king's new Persian court ceremonial and was arrested and died in custody. Being the great man's teacher was not a safe posting. Rembrandt's painting sets the whole arrangement out as an argument between two objects. The philosopher rests his right hand on a bust of Homer, the poet who was blind and poor and left nothing but words. His left hand touches the heavy gold chain across his chest, and the medallion hanging from it carries a portrait of Alexander: the honor a patron gives, the reward for teaching a king. The face between them is doing arithmetic that the picture declines to finish. The light falls on the sleeve, the chain and the stone forehead, and everything else in the room stays in the dark. The commission has its own comedy. It came from Don Antonio Ruffo, a Sicilian nobleman in Messina who had never met Rembrandt, ordering a philosopher sight unseen from a painter at the other end of Europe; when it arrived in 1654 Ruffo was pleased enough to order two more. Rembrandt at that moment was in the financial slide that ended three years later with an inventory of his possessions and a forced sale of his house and his collection, and he had spent much of his life buying exactly the kind of exotic props the sitter is wearing. When the painting came up at auction in New York in 1961, the Metropolitan Museum bought it for two and a third million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction, and the news ran on front pages. The museum hung it alone in a gallery, and people queued around the block to look at a picture about whether worldly reward is worth anything. The queue was itself an answer.