スザンナと長老たち

A young woman twists away on a stone bench as two men loom over her like a dark cloud. It is Artemisia Gentileschi's earliest known signed and dated painting, and no one before her had shown Susanna's fear this way.

The story behind the painting

The story comes from the Book of Susanna in the Additions to Daniel. Two elders hide in a garden while a young married woman, Susanna, bathes. They demand sexual favours and threaten to ruin her if she refuses. She refuses, they accuse her of adultery, a crime punishable by death, and the young Daniel saves her by questioning them apart until their stories clash. Artemisia Gentileschi's 1610 version is her earliest known signed and dated work. It hangs at Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden, Germany.

What to look for

Susanna sits uncomfortably, her body twisting in distress, unlike many versions that show no discomfort at all. The two elders are spread across the top of the tall canvas as a dark mass hovering above her, creating a feeling of malevolent pressure. Instead of the usual garden, the scene is set in a stone enclosure, with only blue sky behind. Her body follows a classical model that lends her nudity a heroic dignity. The signature is on the stone step at lower left; Gentileschi signed only 19 paintings.

Meaning and intent

The subject often let male artists display the female nude for male patrons. Compared with Annibale Carracci's Susanna, who looks receptive, Gentileschi's is uncomfortable and more feminine, and no artist before her had explored the psychological side of the story. Scholars disagree about how much her father Orazio guided her: x-rays suggest adjustments to the composition. Mary D. Garrard links the image to the harassment she faced before her rape by Agostino Tassi, while Gianni Papi sees the elders as her father and Tassi. The source stresses there is no evidence for these opinions.

Legacy

The date was long disputed. In 1845 the last digit was read by some as a 6 or a 9, which would place the work in her Florentine years; x-rays by Susanna P. Sack in 1970 confirmed 1610, published by Garrard in 1982 and accepted by most scholars. By 1714 the painting belonged to the artist Benedetto Luti, who described it as a work by Orazio while copying it for Lothar Franz von Schönborn. It was in the Schönborn collection by 1719, and an 1845 guidebook first named Artemisia as its painter.