![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes the violence threatened against Susanna is indicated in the tableau: in a version by Ludovico Carracci that hangs in the National Gallery in London, one of the elders is tugging at Susanna’s robe, pulling it off her body. In a treatment by Rubens from half a century later, on display at the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, Susanna is shown reaching for a shawl, realizing with horror that she has been exposed to two leering men. Tintoretto depicted the scene several times in a version painted in the fifteen-fifties, which hangs in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, he portrayed Susanna as serene and abstracted, towelling a raised foot and regarding herself in a mirror, unaware of a bald man who is concealed behind a rose trellis and peering between her parted thighs. The tale offered painters an irresistible opportunity to replicate a similar kind of voyeurism. The men suddenly accost her and demand that she submit to rape if she resists, they warn, they will ruin her reputation by claiming that they caught her with a lover. Susanna, a virtuous, beautiful young woman, is bathing in her garden while two older men spy on her. The story of Susanna and the Elders, related in the Book of Daniel, was a popular subject for artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no wonder. ![]()
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