The finest art exhibition for many years is currently in our city -- arrived without fanfare, lines, coffeecup logos, and will probably leave the same way. No one seems to have noticed. Borrowed from the Morgan Library in New York, 48 Rembrandt etchings -- some about as big as a commemorative stamp -- are in town. A fearsomely difficult process -- involving scratching needles into a layer of wax over a copper plate, which is then dropped into an acid bath, graving the lines permanently into the copper. All this has to be done backwards, and once done, can only be somewhat erased.

All the great Rembrandt etchings are here: the landscapes generated out of a few swirling curlicues of line; the washerwomen nudes, their skin glowing in skeins of crosshatching; the dark entombments; the tiny dogs; the beggar children. And the grand pieces speaking of the great discovery of the Protestant Reformation: that the poor can be as great carriers of the truth of God as the rich and the priestly -- Christ preaches to the multitude: and in one corner a dog shits, and a child doodles, and a mother wonders whether there will be a dinner on the table tonight. He is crucified, and the bored soldiers think about the rest of the weekend coming up. Just a gesture, a grimace, a huddled body. It is all there in a few scratches on a copper plate, inked, and pressed down on fragile paper.

And because they are etchings, anyone can go into a good bookstore and get the two volumes of the Dover etchings for about 40 dollars, and there is a lifetime of looking, pretty close to the Morgan Library versions; though it is a thrill to see the real thing, up close, and inexhaustible.