Daniel Proving Susanna's Innocence

This canvas is the second half of a pair. Its companion, Moses striking water from the rock, hangs in the same room at the same size, and both were painted for the court of Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy and, from 1720, king of Sardinia. The museum dates them to about 1725 or 1726, noting an alternative date of 1724, and here too its record adds an attribution to Sebastiano's nephew Marco as a second hand.

The story is told in a chapter that the Greek and Latin Bibles add to the Book of Daniel. Two elders, both judges, have accused Susanna of adultery after she refused them, and she is being led away to her death when the young Daniel halts the crowd. He has the two men separated and asks each one under which tree he saw her with her lover. One answers a mastic tree, the other a holm oak, and the lie falls apart. The crowd turns on the accusers. Both canvases came to the gallery in 1860, a gift of King Victor Emmanuel II.