Susannah and the Elders

Susannah and the Elders is an oil-on-canvas painting made around 1580 by Paolo Veronese, in the Mannerist style. Its biblical subject shows a woman washing while two elders watch her. Veronese places the nude figure in the foreground, holding herself with restraint, while the two men look on from one side of the composition. The scene does not show a moment of action so much as a gaze that controls the space.

The artist encloses the figure within a wall that closes off the setting and isolates the woman from those observing her. Among the symbolic elements are a small dog, associated with fidelity and incorruptibility, and a statue of a satyr that looks at Susannah with lewd interest. These three motifs, the wall, the dog and the satyr, recur in other works by Veronese on the same theme from roughly the same period, among them examples preserved in the Louvre, suggesting that he used them as a recognisable iconographic repertoire.

The canvas is first recorded in Genoa in the eighteenth century. Earlier owners include Gaspar Méndez de Haro, 7th Marquis of Carpio, a Spanish collector of the seventeenth century. Today it is on permanent display at the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa.

The painting is of interest for how it combines a sensual treatment of the nude with a moral reading of the episode: Susannah is at once an object of the viewer's gaze and an example of resistance. That tension between desire and virtue helps explain much of the religious painting of the period.

Painter

Paolo Veronese

Date

1580

Dimensions

111 × 145 cm

Museum

Palazzo Bianco, Genoa

Movement

Mannerism

Genre

religious art, nude

Depicts

washing, woman, Susanna, toplessness, breast

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