PD Images: Susanna and the Elders (1607-08), oil on canvas painting by seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), dimensions 94 cm x 66 cm, located at Galleria Borghese, Rome. Rubens is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and his paintings on historical, biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects.
The story of Susanna (also spelled as Susannah or Shoshanna) is in Book of Daniel (chapter 13), a later addition, considered apocryphal by some churches. The story is also engraved on a rock crystal, the Lothair Crystal, made in the Lotharingia region of northwest Europe in the mid 9th century, now in the British Museum.
The story, frequently titled as Susanna and the Elders, became a very popular theme with artists and art connoisseurs from about 1500, seemingly because of the possibilities it offered for a prominent nude female in a historical or biblical painting, like the paintings of Bathsheba bathing. Susannah was the subject of paintings by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Anthony Van Dyck, Tintoretto, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Guido Cagnacci, among many others. This video contains some of the best works by over two dozen selected artists.
