Its name says night, but Rembrandt's 1642 masterpiece actually depicts a militia company stepping out in broad daylight. This episode treats The Night Watch as a living biography, tracing how a civic guard portrait commissioned for a musketeers' hall in Amsterdam broke every convention of the stiff group portrait, why darkened varnish gave it a misleading name for centuries, and how a 12-by-14-foot canvas painted in a garden shed became a target for bureaucrats, vandals, and eventually artificial intelligence.

We cover the 18 guardsmen who paid 100 guilders each and got shoved into shadow, the girl with a dead chicken that encodes the guild's coat of arms, the 1715 trimming that destroyed two figures so it would fit between columns, the wartime rolling of the canvas into the caves of Maastricht, knife attacks in 1911 and 1975, an acid attac ...