Susannah and the Elders

Susannah and the Elders by Paolo Veronese, painted around 1580-85 and now in the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, depicts the apocryphal story (Daniel 13) of the virtuous Jewish woman spied upon in her bath by two lecherous elders who attempt to blackmail her — a narrative of female virtue threatened by male lust and ultimately vindicated by the young Daniel's legal acuity. The subject was among the most popular in European painting for combining the display of the female nude with a narrative that simultaneously condemned the voyeuristic gaze and invited it. Veronese's treatment characteristically emphasizes Susannah's dignity and composure over the voyeuristic elements, his late style investing the scene with the deeper moral gravity of his final decade. The Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, one of the Strade Nuove museums housed in a sixteenth-century noble palace, holds this alongside other Flemish and Italian paintings that document Genoa's distinctive collecting culture.

The luminous rendering of Susannah's flesh and the rich garden setting demonstrate Veronese's warm, elegant palette, with the lurking elders discreetly placed to maintain the scene's refined decorum.