Vincent van Gogh paints The Starry Night in 1889, inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, a year before his death, and this film treats the canvas like a crime scene to be worked out clue by clue. It matches the spiral overhead to real nebula illustrations circulating in the astronomy handbooks of the day, and identifies the bright point beside the moon as Venus, unusually vivid in the sky that year. Records place Van Gogh at his cell window before dawn on 25 May 1889, but since the actual view was partial, the film shows how he built out the rest, adding a village church tower and a cypress tree that were not visible from his room, to give the composition depth and a bridge between its calm earth and turbulent sky. The same detective method is turned on other artists' famous paintings, including Manet, Botticelli, Vigee Le Brun, Rembrandt, Holbein, Bellini, Carpaccio, and Bruegel, each work broken down for the historical and technical decisions hiding inside it. The recurring question is whether these effects are accidents of feeling or engineered choices.