Susanna and the elders

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Susanna and the elders: Peter Paul Rubens

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Peter Paul Rubens Oil Painting - Susanna and the elders

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Work Overview: Susanna and the Elders
Peter Paul Rubens
Date: c.1611
Style: Baroque
Genre: religious painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 108 x 123 cm
Location: Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia

A popular image in sixteenth-eighteenth-century art is the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders. The biblical story of Susanna and the Elders tells of a young married Jewish woman living in Babylon during the first exile of the Jewish people (after 586 BCE.). Susanna is bathing in her garden. She sends her two maids into the house to fetch oil and perfumes for her bath. Two lecherous elders of the community spy on her, conspiring to force her to submit to them sexually. They threaten her that, if she refuses, they will denounce her of adultery with another man, adultery being, according to ancient Jewish law, a capital crime for women. Susanna refuses, preferring the fate of death to the sin they propose. She is then falsely accused by the leders and condemned to death. Daniel, of leonine fame, vindicates Susanna by exposing the elders' mendacity. Interrogating them separately, he asks them under which tree Susanna committed adultery. Each names a different kind of tree. They are then executed for the crime of false witness.

The story is a complex narrative of sexual desire and visual temptation, female chastity and masculine law. During the Renaissance the dramatic focus on the moment of the woman's nakedness while bathing exposed to a lecherous conspiracy emphasized the sexual, voyeuristic and visually violating aspects of the theme, while providing a biblical and even theological justification for the painting of an erotic female nude, a genre that was emerging in this period, shifting the connotations of the female nude from its traditional iconographic association with Truth towards its modern signification of (masculine) desire and its privileged visuality.

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Peter Paul Rubens

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