‘Susanna and the Elders’ — She is Never Alone
Approaching Tintoretto's representation of a Renaissance body
I first saw this painting of Susanna and the Elders when I visited the major exhibition, Titian and the Image of Women in 16th-century Venice, in Milan’s Palazzo Reale in May 2022. It was painted in 1555 by the Venetian artist Jacopo Tintoretto (c.1518-1594) who — along with his rival and colleague Paolo Veronese — was one of the leading painters in the city at the time. Both artists drew heavily on Titian, the most important painter in 16th-century Venice, with his dynamic use of colours, thickly-woven canvases and expressive brushstrokes.
Tintoretto produced several treatments of the Old Testament story of Susanna, a young married woman, who is spied on by two men while she bathes. When she refuses to have sex with them, the men accuse Susanna of adultery and she is condemned to death. Fortunately, their lie is eventually exposed and the men themselves are sentenced to death instead. The story was an increasingly popular subject in European art from the ninth-century and was frequently depicted through the sixteenth.
Today, I would like to take you through some of the thoughts I had whilst looking at this painting. Firstly, I moved closer to the large canvas, which is just over six feet in width. The closer I got, the more absorbed I became in its textures. Susanna’s bracelet is, up close, a warm swirl of red and gold; a trickle of water is a dash of white paint scraped across the canvas.
Have you ever noticed that when you move closer to a large-scale painting, other people around you start to do the same? It takes one person to cross over that powerful and invisible gap between viewer and painting, and suddenly it seems as if permission has been granted for others to do the same. Try it next time you are in front of a large painting. Of course, this isn’t always the case. Most of us have, at least once, had to shrug off the humiliation of setting off the alarm or grouchy gallery assistant by inching slightly too close to an artwork.
That quiet afternoon in Milan, however, I stood in front of Susanna undisturbed. I was not only drawn into the painting by Tintoretto’s masterful way with paint, but also by the subject-matter. The dark greens, the textures of leaves, roses, bark, water, all pulled me into the garden where Susanna sits.
It is Susanna’s garden, for she has made it her own. Her possessions are laid out in front of her. She is naked, and she dips one foot into the pond beside her. She wraps her hands around her other foot, in a comfortable gesture, as she leans forward slightly as if to look at her reflection in a mirror which rests against a rose trellis. This all seems to tell us that Susanna perceives herself to be alone, tucked safely between the trellis and the tree.
Does she know that the light shines only on her? Does she know that, far from being alone, she is being spied on, by two old men peering from behind both ends of the trellis? Does she know that I stand on the other side of her pond, pulling myself towards her with the same fascination as those men? With this, Susanna changes: she becomes the most prized object out of those lying in front of her. Her mirror is no longer a tool for self-reflection, but instead a confirmation that Susanna is an image to be admired. And as Susanna changes, so too does the garden around her, and her place within it. Now the rose trellis offers protection not to Susanna, but to her voyeurs. The magpie in the tree behind her is now another pair of fascinated eyes staring down at her.
With these subtle but sinister shifts, I start to notice that the garden was not an uncomplicated ‘natural’ haven that embraced Susanna as part of it. There are criss-crossed trellises in the background; stone pillars from which gawking, legless statues have been carved. I notice the distant presence of a deer and stag, and a family of ducks; but they are an indifferent theatrical backdrop, evidence of natural creatures going about their business, separate and unaffected by Susanna.
I realise that I had been viewing Susanna as part of the garden, in harmony. I thought of the summer days I have spent by the river, reading a book and smelling the grass, contentedly alone. I take a look around the garden. If she is part of it, then she is part of a construction; she is clipped onto a trellis, carved out of stone; she is a floral texture, a paved pathway, a water feature.
My eyes may turn towards other details, textures of paint, depth of field, but I seem to return to Susanna’s luminously white body, again, and again, because Tintoretto won’t let me turn away. Perhaps Susanna’s place is simultaneously separate from, and subsumed within, this garden setting. She is never allowed to fall into the background, and yet the power of her presence depends on her place within it.
The whiteness of her body does not share the textures of the garden, but her luminosity depends on its contrast to the darkened, dappled foliage around her. No room for body hair, blemishes, bruises, scars, perhaps because this would let her sink sweetly into the garden. When I see her looking at herself, she is there, content, sunk, oblivious, alone. Then I look at her from my own eyes — that is, from the eyes of her voyeurs — and she is wrenched from her surroundings, and plonked on a pedestal.
“Monuments are interesting mostly in how they diminish all other aspects of the landscape,” says poet Anne Boyer, “Each highly perceptible thing makes something else almost imperceptible.”
That is what happens, at least according to a feminist reading of art, when we look at a nude woman without her returning our gaze. Feminist art history has generally taught me that to be titillated by an image of a nude woman is to perpetuate patriarchal power dynamics, to assume the ‘male gaze’ of man-looking-at-woman and, in some way, strip the woman of agency and selfhood. As a bisexual woman, I suppose I could be ‘titillated’ (what a funny word) by the image of a woman, yet I can also know what it is like to be that woman.
So, when I look at Susanna in this gallery now, I wonder whether I am closer to the two creepy men watching her than I am to her? I think of all of the beautiful women I have admired, romantically, sexually, and believed myself to be the pervert. If I say that I think Susanna looks sexy, am I as bad as the old men? What if I think she looks sexy because she is gazing at herself in a mirror, alone in a garden, thinking that she looks sexy?
For the record, a Renaissance woman isn’t really my type, perhaps because she is too much a cast of what men want her to be. I want to admire Susanna as she admires herself, but I am disturbed by the beaming whiteness of her skin, the golden glow of her blonde braided hair, the glint of her pearl earring. It is uncomfortable to see that Susanna shares too much in common with the objects in front of her. The curators of the exhibition have excellently included a glass cabinet of sixteenth-century Renaissance toilette objects, just like the ones in the paintings.
I want to like the wave of curves on her back, stomach, legs, because they show that Susanna’s body is a real body, not because they speak nicely to men of sex and softness. And so she titillates, this Hebrew wife modelled after a Venetian sex worker, by daring to be naked and — perhaps even more shockingly — by daring to be content in her own presence. I continue to tilt forward between my gallery and her garden, my garden and her gallery… until I turn away and move on to the next painting.
